text:
Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce

By Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti
April 17, 2024

In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth.

Deep within the bibliography to the sixth volume of the journal Studi sul Boccaccio (Boccaccio Studies), we find this entry:
[G. Boccaccio], Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta. Two hitherto untranslated stories by Giovanni Boccaccio with some unpublished sketches by Aubrey Beardsley. New York, Biblion Soc., 1927; for private circulation.1
And beneath it, in smaller type, a peculiar note: “Sono operette inventate.” That is to say: these are invented little works, daring forgeries produced by some unscrupulous agent many years after Boccaccio’s death. Who was this agent? No translator is mentioned, but the stories were published by the Biblion Society. Though its name is shared with the Erotika Biblion Society of London, publisher of the pornographic novel Teleny (often attributed to Oscar Wilde), the Biblion Society that printed these stories was an American venture, based in New York. And it was run by none other than that archduke of literary piracy and pornography, Samuel Roth.
Roth inscribed himself fatally into the history of literary modernism as the first person to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States. While The Little Review had previously published excerpts from the novel, many issues of this journal were seized and destroyed — and its editors charged with distributing obscenity by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice — creating an opportunity for Roth. He was able to plan an unauthorized, bowdlerized, and error-ridden edition of Ulysses to appear in 1928–29.2 Joyce tried to fight the forthcoming publication with the help of an American law firm, seeking an injunction in the autumn of 1927. In a typically audacious response, Roth appealed to his readers to subscribe to a fund for his defense in the name of “the liberty of beauty”.3
Roth’s editorial license was not limited to radical modernist contemporaries — it extended even to the most canonized figures in the western tradition. In our case, Giovanni Boccaccio. Printed as a “literary supplement” to later issues of Two Worlds, “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” are titillating tales in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, accompanied with illustrations (supposedly) by Aubrey Beardsley. In “Pasquerella”, the doomed eponymous heroine marries Count Sandro Bernini when she is fifteen years old, and is quickly “made aware of the demands of her marriage”. She gets pregnant; Sandro grows indifferent. Thirteen years later, her son Phillip becomes obsessed with Bianca, the neighbor’s daughter, whom Pasquerella has hired as live-in help. Bianca pleads to her employer, explaining that Phillip has a key to her room and breaks in at night. Pasquerella doesn’t believe the young girl, and decides to sleep in the room herself. In the dark, Phillip mistakes his mother for his would-be lover. “Never before had the core of passion trembled in Pasquerella of its own accord. Under the delicate considerately tenuous fingers of her son it shot into sudden flower.” Disgusted the next morning, she sends him away, under the pretense of education, and gives birth to a child eight months after, whom she abandons to an abbey. Many years later, Phillip returns as a war hero with a new wife, Pamela, and Pasquerella is overcome with “strange, rapidly intensifying emotions”. She recognizes the young woman: it is her child — Phillip has married his sister and daughter. Like an Italian Oedipa, Pasquerella sneaks into their room while they are sleeping, returning to the primal scene — “strange forces were working within her, directing her daggered hand, forcing it . . .” — and ends the chain of incest once and for all.
In “Madonna Babetta”, a Neapolitan priest named Lorenzo befriends his Protestant neighbor, Cornelius, “a young man of remarkable physical attractiveness”. They take long walks, discuss religion: “Ah, I see, sighed Cornelius, We burn in hell for the sin of having intercourse with pretty women.” An aristocrat named Madonna Babetta captures Father Lorenzo’s ear and twists the sacrament of confession to her own sordid purposes, claiming that Cornelius has been ogling her in the evenings. Upon hearing these rumors from Lorenzo, Cornelius decides to do exactly the thing he is charged with, hiding in Madonna Babetta’s garden, “hoping to catch a glimpse of his evil double”. When he locks eyes with his accuser, she smiles at him knowingly, and Cornelius recognizes the ruse for what it is. They become lovers. One day, Madonna Babetta murders her husband Helvetius with a dagger, and asks that Cornelius bind her to the bed, arranging the room “as if a desperate struggle had taken place”. When Cornelius later expresses guilt for complicity in her scheme, Madonna Babetta embraces him, dagger in hand, and he slumps over, dead. Taking up the pipe and magnifying glass, Father Lorenzo enters the widow’s garden himself in order to ascertain how two respected men have returned to God before their time. He deduces Madonna Babetta’s role and storms into her bedchamber, demanding a confession for double homicide. “Father, she breathed. Would you not murder to have me now?” We cut to the future:
The sainted Father Lorenzo is seen often mounting the street to the Via Nilla at that hour between four and six when the sea about Naples seems to swoon at the approach of the fiery sun, but it is doubtful whether he is preoccupied with the state of Madonna Babetta’s soul, or that the Madonna has so many sins to confess, for the maid servant has never yet heard, that chant beginning. . . . In Nomine Patri . . . issuing from her mistress’ chamber.
The setting of Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta is a pastiche of premodern Italy à la Boccaccio: full of villas, confessors, and passionate, murderous women.4 The stories are rather entertaining, but there are irregularities of style and detail that would not be found in the authentic works of Boccaccio.5 Though there are many transgressive women in Boccaccio’s work, their depiction is in stark contrast to the lurid, extended violence of Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta. There are also issues of a historical nature. Touched as we may be by the friendship between Catholic and Protestant, it is important to remember that Martin Luther was born more than a century after Boccaccio’s death. Or take for example the colorful mishmash of names, whose morphological disunity is characteristic of archaizing, foreignizing works: the Italian Lorenzo and his good friend, the Latin Cornelius; Madonna Babetta and her husband, Helvetius.6
But Roth was not just content to expand the canon of Boccaccio — he wanted to do Aubrey Beardsley the same favor. The “hitherto unpublished” Boccaccio stories discovered by the Biblion Society were to be illustrated “With Some Hitherto Unpublished Sketches by Aubrey Beardsley”. In fact, all of the illustrations by Beardsley had already been printed. The first, depicting a naked angel, which Roth titled “New Sketch”, had already been published in 1898 under the name “Mirror of Love”. The next four full-page illustrations, all featuring people looking pensive and forlorn amid vegetation, come from the Dent edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1892) — the blank and white boxes in their top right corners were supposed to contain chapter numbers. The final full-page illustration is “Lysistrata Haranguing the Athenian Women”, from an edition of Aristophanes printed privately in 1896.7
There are also sketches that are falsely credited to Beardsley, including the repeated, semi-typographic motifs printed between paragraphs — two women in repose in “Pasquerella”, a young man wooing a woman lying on a phallic sofa in “Madonna Babetta” — and a full-page print entitled “The Governesses Disporting themselves in the Garden”. Finding the origin of these illustrations provides a helpful context for the Boccaccio stories published by Roth. All three of these drawings are in fact by the Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogany, and were published as illustrations to a 1926 edition of The Songs of Bilitis. Released in 1894 under the title Les Chansons de Bilitis, these erotic poems were originally publicized as supposed translations from the Greek poet Bilitis, a contemporary of Sappho. In reality, they were written by the Belgian-born poet Pierre Louÿs who, in the 1926 edition from which Roth must have taken the illustrations, presents himself as the author, not the translator. Les Chansons de Bilitis are thus pseudotranslations: works of literature that claim to be translations from another language but are in fact original compositions by their would-be translator. Intentional or not, lifting illustrations from Bilitis associates Roth’s stories with contemporary European pseudotranslations.
One wonders why Roth would select images from a pseudotranslation for this volume. Was the decision, in fact, a sort of wink toward the camera, a playful admission of guilt for the inquiring contemporary reader, or, beyond the grave, toward the future collator of his work? Or was the inclusion of these images purely pragmatic: he saw they were effective for marketing one forgery, so why not for his own? Roth produces a space of unanswerable questions as his legacy.
At first glance, it can be tempting to group “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” with Pogany’s Bilitis or James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, relatively poor forgeries which purported an ancient source. A simple explanation for their provenance would be that “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” were fabricated by Roth or by someone in his employ. And if this were true, the case would likely be closed . . . but two pamphlets, written in Yiddish and published at the turn of the century by the Hebrew Publishing Company, make this story all the more strange.
***
Even if you are a student of Yiddish literature, there is a good chance you have never heard the name Dovid-Moyshe Hermalin. He, like Roth, was an immigrant to America. He came from Romania in 1885, when he was twenty years old, and died when Roth was seventeen. One is tempted to imagine a meeting between the two, perhaps in a cafeteria on the Lower East Side, where you could get stewed fruit: the Yiddish writer in the last year of his life and the young correspondent for the New York Globe. But, with no record of its occurrence, to describe such a meeting is pure fabulation. Though Hermalin was among the most prolific and popular Yiddish men of letters in his day, he has been all but forgotten. This is likely because his writings would be classified post facto as shund, and thus excluded from the Yiddish canon. Literally, shund derives from a German term referring to the unusable remnants of an animal left over after slaughter and processing, but in Yiddish it means, more or less, “trash literature”, or perhaps more generously “pulp fiction”.8 Shund literature usually appeared in newspapers, and the stories were often titillating, full of sex and suspense, and written to sell. Around the turn of the century, vocal Yiddish intellectuals began to rail against shund, decrying it a poor representative of Jewish culture and deleterious for the impressionable Yiddish-reading public.
This was a common critique: shund literature was too indebted to European models, too bound up in translation, to be properly Jewish. It did not conform to a politics of Jewish national autonomy. According to the leading Yiddish intellectuals at the time, Jewish literature, like the Jewish people, needed be one among many, on the same plane as the peoples and literatures of Europe, not dependent on or subservient to them. The Yiddish authors who have been canonized, and therefore disproportionately translated, are those whose work conformed, mainly, to a non-shund model. Recent projects have tried to turn the tide of research away from canonical Yiddish literature and toward shund, acknowledging its central position in the reading lives of Yiddish speakers and recovering its visibility.9
Hermalin wrote shund novels alongside works of popular philosophy and journalism, but it seems his real specialty was the translation or adaptation of popular European authors for the Yiddish-reading public. In our database of translations into Yiddish, we have so far identified twenty-four such works. He wrote “adaptations” of Goethe, Conan Doyle, Swift, Maupassant, Zola, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and, as you might have guessed, Boccaccio. He generally worked with the Hebrew Publishing Company of New York, one of the most prolific producers of Yiddish reading material during those boom times, when various Czars’ censors, all but banning the Yiddish publishing within Russia, inadvertently turned New York into the printing press for the Yiddish world.
Around the turn of the century, Hermalin produced two adaptations of Boccaccio: Paskarela with the press of B. Rabinovits, and Madam Babeta with the Hebrew Publishing Company. In contrast to Roth’s “hitherto untranslated”, it is stated on the cover page of both stories that Hermalin had “baarbet” (adapted) these works from Boccaccio. This gives him a little wiggle room, though the introduction to Madam Babeta does explicitly state that it is “one of the best stories from the Decameron”.
Paskarela and Madam Babeta are longer versions of those same stories that Roth printed in English twenty-seven years later. Unless some proto-version of these two stories surfaces, the most likely explanation seems to be that the tales were composed by Hermalin as pseudotranslations of Boccaccio, and that Roth (or someone close to him) translated these stories and passed them off once more as authentic, lost stories by Boccaccio. By birth a Galician Jew, Roth knew Yiddish, and used Yiddish sources to produce translations of Heinrich Heine, since he had no German.10 He was also an inveterate publisher of phony translations, with sensational titles such as 1941’s I Was Hitler’s Doctor and 1951’s My Sister and I, supposedly a lost work by Nietzsche. He had the means, the motivation, and the sheer brazenness necessary to take a pair of Yiddish fakes, translate them into English, and pass them off as genuine discoveries to an unsuspecting literary public.11
Roth was situated in a strange middle place. The free way he dealt with authorship has much in common with the prior generation of Jewish-American literary production. He would have done well with the Hebrew Publishing Company, where, for example, Thomas Mayne Reid was falsely presented as Jules Verne, and German adventure novels were published as the work of Jewish authors.12
Of course, if Roth were to market Hermalin’s pseudo-Boccaccio to his literary, anglophone market, the stories would have to be adapted. The English versions are significantly shorter than the Yiddish (in the case of “Pasquerella”, seventeen vs. eighty-three pages), and the style of the English is significantly more reserved. The Yiddish narrator delights in parables — he philosophizes on the incontinence of human nature, on inexorable desire, and he often addresses the reader directly. At one point, he asks us: “Have you ever plucked a rose from a bush? Yes?” and then uses the rest of the paragraph to compare Pasquerella to that rose. Roth’s version, conversely, sticks to indirect, third-person narration, and pretends toward a sort of Anglo-Saxon dignity. For example, that same rose simile is retained in the English, but it is framed instead as “Whoever has plucked a rose from its branch . . .” The Yiddish version is also significantly more explicit in its descriptions. Hermalin describes the large bosoms, plump arms, and broad shoulders of Pasquerella and Babetta with relish, over and over, and the blood of their murdered victims is bright red and comes forth in lurid sprays. Roth, publishing for a public with literary pretensions, seemed to think it wise to tone down the extravagance.13
Had Roth wanted, he certainly could have found other famous works of questionable provenance in the Yiddish press. Hermalin produced two more Boccaccio “adaptations” entitled Printsesin Tsuleyka (Princess Zuleika) and Di Tsvey Poorlakh (The Two Couples). Printsesin Tsuleyka is actually a significantly expanded adaptation of a real story from the Decameron: the seventh story of the second day, about the Sultan of Babylon who sent his daughter Alatiel to the King of Algarve as a wife. But under Hermalin’s hand, Alatiel’s name changes to Zuleika, which also happens to be the traditional name for Potiphar’s wife, the Egyptian woman who tried to seduce Joseph. This biblical story is referenced in both versions of Babetta, and seems to have exerted a special force on Hermalin. And how could it not have? Being, as it is, one of the shund-ier parts of the Hebrew bible.14
***
“Madonna Babetta” and “Pasquerella”, in Yiddish and in English, are but two of countless examples of unlicensed literary appropriations. And although they are, in a sense, rather poor forgeries, they reveal the curious and irreverent ways in which literature is reproduced and kept alive across the boundaries of class and nation by means of adaptation. Boccaccio was an adapter himself: he took material for the Decameron from the whole wealth of narratives that were available to him — from French, Italian, and Latin sources — which in turn adapted stories of non-European origin, probably composed in Arabic and Sanskrit.15 Boccaccio reworked them as he saw fit, and wove them together to create his opus. The Decameron itself was an anthology of adaptations, held together by a well-wrought frame narrative.
A history of translation is incomplete without a proper charting of the muddied streams of unlicensed adaptation, false attribution, and pseudotranslation. Born beside on tributary of the Dniester and buried near the Hudson, Roth, like Hermalin, called this contentious space home. As did Boccaccio, some six-hundred years prior. But while the Decameron has been thoroughly canonized, the texts that Roth, Hermalin, and their comrades produced by these practices have been forgotten, relegated to the dustbin of literary studies as shund, marginalized as curiosities. A shame, because texts of this sort constituted an outsized proportion of the material that readers actually read. Texts like these, and not the canonized classics, were the bread and butter of the popular press. To understand the functions and methods of translation as they were and are — not as they are supposed to be — we must turn attention to these stories.
Boccaccio, Hermalin, and Roth all belong to the same tradition. They are collators, adaptors, collectors, and tellers of tales. And if we are to study them, then we must be too. All the more so because Hermalin and Roth did not provide frame narratives for their stories: they published no acknowledgements with their texts; none of that sinew which connects the femur to the hip. Perhaps out of piety, that fleshy byproduct, the origin of shund, was thrown away. So it is up to us to produce the frame story for Hermalin and Roth — to bring bones together, put tendons and flesh upon them. This is done by problematizing these fraught and fascinating moments of transmission: fleshing out the story. Or, otherwise, by fishing around in the trash.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
Rhapsodies in Blue
Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes
By Paige Hirschey
December 6, 2023

In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate” themselves.

In the preface to his 1844 book, The Pencil of Nature, English inventor Henry Fox Talbot described his “little work” as the “first attempt to publish a series of plates or pictures wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing.”1 Talbot had grandiose ambitions for the future of photography — a medium he had played a role in creating — but this experimentation was already well under way. He was not, as he claimed, the first person to publish a book of photographic prints. That distinction belongs to an amateur botanist named Anna Atkins.
Starting in the early 1840s, Atkins created hundreds of cyanotypes, a photographic process in which paper is treated with a chemical solution before being exposed to sunlight. When objects are left on the treated paper — British ocean plants, in Atkins’ case — over time they produce a white silhouette against an inky blue ground. Bound together, Atkins’ images served as an illustrated supplement to the phycologist William Henry Harvey’s Manual of British Algae (1841). This arrangement was typical at the time, when printing text and images in a single book would have been prohibitively expensive. Indeed, in this and many other ways, Atkins’ work assumed the standard conventions of botanical illustration, and were it not for her use of the novel medium, British Algae would have most likely been forgotten to history.
As it is, Atkins has become a posthumous celebrity, raised from obscurity in the 1980s by art historian Larry Schaaf as quite possibly the world’s first woman photographer.2 Today, her cyanotypes — of ferns as well as algae — are housed in the collections of some of the finest museums in the world and have come to be understood primarily as objets d’art, prized less for their scientific contributions than their artistic merit. Yet beyond their aesthetic innovations, these images convey something important about the understanding of the natural world at a time of scientific upheaval, even if this was not their creator’s explicit intent.
By her own admission, Anna Atkins (née Children) turned to the medium of cyanotypes because she felt they could best capture the minute details of the algal specimens that were the subject of her first photographic book.3 But by the time Atkins published British Algae, she had already demonstrated her affinity for botanical drawing. After her mother died in her infancy, Atkins was raised by her father, a chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist who gave her a scientific education that would have been uncommon for a woman at that time. Under his guidance, she took up drawing at a young age and illustrated a companion to his translation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of Shells in 1823. Her prior achievements with hand-drawing naturally lead one to wonder why she would choose to turn to cyanotypes, a more costly and in many ways less practical medium, and there are potential insights to be found in the long evolution of scientific illustration as a genre.
Atkins’ illustrational and photographic work situated her within an artistic tradition that stretches back nearly two millennia, with conventions that have evolved over time to suit its users’ needs. Among the earliest iterations of botanical illustration were manuals or “herbals” that helped medical practitioners identify plants with therapeutic properties. In the 1600s, naturalists began documenting the exotic flora they encountered during exploratory trips to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, producing lavishly illustrated books for the homebound European scholar. But the so-called Golden Age of botanical illustration came later, coinciding with the height of the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. During this period, one of the primary aims of botanical illustrators was to contribute to the total understanding of the natural universe, a goal that was understood to be not just theoretically possible but actually achievable.
In the field of botany, one of the most prolific contributors to the Enlightenment project was Carl Linnaeus, who developed a standardized system for identifying and naming all manner of flora and fauna. His popularization of binomial nomenclature provided a globally uniform set of species names, while his taxonomy offered an orderly system whereby plants could be divided into genera based almost solely on the structure and number of their reproductive organs, discounting most other features. Linnaeus was handsomely rewarded for his contributions to the field. He was known in his time as the “Prince of Botanists” and was knighted by the King of Sweden in 1758, but this popularity can largely be attributed to the fact that his work reaffirmed the already popular notion that the universe was an orderly system just waiting to reveal its secrets to the keen minds capable of deciphering them.
By the time Atkins was working a century later, this orderly vision of the world had begun to unravel. A confluence of scientific discoveries — from more accurate theories about the age of the earth to the discovery of previously unknown organisms in the fossil record — had led many naturalists, even those who had previously believed in the fixity of species, to hypothesize that the plants and animals that lived in their time had not existed since the world’s beginning but had instead evolved from entirely different species through interactions with their environment.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put forward his theory on the “transmutation of species” as early as 1802.4 Thirty years later, Goethe proposed that “[t]he plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, [rather,] they have been given . . . a felicitous mobility and plasticity allowing them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.”5 These whispers eventually culminated in Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the product of more than two decades of agonizing research.
It is difficult to say just how much Atkins may have been influenced by these ideas. She was surely kept apprised of important discoveries by her father, who played an active role in multiple scientific societies until his death in 1852, but there is no written evidence to suggest that she was particularly invested in the evolutionary debates of the era. Even so, scientific data and how it is presented has always played a part in forming, challenging, or reinforcing its viewers’ understanding of the world, and for all their apparent adherence to tradition, Atkins’ cyanotypes offered a starkly different vision of nature than the one that predominated in her time.
The visual conventions of most nineteenth-century botanical illustration had helped uphold the idea that species were discrete, innate, and unchanging. Specimens were typically displayed alone on a white ground, devoid of environmental context. Although fidelity was paramount, artists would omit distracting imperfections from their drawings, and the final image was often the composite of multiple specimens, implying the existence of a platonic ideal. Sometimes the central subject was surrounded by additional views of the plant in various life stages, or in cross-section, if significant features were obscured in the primary drawing. These conventions suited the purposes of identifying and codifying plant species, but they also reflect a scientific approach that, to quote the ethnobiologist Scott Atran, “emerged by decontextualizing nature, by curiously tearing out water lilies from water so that they could be dried, measured, printed, and compared with other living forms detached from local ecology and most of the senses.”6
Upon initial examination, a similar charge could be made against Atkins, whose practice necessitated tearing her subjects from their environs and likewise presented them alone on the page, though in her case this was partly a limitation of her chosen medium. Indeed, it was not only the natural context that was concealed by the cyanotype process, the specimen's surface and texture too was lost to these startling, blue-and-white silhouettes.
Despite these limitations, one can’t help but see in Atkins’ images of algae and ferns the ghostly presence of their lost vegetal source, for the cyanotype necessarily preserves the vagaries of an individual specimen. Here the torn leaves and tangled roots, invariably captured by the photographic process, act as an affirmation of the materiality of their subject and help retain something of the amateur engagement with nature in which the plant is met on its own terms, never fully revealing itself to its human observer. Though not literally snapshots, her images capture their subjects at a particular moment in time, granting them an exceptional degree of authenticity when compared to traditional botanical illustration, whose practitioners were still largely involved in upholding a static and increasingly outdated vision of the world. By 1856, around the peak of Atkins’ career, Darwin would disparage his peers’ ongoing efforts to divide the earth’s biota into a set of fixed species as “trying to define the indefinable.”7
The evolutionist’s concerns dovetailed with a contemporaneous, albeit waning, strand of scientific inquiry, one that pushed back against the excesses of an increasingly strict positivism and saw the sensuous engagement with nature as a precondition for genuine understanding. This romantic approach to life science, what Goethe referred to as “tender empiricism”, prioritized the study of processes over organisms in isolation, and understood life to be mutually constituted, constantly changing form through its environmental interactions. As Amanda Jo Goldstein has argued, many of the naturalists and writers who subscribed to this school of thought, among them Goethe, Blake, Shelley, and Herder, put a premium on firsthand engagements with nature and aimed to capture their experiences in poetic modes that reflected their own capacity to affect and be affected by their objects of study.8
We can see a similar attitude displayed in Atkins’ cyanotypes. Rather than the artist choosing which parts of the plant to show or emphasize, her subject is put in a position to “draw” itself. Throughout her work, Atkins acts as an equal collaborator, arranging her specimens in desirable configurations but ultimately endowing each plant with the capacity to produce its own image. This authorial shift has important ramifications, not only for the study of Atkins’ work but for the understanding of the human relationship to the natural world at a time when the professionalization of science was still underway. While the Enlightenment vision of nature — and the illustrational conventions it produced — supported the idea that humans existed at the apex of a rigid hierarchy of being, Atkins’ cyanotypes, with all their individual imperfections, seem to hint at the existence of an underlying flux that could not be sufficiently captured by a fixed natural order.
In many ways these images are the product of a distinct historical moment — cyanotypes would not catch on as a viable replacement for botanical illustration — but modern science has legitimized a version of the worldview that Atkins’ images tacitly endorsed. Increasingly we are discovering that the maintenance of a livable biome relies upon vast webs of entanglement, yet still many of us cling to the nineteenth-century notion that we are somehow set apart from the natural world. We have developed tools that allow us to “see” everything from individual atoms to the origins of our solar system, but all of this knowledge has not stopped us from plunging headfirst into the earth’s sixth mass extinction. To understand Atkins’ cyanotypes as merely the relics of an outdated science or the fanciful experimentation of a budding artist is to disregard their most salient contribution. Her images demonstrate a way of knowing the world that is based in mutuality rather than domination. We discount such a lesson at our peril.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 6, 2023

author: Paige Hirsche


text:
Through the Cheval Glass
Reproduction in the Photographs of Clementina Hawarden
By Stassa Edwards
January 24, 2024

Soon after Clementina Hawarden began taking photographs in the mid-19th century, her eye caught on doubles, reflections, her daughters glimpsed in the mirror. Stassa Edwards examines the role that reproduction — photographic, biological — plays in this oeuvre, and searches for the only person not captured clearly: Hawarden herself.

Does Lady Clementina Hawarden’s hand hover, disembodied, next to her camera in this photograph? It seems to exist in an indeterminate state. At once present and absent, her hand is, as the Victoria & Albert’s labeling indicates, a “slight suggestion”, a blurred historical reproduction or a trick of the present-day viewer’s eyes, as they produce the history we want to see.
This ghostly outline appears in one of the many photographs Hawarden took of her daughter Clementina, who wears a typically fussy Victorian dress, her right forearm leaning against a large mirror, fingers grazing her temple. Clementina’s contemplative pose frames the full-length mirror, demanding that the viewer’s gaze linger on both the reflective object and what is or is not captured in it. It is an unusual image: though roughly 775 of her photographs survive, this ghostly remnant is one of only two possible photographic traces left of the viscountess.
In this accidental (or apocryphal) self-portrait, taken between 1859 and 1861, one can see a confluence of various forms of reproduction: that of biology, in the subject of her daughter, and that of the visual, in the technology of photography and the reflecting mirror. Hawarden is the source of this reproduction — creator of both the photograph and her daughter; her “authorship” is underscored by the placement  of her camera in the mirror, and made uncanny by her spectral presence, real or imagined. The full-length mirror appeared regularly in Hawarden’s photographs, emerging as one of her favorite props in the makeshift studio she created in her South Kensington, London home located at 5 Princes Gardens.1 Within the frame of the photograph, the labor of motherhood and the labor of photography are compositionally bound by mirror-adjacent effects: doubling and reproduction, a rare coupling by one of early photography’s rare woman practitioners.
If Hawarden’s “self-portrait” is nothing but a faint suggestion, then so is the surviving knowledge of the viscountess herself: In both official records and sparse family letters, she is little more than a ghostly impression. Few letters by her hand survive and there are no extant records of her social life as a member of the Victorian elite. Letters written by various family members are unsurprisingly focused on “Clemy’s” domestic life, particularly mothering, work that would have undoubtedly consumed the majority of her time. On her photography, the historical record is silent. As far as we know, she left no letters or diaries that shed light on her artistic practice. If she ever titled her photographs or depicted scenes from certain works of literature or art, those have been lost to time (the few photographs she exhibited were simply titled Photographic Studies or Studies from My Life). With what little that survives, the photographs are the only tangible material trace left of Hawarden; part of their allure is not simply their beauty or formal mastery but their mysteriousness. That is true of Hawarden, too: she is unknowable, little more than a spectral presence that haunts her work — a presence presumed rather than seen.
Before Hawarden was a ghost she was a girl. The daughter of a Navy admiral and a Spanish woman regarded for her beauty, Hawarden’s (née Fleeming) childhood was unremarkable. Virginia Dodier recounts that Hawarden and her sisters were “trained and encouraged in what is now termed ‘accomplishment art,’ the type of arts education then available to young girls of the middle and upper classes.”2 After some obligatory time on the continent, she returned to London and met her future husband. At twenty-three years old, she married Cornwallis Maude, the future fourth Viscount Hawarden, significantly elevating her social status if not her immediate financial status. Hawarden’s in-laws objected to the match. Her cousin, John, 13th Lord of Elphinstone, described the situation in an 1845 letter: “Poor Clemy!” he wrote, “I hope she will be happy, but it is a sad thing to marry into a family that is unwilling to receive you–& it requires a great deal of love on the part of the husband to make up for the want of it in the others”.3
Despite the disapproval, Hawarden understood that her primary occupation as a future viscountess was to produce an heir, a job she undertook with enthusiasm. Between 1846 and her death, aged forty-two, in early 1865, Hawarden gave birth to ten children, eight of whom lived to adulthood and one of whom had the good sense to be a boy.4 Her three eldest daughters, Isabella, Clementina, and Florence, became her most familiar models, assisting their mother in her photographic endeavors. Her sister Anne once described her in a letter as a “great baby lover.”5
It is a point worth emphasizing that Hawarden would have spent most of her adult life pregnant or with an infant in arms. Nearly twenty years separate her eldest and youngest daughters, and it was in that fertile domestic landscape that Hawarden began experimenting with photography, no idle pastime but a labor-intensive process. The work of motherhood and photography were inextricable, as suggested by her surviving prints. In an 1854 letter, by which point Hawarden had five children, her uncle remarked on her maternal care: “I never saw nicer children or better brought up. . . . It seems strange [that] Clemy who could never keep her own shawl in order & whose devotion to her children seemed to spoil a whole generation, but her good sense and regard to duty has kept all right.”6
It is unknown why Hawarden decided to become a photographer, a laborious and messy pursuit that would have been an unusual undertaking for a woman of rank. Nor is it known when exactly Hawarden began taking photographs, or how she learned the complicated wet collodion process she preferred, but as Dodier notes, “the speed with which she became proficient is impressive.”7 The earliest surviving images are from 1857, taken at Dundrum House, the family’s estate in Ireland. Hawarden’s husband inherited Dundrum when he assumed his title in October 1856, making the couple some of the wealthiest landowners in the British Isles and drastically altering their financial circumstances. Dundrum features significantly in her early works: Hawarden took stereoscopic photographs of the landscape around the estate, perhaps suggesting an early interest in the medium's doubling effect that would define her mature art. Her early figural photography had an unsurprisingly amateurish quality, showing a photographer who was still learning the subtle manipulation of light and shadow. In many of these photographs, her family proved themselves eager models, dressing up as picturesque peasants and playing stock roles before her camera. Even their dogs had parts. As tableaux vivants, the images are charming records of an aristocratic family at play, but they show little of the sophisticated photographer who would emerge a few years later.
Hints of Hawarden’s interest in mirroring began to appear in photographs she took of Clementina on the grounds of Dundrum. In one particularly compelling photograph, her daughter is outside, dwarfed by a massive tree, her body and face turned to offer the camera her profile. Clementina’s straight stance is mimicked by the tree’s trunk, even as one of the tree’s massive branches seems to purposefully bend to cradle and frame Clementina’s form. The contemplative pose, combined with Hawarden’s compositional coupling of her daughter and nature, conjures up the romantic tone of Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits from the previous century.
In 1859, Hawarden and family moved to the newly constructed home in South Kensington. There, it seems, she was able to secure a governess for her children, giving her more time and space to devote to photography. She converted rooms on the second floor of the house into her studio and shifted primarily to indoor scenes. Although there are numerous photographs of her younger children, husband, and other relatives from 1859 until her death, her three eldest daughters stood most regularly in front of her camera’s lens.8
Hawarden, Isabella, Clementina, and Florence must have spent a significant amount of time in the studio, producing and posing for photographs. The space was innately gendered — one where a mother and her daughters collaborated, artfully arranging and costuming themselves. In Hawarden’s studio, “women”, Lindsay Smith writes in Politics of Focus, “play all the parts.”9 While the photographs might look like play, particularly the fancy dress scenes in which the narrative or inspirational source has been lost, producing a photograph was difficult and time-consuming. It seems that Hawarden’s daughters helped her develop her prints as well, laboring alongside their mother from conception to realization.
She appears to have been exceptionally interested in posing her eldest daughters in front of mirrors — it was a motif she returned to repeatedly. Again and again, the photographs allude to the visual concept of doubling. In one particularly sophisticated example, taken between 1861–62, Hawarden captured Clementina gazing into the same full-length cheval mirror, hair bound to show her neck, a white blouse arranged to reveal a bare shoulder. The light from the balcony windows on Hawarden’s second-floor studio gives the photograph a tenebristic contrast, illuminating Clementina’s shoulder and the folds of her skirt while simultaneously throwing the reflection of her face into darkness. In 1863, after seeing Hawarden’s prints in an exhibition, a writer for the Photographic News remarked on Hawarden’s “darling lighting” and “artistic effects of light and shade”, comparing her manipulation of light to the techniques of Rembrandt.10
An attractive young woman gazing into a mirror is, of course, a recurring motif in the history of art. Venuses like Diego Velazquez’s gazed into mirrors and so did penitent Magdalens who warn viewers of the fleetingness of life. Painters were no doubt drawn to mirrors because of the visual tricks they could explore and, for artists like Velazquez, reflective glass allowed the painter to simultaneously show his attractive model from a variety of angles. For photographers in the nineteenth century, however, the mirror was rich with meaning about their very medium.
Since William Henry Fox Talbot published the six volumes of The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), describing his calotype photographs as “the agency of Light alone”, photography was perceived to be unique because it was anchored in its fidelity to detail. But Victorian photographers also understood that those very details — flattening and still — often rendered a photograph otherworldly. They dubbed the camera a “magic mirror”. As Susan Fagence Cooper writes, the description “not only commented on its mimetic accuracy but also its power to make the once-familiar mirror image strangely unfamiliar, the site of definition oppositions, inversions, and ‘realistic’ apparitions.”11 In Oscar Rejlander’s composite print, The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush (ca. 1856), his allegorical representation of photography features a mirror in which Rejelander and his camera are shown in reflection. Rejlander weds the reproductive effects of the mirror with the medium of photography itself.
If Rejlander made plain the link between mirror and photography, then Hawarden’s formal interest in coupling her daughters with mirrors added yet another layer to the allegory: reproduction extends not just to the photograph but to Hawarden’s subjects. In two separate photographs of Clementina, both taken sometime between 1862 and 1863, she leans against the full-length mirror, her right arm supporting her elegant, nearly balletic contrapposto. In both she wears her underclothes; in one photograph she is barefoot emphasizing her state of undress. Though Clementina is shown from a variety of angles, her contemplative gaze resists the camera, as if she is too absorbed to notice its presence, grounding the image in the domestic sphere, a space that, for Hawarden, was also a working photography studio. As Smith has written regarding Hawarden’s photographic panoply of women, the “innocuous scenes of domestic contemplation represent a profound questioning of all that the seemingly knowable domestic sphere stands for in Victorian culture.”12 Hawarden’s photographs are saturated with a sense of strange unknowability, as that magic mirror of photography’s fidelity becomes something almost spectral.
It seems likely that the photographs were taken in the same session since their only substantial differences are shoes, lighting, and the placement of a “negligee, blouse or peignoir” dangling on the mirror. Between these two photographs, Hawarden has posed and reposed her daughter, wedging her between the window and mirror emphasizing the structural tension of the photograph itself; she is posed between light and reproduction. “The mirror”, Craig Owens wrote in his pivotal essay “Photography ‘en abyme’”, “doubles the subjects—which is exactly what the photograph itself does—it functions as a reduced, internal image of the photograph.”13
In these two photographs, Hawarden has angled the mirror away from her camera; its reflection only captures Clementina and a vague impression of the window. It is as if she has purposefully removed any trace of herself. And yet, proof of her “authorship” is tangibly evident in the photograph: Clementina exists, she stands before the camera. This doubling of the meaning of reproduction — underscoring Hawarden’s role as both biological and artistic creator — haunts her photographs: it is evident in her use of mirrors, in a possibly disembodied hand reflected in a mirror, and in her loving focus on her daughters.
In another poignant portrait, this time featuring both Isabella and Clementina, the two sisters are pressed close together, and Clementina wraps her arm around Isabella’s shoulders in a moment of unguarded intimacy. Isabella sits facing the camera while Clementina is captured in profile. They form a reflection of one another; similar to the angles that would reflect in the studio’s full-length mirror. Isabella holds in her hand a photograph (perhaps an image of another sister) undoubtedly taken by her mother. Here again, Hawarden’s hand haunts just outside the photographic frame. A photograph within a photograph, the daughters who worked with their mother to create these images and ensured their material survival.
After Hawarden’s quick and unexpected death from pneumonia, her photographs were gathered and pasted into an album for safekeeping, likely by one of her daughters since album-making was the province of women. It was passed to her granddaughter and the photographs remained unseen by the public for decades, eventually forgotten. Her granddaughter, Lady Clementina Tottenham, gifted nearly eight hundred of Hawarden’s photographs to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1939.14 The edges of the photographs are torn because, at some point, they were ripped out of the album. That Hawarden’s photographs continue to exist is a testament to a different kind of women’s work, that of reproducing knowledge through preservation and memory. Though the torn edges add to the enigmatic mood of Hawarden’s images, they are also persistent reminders that women “collect and keep photographs”, as Rosalind Coward observed, “guardians of the unwritten history of the family.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 24, 2024

author: Stassa Edwards


text:
From Snowdrop to Nightjar
Robert Marsham’s “Indications of Spring” (1789)
By Hugh Aldersey-Williams
March 7, 2024

What can we learn from observing the progression of spring — a hawthorn’s first flowering, the return of birdsong on a particular day? Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores the lifelong calendrical project of Robert Marsham, the Norfolk naturalist considered Britain's first phenologist.

21 January 2024: Today I notice the first snowdrops rising from leaf litter in the woods where I live a few miles from Stratton Strawless.
Spring came late to much of the northern hemisphere in 1784. One reason we know this is because of records made by Robert Marsham of Stratton Strawless in Norfolk, England, in which he noted that his hawthorns began to leaf on April 22, fully two months later than in recent previous seasons, and the latest by far in all the forty-eight years he had been keeping records. The anomaly was due to an eruption of the Lakagígar volcanic fissure in Iceland that past June, which had led to a hot, cloudy summer followed by an extremely hard winter in much of Europe.
In 1736, while still in his twenties, Marsham embarked on his lifetime project of recording what he was to call his “Indications of Spring”. He noted down the dates of biological events related to the indigenous flora and fauna, and made more general observations too. During the exceptionally cold winter of 1739–40, for example, he wrote that many of his trees split apart and the urine froze in his chamber pot. In Norwich and surrounding areas, there were food riots “for which some were hang’d at ye next Assizes”.1 As a prominent landowner, Marsham served for much of his long life on local assizes juries, and, fearful of revolutions like those in America and France, played his part in handing down these harsh sentences.
Although most of his journals and letters have been lost over time, “Indications of Spring” has survived because, after a half-century of assiduous data entry, he presented his accumulated findings to the Royal Society. To Joseph Banks, the society’s president, Marsham wrote: “As I know of your boundless curiosity, I think it possible that an imperfect Calendar of some few articles of Spring, many years past, may afford you some amusement.”2 The calendar was published in the society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions, the following year as a tabulation on three foldout pages.
The table shows how the project developed in Marsham’s mind. In the left-hand column, he dates all his observations by year, from 1736 to 1788. He begins tentatively with only a few obvious items, such as when he first hears the song thrush and the arrival of the first swallow, entering the date in the appropriate box in the table. Sometimes, he notes when an observation was made in another county, presumably while he was travelling. It is a few years before he settles into his methodology, developing a full list of twenty-seven items of flora and fauna recorded at home entirely on his own estate, selected so as to cover the whole spring season from winter to early summer. They include the leafing and flowering of hawthorn and the leafing dates of ash, oak, elm, beech, birch, hornbeam, and chestnut trees, as well as the dates on which birds such as the cuckoo and nightingale began to sing. The snowdrop flower is among the earliest things he expects to see. The last anticipated observation of the season is the distinctive calling of the nightjar, which he terms the “Churn Owl”, and which is still easily heard on warm evenings in the area today. Marsham continued to record this information until his death at the age of eighty-nine.
23 January 2024: I hear (but in the ivy cannot see) rival song thrushes trying out a few riffs for the mating season.
Born in 1708, Marsham inherited his father’s heathland estate north of Norwich in 1751. The sandy soil was too poor for growing crops or even grass for grazing — hence the local name Strawless. Instead, Marsham planted trees — tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of mainly deciduous species, chosen for their longevity over fast-growing pines — and in doing so transformed the landscape.
Marsham’s way with trees influenced the famous landscape gardener Humphry Repton, and they became friends in their old age. After Marsham’s death in 1797, Repton hoped to publish his notes on tree planting as a book, but the idea never came to fruition. Repton wrote that Marsham had achieved a “far better method of planting waste land, where enclosures are not permitted”.3 He was referring to Marsham’s choice of predominantly deciduous planting as well as his method of grouping and rooting the saplings. Repton followed this example in his artfully designed landscapes for many grand English country houses.
“I plant whenever I have leisure”, Marsham wrote.4 Only a few of his trees may still be discovered today. A giant twisted sycamore, which stands across the road from Stratton Strawless Hall, bears a sign attesting to its protected status as of 1995, but it is guarded by its own rotting fallen boughs and surely hasn’t long to live. A cedar planted in 1747 has grown to more than thirty metres. You can’t get close enough to hug its eight-metre girth as it lies within the bounds of a farm heavily armoured with hostile signage. It can best be seen from afar in any case, standing protectively head and shoulders above the surrounding mature woodland.
Marsham also corresponded with Gilbert White, the most noted British naturalist in this period, who recorded the arrival dates of migratory birds to his Hampshire estate at Selborne. White praised Marsham as “a painful [i.e. painstaking] and accurate naturalist”.5 White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) was published in the same year as Marsham’s “Indications of Spring”, and thereafter the two men struck up a correspondence, although they never met. They compared notes on the sizes of the trees they had each planted in boyhood some seventy years earlier. One oak of Marsham’s had attained a girth of twelve and a half feet since he planted it at the age of twelve. “Perhaps you never heard of a larger Oak & the planter living”, he bragged.6 They also swapped notes about migration at a time when many people believed that birds simply hibernated during the winter rather than making long journeys. In October 1792, Marsham wrote to White with a truly remarkable find: “My man has just now shot me a bird which was flying about my house: I am confident I have never seen its likeness before.”7 The bird proved to be a wallcreeper — and the first recorded sighting of the species in the British Isles.
Marsham’s almost exact contemporary, the Swedish pioneer of biological taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, also recorded the dates when trees flowered and fruited, but did not start until 1750 when he finally settled down after many travels and became the rector of Uppsala University. There are many who have made similar observations ever since. For example, the American writer Henry David Thoreau recorded the dates on which many of his plants first flowered for nearly a decade in the nineteenth century.
Noticing signs of spring is not confined to the scientifically minded, of course. It is an idea with a long provenance. Buddhist monks in Japan were recording the arrival of the cherry blossom as far back as the ninth century. Some of Marsham’s “data points” (such as the swallow and the cuckoo) have long held a place in popular lore and folk songs. The old English saying “Ne’er cast a clout till May be out” — a warning not to remove outer clothes too soon in the year — is usually supposed to refer to the month of May. But English May weather is highly variable, and it is more likely that the saying refers to the May tree, or hawthorn, which generally flowers at some point during that month (long after it has come into leaf). Whether it does so early or late is determined chiefly by the weather conditions, making it a more reliable index for an appropriate choice of dress than a calendar date.
Robert Marsham’s project was handed down in the family and only came to a halt in 1958 when his great-great-great-granddaughter Mary died and her descendants were advised that their amateur contribution was no longer required, presumably judged to be no match for modern scientific methods. Despite its abrupt termination, it is the unbroken long run — 222 years — of Marsham’s “Indications of Spring” that gives it lasting scientific worth. There are a few patchy early records for places in the UK, but Marsham’s is the first truly systematic dataset, according to Tim Sparks, a professor of zoology and quantitative biology at the universities of Cambridge, Liverpool, and Poznań. “It is the longest such record for the UK and has been of immense value in determining the variability in spring and in its response to prevailing weather conditions. He inspired many others to do likewise.”8 Marsham’s record stretches back far enough that it can serve as a baseline for the investigation of changes that have already happened in the more recent past as well as for ongoing studies of the present situation.
One merit of Marsham’s idea is surely that it is so easily grasped. You do not need to be a scientist to understand his results — or to begin recording your own data. In the mid-nineteenth century, the observation of seasonal changes in nature acquired its own name — phenology — as the gentleman scientists of the Victorian age began to add their contributions. Today, Marsham’s pioneering work inspires successor projects around the world, many of them examples of “citizen science”, relying on the participation of members of the public.
The UK Phenology Network, set up by the Woodland Trust and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, has more than 20,000 participating amateur recorders. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew organized the Great Plant Hunt, a citizen science project in which schoolchildren in Britain were encouraged to record their observations of buds, flowers, and leaves of different plants over one week in May. Extended nationwide, the project forms a snapshot illustrating the progress of spring in different regions — spring advances northward at about 2 mph (walking pace), as Marsham and White had found when they compared dates of their specific observations. These were usually found to be a couple of days apart, reflecting the fact that Stratton Strawless lies about 100 miles north of Selborne.
Data can be adduced indirectly as well. For example, Professor Sparks has found that the dates of flower festivals are being moved forward in the year, a sure sign of earlier blooms. In other circumstances, photographs taken annually at significant occasions that fall on a particular day can be used to reveal their own accidental record of the shifting seasons.
Phenology might fairly be described as one of the earliest sciences — crop yields are known to have been recorded 3,000 years ago. But it now has a magnified contemporary relevance because it provides not only an historic benchmark, in records such as Marsham’s, but also a continuing measure of climate change.
In the short run, phenological records reveal that natural occurrences are highly responsive to different seasonal conditions. The indications of spring are subject to more movement than we often imagine there to be, linked to weather factors such as frost, rainfall, and hours of sunshine. “It shows the variability in the timing of spring events”, says Professor Sparks. “These may typically be two to three months — much longer than human memory might falsely estimate.”9 Nor does everything happen in concert. Different indications of spring may be advanced or retarded by quite different amounts in the same place in any given year, even though environmental conditions are apparently the same. Comparison of phenological data with concurrently recorded temperatures reveals, for example, that beech trees come into leaf four days earlier for each 1°C rise in temperature, whereas birch will leaf ten days earlier.
Climate change is likely to exacerbate these effects. Research published in the journal Nature by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in 2016 indicates that seasonal events like those observed by Marsham are in general more sensitive to changes of temperature than to changes in other factors such as rainfall. Such disruptions have the potential to “desynchronise ecological interactions and thereby threaten ecosystem function”, according to Stephen Thackeray and his coauthors.10
This table of data is now almost all the evidence left of Marsham’s work with nature. At Stratton Strawless itself, much of his plantation was felled for timber during the world wars. In place of his rich deciduous woods, there are now fast-growing conifers. The house he knew was lost to fire a few years after his death, and its joyless nineteenth-century replacement now forms the office of a mobile home park. (Marsham always found new buildings a disappointment, as they began to decay from the moment of their completion, whereas a tree just grew in majesty.)
17 February 2024: During what is being reported as the warmest February on record, the hawthorn is beginning to come into leaf.
What do I learn from my effort to follow in Marsham’s footsteps? I find that not all my observations fall earlier than his of 250 years ago. My snowdrops appeared nearly four days later than Marsham’s averaged overall date, whereas my thrush sang eleven days earlier. My hawthorn leafing date fell more than three weeks earlier than Marsham’s average. This may say little more than that we experienced a cold snap in January followed by an unusually mild first half of February. But, given that February is heading toward breaking numerous heat records both nationally and globally, it would also seem evidential of climate change.
Perhaps Marsham found, as I am finding, that close observation changes your perception of the season. The detection of the very earliest signs, such as snowdrops, before any general warming is felt, holds out hope of renewal. Spotting one sign shortly after another exposes the endless longueur of winter as a sham, and is a reminder that time is in fact hurrying on. Spotting several signs in rapid succession is further proof that spring is gathering pace and a promise of the abundance of nature to come.
“The spring is coming by a many signs”, the poet John Clare wrote in the century after Marsham.11 I am submitting this article on February 20 in time for you to read it during the spring (if you live in the northern hemisphere). I have not yet seen the rowan or the beech or the birch come into leaf, I have not yet heard the frogs and toads begin to croak, I have not yet observed the first arriving swallow. But if you have the chance to get outside, you might catch them yet, and become part of Marsham’s great experiment.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams


text:
Little Boney
James Gillray and Napoleon’s Fragile Masculinity
By Peter W. Walker
March 21, 2024

Of all the caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte, representations of the French emperor as a miniscule megalomaniac continue to haunt the historical imagination to an unparalleled degree. Peter W. Walker searches for the origins of “Little Boney” in the early 19th-century caricatures of James Gillray, the English illustrator who took Napoleon down a peg by diminishing his reputation and scale to the point of absurdity.

Napoleon Bonaparte is beloved by a certain kind of military history buff as the epitome of “great man” history: the genius who bends the world to his will. Ridley Scott seems to have aimed for something different with his blockbuster Napoleon (2023). The movie might be read as a study of fragile masculinity, an attempt to reinterpret the “great man” through the lens of twenty-first century sensibilities. Joaquin Phoenix is stiff, insecure, petulant, and terrible at sex. He is above all small: physically, emotionally, metaphorically. His relationship with the Empress Josephine is bizarre. “You think you’re great”, she tells him, “You’re just a tiny little brute who is nothing without me. Say it!” He obeys.
It is not so easy to come up with an original interpretation of someone who has already haunted the European historical imagination for well over two hundred years. In all the above, Scott is echoing contemporaneous British wartime propaganda, whether consciously or not. He is particularly indebted to the brilliant caricaturist James Gillray. Often credited as the “father of the political cartoon”, Gillray created the character of “Little Boney”: a miniscule, cuckolded megalomaniac; a dictator with an inferiority complex. Gillray’s satirical cartoons were so successful, and so funny, that they established an image of Napoleon which remains with us to this day. Scott’s Napoleon is not so different. No wonder that French critics hate it.
Gillray’s determination to take Napoleon down a peg was a response to the emperor’s own prodigious self-aggrandizement. His chameleon-like image is seen in the famous paintings of Jacques-Louis David: a Roman-style military leader in Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801–05); a modern statesman in The Emperor Napoleon in his Study at the Tuileries (1812); a new Holy Roman Emperor in The Coronation of Napoleon (1807). In the last, he places the imperial crown on his own head, overseen by a compliant Pius VII. (Napoleon had kidnapped the previous Pope, Pius VI, who died in captivity in Paris.) He is legitimized by an ancient, sacred Catholic ceremony, in an overture to France’s still-powerful royalists, even as he undercuts the traditional Christian meaning of a coronation, replacing it with one of meritocracy; he is the heir to Charlemagne, but he got there himself. The emperor scored a still more surprising propaganda victory with Emmanuel de la Cases’ The Memorial of Saint Helena, published in 1823. After he was defeated the first time, Boney was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba, but easily escaped. The second time around, he found himself banished to a small rock in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean named Saint Helena. Here, he dictated his memoirs, rehabilitating his reputation and winning a new generation of admirers. That certain kind of military history buff’s ongoing admiration for Napoleon is a product less of the man’s military or political abilities than of his gift for propaganda.
The “golden legend” of Napoleonic propaganda met its match in Britain’s well-developed tradition of satire and political caricature. Britain enjoyed a climate of relative press freedom, rancorous party politics, and a robust market for the printed word and image: conditions which fostered the work of caricaturists such as the famous William Hogarth (1697–1764). Compared to Hogarth, Gillray’s work was more focused on politics. It was also more shocking (and remains so to this day). Even in the uproarious world of Georgian satire, his cartoons stand out as particularly grotesque (such as his 1799 depiction of The Gout); vulgar (as in 1792’s Fashionable Contrasts, depicting the Duke of York’s marriage to Frederica Charlotte); and occasionally devastating (as in 1793’s The Blood of the Murdered, a pre-Napoleon critique of the French Revolution).
Gillray’s own life was far less colorful than these larger-than-life cartoons would suggest. Born in Middlesex in 1756, his father was a veteran, Chelsea pensioner, and member of the Moravian Brethren, a gloomy Protestant sect. Gillray set out to make a career as a “straight” illustrator, but meeting with little success slipped instead into a less respectable profession as a caricaturist. He spent the 1780s satirizing English politics, treating Whigs and Tories alike with equal cynicism, though eventually falling in with the Tory MP and future Prime Minister George Canning. He lodged with the spinster Hannah Humphrey, who published his cartoons. They came close to marrying on one occasion, but Gillray got cold feet at the church door.
His work on the French and their Revolution propelled this colorless man into celebrity. Gillray had good reason to dislike the French: his father had lost an arm during an earlier war with them. Gillray himself accompanied another artist to France in 1793 to make sketches for a painting of the Siege of Valenciennes. Thereafter, he increasingly turned his sights on the Parisian mob (the sans-culottes) and their English sympathizers. The resulting cartoons were extraordinarily popular. In 1802, one royalist French émigré described the “veritable madness” when a new Gillray drawing appeared: “you have to make your way in through the crowd with your fists”.1 In Very Slippy-Weather (1808), Gillray depicts an eager crowd assembled to view his prints, displayed in the window of the printer’s shop. (Cartoons such as these were not printed in newspapers but were instead sold directly by the printer.)
There are over two thousand British prints of Napoleon Bonaparte, of which Gillray produced around forty. His were by far the most influential, however, notable for their relentless attacks on Napoleon’s stature. Gillray’s pocket-sized Boney stands in contrast to earlier British caricatures such as Isaac Cruikshank’s The French Bugabo (1797), representing Napoleon as grotesque and monstrous. Gillray’s first caricatures of him are similar. In Buonaparte hearing of Nelson’s Victory (1798), the general is arrogant, disdainful, bloodthirsty, and — at this point — still average-sized.
This would change in 1803. The short-lived Peace of Amiens broke down, war resumed, and Britain braced itself for a French invasion. Alongside the military preparations, the invasion scare saw an outpouring of popular loyalism: volunteering, song-singing, the avid consumption of anti-French propaganda. Gillray’s “Little Boney” was born in this context. In that same year, he gets steadily smaller in Introduction of Citizen Volpone, German Nonchalance, Evacuation of Malta, and Maniac Ravings, shrinking as the French threat to Britain grew. Buonaparte, 48 Hours after Landing and John Bull Offering Little Boney Fair Play minimized (quite literally) the danger posed by a French invasion. “Little Boney” continued diminishing to the point of absurdity. He becomes an animal in Death of the Corsican Fox (1803); a baby in The Genius of France (1804); and — inevitably — a six-inch Lilliputian in The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (1804). Other cartoonists quickly got in on the joke, as in 1803’s Britannia Repremanding a Naughty Boy!, John Bull Teazed by an Earwig, and The King’s Dwarf Plays Gulliver a Trick. One printed collection of patriotic songs was similarly full of bellowing threats against “Boney the Pigmy”.2
Gillray’s tiny Napoleon served, in the first place, to bring a threatening dictator down to size. Charlie Chaplain did much the same thing to Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). But Gillray was also mocking Napoleon’s low social origins: he came not from France proper but from a family of minor Corsican nobility. Thomas Rowlandson’s The Progress of the Emperor Napoleon (1808) shows him as a “Ragged Headed Corsican Peasant”. Gillray’s Democracy, or a Sketch of the Life of Buonaparte (1800) begins with his humble, impoverished origins. This was also a joke about Britons’ supposedly higher standard of living. “Little Boney”, as the name implies, is a skeletal figure, whereas Gillray inevitably drew Englishmen as stocky and well fed (dining on French warships in 1798’s John Bull Taking a Luncheon). “Little Boney” was not just a crack at a dictator, but also a class-based attack on the Napoleonic meritocracy and myth of the self-made man.
British cartoonists’ mockery of Napoleon also had a sexual element. They drew him as cuckolded, impotent, and sexually insecure, humiliated by Josephine’s serial infidelities and belittled by his inability to produce an heir. Scott’s Napoleon, with its embarrassing sex scenes, also emphasizes these ideas, but here again Gillray’s cartoons not only got there first but were also far more severe than anything Scott was able to serve up. Gillray’s Ci-devant Occupations (1805) shows Josephine and Madame Talian dancing naked before Napoleon’s rival Paul Barras, while Napoleon himself peeps in from the corner. The scene takes place in Egypt, and the two women appear as orientalized dancing girls, playing tambourines and only half-concealed by a transparent curtain. Josephine, according to the caption, “is smaller & thin, with bad Teeth, something like Cloves”. Similarly, Charles Williams’ The Devil and his Protegée (1810) depicts Napoleon and the Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise on the morning after their wedding night. Holding a copy of the gynecological manual Aristotle’s Masterpiece, Napoleon pleads with the devil for help impregnating his new wife. She adjusts her garter, saying, “few husbands disturb their wives rest more than mine does, but it’s with starting & kicking in his sleep & crying have mercy on me.”
One of the reasons why these British cartoonists had such fun on this subject is that Napoleon’s sexuality really was public knowledge. As he made the transition from First Consul of the French Republic to a hereditary Emperor of the French, his ability to reproduce — and thus his virility — became a matter of momentous geopolitical significance.3 More concretely, many of his letters to Josephine were intercepted and published during his lifetime. In 1796, he wrote to her from Italy:
I hope that in a few days, I will be more happy . . . to give you proof of the ardent love that you inspire in me. . . . You know well enough that I cannot forget your little visits. You know very well, the little black forest . . . I kiss you there a thousand times and I wait with impatience for the moment I can be there again. . . . Kisses on your mouth, your eyelids, your shoulder, on you everywhere, everywhere!
Within the month, he had discovered her affair with the army officer Hippolyte Charles, and wrote again, “I no longer love you. On the contrary I detest you” (conveniently forgetting his own infidelities).4 British newspapers of the time were not so far removed from today’s tabloids, and they gleefully printed letters such as these, making their author the subject of ridicule.
Gillray’s diminutive and domineering “Little Boney” set the stage for an obsession with Napoleon’s psyche that would last through to the present day. Napoleon gives his name to a psychological disorder (of questionable veracity), the “Napoleon Complex”, which holds that short men are more likely to be aggressive in order to compensate for their physical shortcomings. Even today, the one thing everyone seems to know, or wants to know, about Napoleon is his height. Scott’s Napoleon plays on the same trope: in one scene, the general climbs on a stool in order to look a mummified Egyptian pharaoh in the eyes.
By focusing relentlessly on psychology, the “black legend” put forward by British cartoonists such as Gillray mirrors the “golden legend” of pro-Napoleon propaganda. While Gillray suggested that Boney’s penchant for world conquest stemmed from a disordered personality, Napoleon depicted himself as a genius who remade Europe’s destiny through the force of his own courage and willpower. That idea has lent itself to the second (also questionable) psychological disorder which bears his name, the “Napoleon Delusion”: the idea that believing oneself to be Napoleon is a hallmark of madness. The idea has proved so influential in popular culture and mass media that a character adopting the distinctive hand-in-jacket pose has become an instantly recognizable shorthand for insanity, employed on Broadway in The Misleading Lady (1913), by Stan Laurel in Mixed Nuts (1922), by Bugs Bunny in Napoleon Bunny-Part (1956), and more recently, by Bender Bending Rodriguez in Matt Groening’s Futurama (2008–2013).
The “golden legend” and the “black legend” are mirror opposites, but they ultimately reinforce one another. The first sees the dictator as the epitome of power and grandeur. The latter sees the dictator as fragile, insecure, and compensatory. Both focus on the dictator’s personality. Together, they lead us back to that certain kind of military history buff and the obsession with “great man” history. Gillray’s cartoons are hilarious, but they imply that dictatorship is a therapist’s problem, to be explained by attention to the Napoleonic psyche. Scott’s Napoleon is more of the same, only less funny. But what of the social and cultural forces that led millions of French men and women to accept, and often enthusiastically celebrate, Napoleonic rule?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Peter W. Walker


text:
Windows Onto History
The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)
By Thom Sliwowski
April 3, 2024

Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy.

It was the spring of 1618 and Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor and past King of Bohemia, had devised a plan that would prove calamitous. Seeking to reverse the concessions granted a decade prior by his brother and predecessor, Rudolf II, he tasked his deputies with reining in the rights of Bohemian Protestants. But these Protestants lived in a tradition of religious dissidence preceding Martin Luther by a century: they were accustomed to a degree of autonomous rule and religious freedom uncommon elsewhere in Habsburg realms. When Matthias’ deputies halted the construction of chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau, Protestants, noblemen, and free burghers found themselves united in their indignation. Ordinarily, these groups had few interests in common. At the time, they could not see — as subsequent historians, painters, and poets would — that they were already becoming Czech, and were about to take part in what, centuries later, would be retrospectively recast as a kind of idiosyncratic national ritual. Nor could Matthias and his advisors see that the Holy Roman Empire was standing before a historical precipice. Keen to meddle in local affairs, Matthias was shrewd enough to act through his zealous deputies. And it was to them that the gravity of this situation would first become apparent.
Two Catholic deputies, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum, had grown notorious for openly disavowing the Majestätsbrief: Rudolf II’s 1609 liberal guarantee of religious tolerance. When a Protestant assembly spurned by the shuttered chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau attracted a massive crowd, Martinice and Slavata began to worry. And when the count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, elected defender of the Protestant faith, called for their execution, they realized it was already too late. The Catholic deputies had overplayed their hand; the mood among the infuriated townspeople was rising to a fever pitch. A large crowd followed the Protestant nobles to Hradčany Castle. They poured inside and to the upper floors, cornering Martinice and Slavata in a tower chamber. Shouting at, threatening, and then grabbing the deputies, they chucked Martinice out the window first. Slavata, meanwhile, held onto the ledge, begging for the Virgin’s intercession. In one final push, the crowd expelled him from the castle window as well. Only the deputies’ secretary remained. Shaking with fear, he clung to the prominent Protestant nobleman Joachim von Schlick for protection, but the defenestrators, as they would come to be called, peeled him off Schlick and tossed him out the window too.
Exuberant, the Protestant rebels mocked these appeals to the Virgin Mary. But when two of them leaned out the window to heap more insults down upon their oppressors, what they saw left them flummoxed. Martinice and Slavata were alive, as was their secretary, and the three were already getting up to reach for a ladder extended by allies from a lower window in the castle. How the Catholic deputies survived this forty-foot fall was a mystery that has turned the defenestration into an object lesson in framing. Catholic propagandists insisted that the Virgin Mary had saved them: Slavata’s prayer for intercession worked, effecting a miracle that legitimated their cause. Protestant pamphleteers, on the other hand, noted that a pile of trash and human shit directly below the window had broken their fall. They may have survived, but only to remind others how loathsome was their attempt to quash local rights.1
Words seem inadequate to the task of describing something so outlandish, and yet “defenestration” comes close. This word is grammatically a compound nominalization — and a flagrantly Latinate one at that. “Fenestrate”, the verb ostensibly at its root, only appears a couple centuries later, carrying two unrelated technical usages in the fields of surgery and botany. From this we can surmise that “defenestration” was a linguistic artifact constructed intentionally. Perhaps it meant to lampoon the Latin of Bohemia’s Catholic rulers: in Czech it is simply “defenestrace”, a rare Latinate word in that language. The humor here derives from the fact that a form of free fall carries a name as clunky as the doctrines and mores of the Catholic rule it sought to swiftly overturn.
Almost immediately, the task of illustrating the defenestration became paramount. A 1618 Catholic Flugblatt (or pamphlet) depicts Martinice and Slavata falling onto a courtyard paved with stones. An accompanying caption renders the event as legend: thanks to the Virgin’s intercession, the deputies’ lives were saved and they took refuge in a nearby cloister. Foolhardy political revolt is here transfigured into a leap of faith that furnishes its own proof: they were, after all, still alive when this image was printed. Regrettably, opposing Protestant pamphlets, depicting the pile of excrement that broke their fall, are harder to come by.
Miracle or mere coincidence, the defenestration catalyzed a broader Bohemian uprising: the first eruption of what would become the Thirty Years’ War. News of the Prague defenestration traveled across Europe within the year; its images proliferated in contemporary pamphlets, fliers, and compendia of recent events. Centuries later, the act of defenestration would serve as a touchstone of Czech national identity and of Prague’s municipal history. But first it would be represented and re-invoked so many times that this concrete, historical event gradually became abstracted into a figure of thought.
We find the seeds of this abstraction in an engraving that was printed in the Theatrum Europaeum: a German historical chronicle published by Matthäus Merian in the mid-seventeenth century. Here, partisan framings are eschewed in favor of neutral representation. Within the castle, men are hoisting the Catholic deputies to the windowsills while their secretary awaits his turn in the center of the image. The focus on him as the engraving’s central figure suggests the perennial question that haunts all news about violent revolts: who will be next?
Of course, the 1618 defenestration would not be the last one to take place in Prague — but neither was it the first. Two centuries earlier, Jan Hus, a wildly popular theologian, inveighed against the Church, denouncing its political authority and its system of monetary indulgences. He also called for Mass to be celebrated not in Latin but in the local tongue, which was then named Bohemian but which we would now call Czech. To this end, Hus wrote his Orthografia Bohemica (1406–1412): the first dictionary of the Czech language, in which he invented the haček and the vowel-length markers, which make Czech spelling unique among European languages. This religious reformer and fervent grammarian was subsequently arrested, found guilty of heresy, and burned at the stake in 1415. By making him into a martyr, the Church had all but guaranteed Hus’ legacy.2 And his followers cemented this legacy by revolting. In 1419, they stormed the Novoměstská radnice, Prague’s “New Town Hall”, and threw three municipal consuls and seven citizens out of a window.
With this violent spectacle, Hus’ followers, who would come to be known as Hussites, won the right to rule themselves and to worship as they chose. They retained this right until 1483, when King Vladislaus II stormed Prague and reestablished Catholic rule. Another defenestration followed, as these proto-Protestants tossed the Burgomeister and the corpses of seven town counselors out of various halls across the city. Again the spectacle worked: a religious reconciliation at the 1485 Peace of Kutná Hora established the Hussite and Roman Catholic faiths as equal before the law. Were the two defenestrations that opened and closed the Hussite Wars decisive for their outcome, or merely incidental? One could be forgiven for thinking that the act of defenestration, as violent as it is theatrical, seemed to carry some magical efficacy.
A compelling ritual is one thing, but lasting historical efficacy is something else entirely. The Bohemian Revolt that followed the 1618 defenestration was decisively suppressed only two years later, in a battle on the outskirts of Prague between the Bohemian Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire. The 1620 Battle of White Mountain slammed shut the window of possibility for Czech self-determination, inaugurating a period of harsh Germanization lasting almost two centuries. Germanophone Catholic agents of the Empire suppressed the language and burned Czech books, under the pretext of a Counter-Reformation strategy aimed at stamping out the Hussite confession once and for all.
No surprise, then, that when the Czech National Revival broke out in the early nineteenth century, it was led largely by radical lexicographers and philologists. Josef Dobrovský published a Czech grammar in 1809, and Josef Jungmann a five-volume Czech-German dictionary over the years 1834–1839.3 Together the two Josefs set down the medium in which Czech culture could flourish: poetry, painting, and history writing — all fueled by the heady currents of Romanticism — elaborated Czech-ness, making a nation out of the language’s speakers. The wave crested in 1848 with the eruption of the June Revolution in Prague. But this uprising, too, eventually failed.
The most enduring artifact of the Czech National Revival was a sense of historical consciousness that recast the Prague defenestrations as national revolts avant la lettre. Aberrant curios no longer, the early modern defenestrations found new life as links in a chain that led directly to the 1848 Spring of Nations. The visual archive from the nineteenth century appears like an anchor line plunging into the abyss of the past. It is here we find the earliest depictions of the fifteenth-century Hussite defenestrations, such as an engraving from the Česko-Moravská Kronika of 1872. Written by Karel Vladislav Zap, a writer and pedagogue best known for popularizing Czech history, this book aimed to instruct the Czechs about who they were. Defenestration came to be at this point a national shibboleth: because they had thrown their enemies from castle windows, the reasoning seems to go, these Hussite rebels were, in fact, ancestors of the nationalists that we are today. To be Czech meant not only to speak the language, but also to be aware of defenestration’s significance.
More than any other defenestration, it was the 1618 instance that captured the imagination of Romantic revolutionaries agitating for the Czech cause. A somewhat earlier painting, from 1844 by Karel Svoboda, stages this defenestration with all the trappings of the nineteenth-century Czech National Revival. Open books and reams of paper litter the left foreground, invoking the work of the lexicographers who codified the language. A toppled chair suggests authority overturned — a motif that later painters will repeat — and the open window looks to be smashed in a curious way. Though this is a historical painting, its call to revolutionary violence is rendered here in the present tense.
Depictions like these elevated and abstracted the historical event of defenestration into something more significant than a milestone. Historical change might be called a “watershed” or a “turning point”, but certain events forge their own metaphors. The 1789 Storming of the Bastille evokes the tumult of the French Revolution, and the 1989 Fall of communism suggests the collapse of a system that turned out to be remarkably flimsy. “Defenestration” does something similar: for nineteenth-century Czech nationalists, these events (and how they model historical change) took on a poetic significance. Some historians surmise that the 1618 Protestant crowd was deliberately reenacting the earlier defenestrations; Czech nationalists certainly thought so, placing the Hussite and Protestant defenestrations in a line of succession that became a tradition and a figure for thinking about history.4
The apogee of painterly depictions of the 1618 event came a half-century later, in two paintings by Václav Brožík from 1890 and 1891. In the first, Pražská defenestrace roku 1618, the line of action moves leftward as the dynamic image expresses the eruption of affect that, for Brožík, defines this act. Martinice is halfway out the window while Slavata, stupefied, is being dragged the same direction. Their secretary is pinned to the desk among some papers, while in the foreground, under the window, lies a toppled chair. A throne overthrown, this chair perhaps embodies the anti-monarchic energy that nineteenth-century nationalists ascribed to the Protestant rebels fighting for political autonomy. The energy in this painting implies hydraulic forces at work: it is as if the upswell of revolutionary emotion tends naturally, automatically to the window, which is at once a release valve and an opening onto the future. If to look out a window is to imagine political possibility — the painting seems to say — then to throw somebody out a window is to make history happen.
Brožík’s 1891 painting depicts the defenestration’s aftermath, showing how even the most ardent collective revolts can be stymied. In the adjacent room, exhausted on a chair, one of the escaped Catholic deputies recovers from their terrifying ordeal: miraculous or odious, the defenestration they survived nevertheless shook them to their cores. Among the crowd one finds some characters from the previous painting, including Count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, in red. This crowd is kept at bay by the Princess Polyxena of Lobkowitz, a politically-active figure who played a significant role in the Bohemian Counter-Reformation. All the way to the right, an empty chair with a scepter laid atop it invokes monarchical authority preserved. Princess Polyxena single-handedly stands between the Protestant rebels and the accomplishment of their task, representing the forces that stood in the way of Bohemian self-determination and Czech national consciousness. However, by placing her at the center of the painting — and in this powerful pose: index finger pointing downward, face stern — Brožík created a far more ambiguous scene. Here, at least, it could go both ways: perhaps Polyxena was right to protect these artifacts of divine intercession.
Already a figure for representing historical change, defenestration became the emblem of a uniquely Czech form of fatalism during the twentieth century. Writers took it up, elaborating and unfolding its significance, and made this idea into an object of obsession. The word’s curious meaning in this century is the strange son of its nineteenth-century usage: to grasp its significance we must briefly retrace its paternity.
Of all the heroes of the Czech national cause, none looms larger than Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Born into a working-class Moravian family, he pursued philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig, studying under Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. He wrote a habilitation thesis on the sociology of suicide: a topic that would prove eerily prescient. A scientific and progressive thinker, he married the American Charlotte Garrigue after meeting her in Leipzig, taking her surname as his second name. In 1918, after a lifetime spent championing the Czech cause, including during speeches given at the Treaty of Versailles, Tomáš Masaryk found himself elected president of the newly independent Czechoslovakia.
Masaryk served as a widely beloved president until his death in 1935. Three years later, Hitler’s Third Reich would annex the Sudetenland: those border-regions of interwar Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. So began the Second World War in Bohemia. If the 1618 defenestration spurred the Thirty Years’ War, what came to be known as the Fourth Defenestration of Prague concluded this one. The beginning of the end was heralded by the Soviet liberation of Prague in 1945. The Czech and Slovak Communist Parties, already popular in the 1946 elections, staged a coup d’état in February of 1948. They had reason to eliminate their opponents, and they soon set their sights on Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Jan Masaryk.
The son of Tomáš Masaryk, Jan had served as minister plenipotentiary for the new nation in London since 1925. In 1940, with his country swallowed up by the Third Reich, he was appointed foreign minister of the Czechoslovak government in exile. A reluctant supporter of Stalin, he traveled to Moscow in April, 1945, to agree on Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy. (He had signed a twenty-five-year alliance with the Soviet leader two years prior.) With increasing disappointment, he observed the postwar developments in Prague until, on March 10, 1948, Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of the foreign ministry wearing only his pajamas. He had fallen from his bathroom window. The official cause of death was listed as suicide, but in the popular imagination this event came to be called the Fourth Defenestration of Prague.
The Czechoslovak authorities were quick to wrap up their investigation into Masaryk’s death, having determined that it was a suicide. But the case would be reopened, incredibly enough, half a century later. In 2004, the Prague Police enlisted forensic expert Jiři Straus to reexamine the evidence, and Straus found that Masaryk, “a heavy[set] man and certainly no athlete . . . would have landed much closer to the building if he had jumped.”5 Because he had fallen so far away from the Foreign Ministry, he must have been pushed. This official finding confirmed what most Czechs had already suspected: no suicide, Masaryk had been murdered on Stalin’s orders.
While defenestrations both real and suggested continued to proliferate throughout the twentieth century after Masaryk’s death, many of them carry a dubious, autotelic quality: writers would pine to be defenestrated, but their desire comes to undo the act’s ritual efficacy. Can defenestration occur without the element of surprise, or without political rivals to carry it out? Is it possible to autodefenestrate? By fixating on the window, writers sprung the frames of what we could call traditional defenestration.
In a recently published academic journal article on the subject, Hana Pichova counted in Kafka’s notebooks at least ten instances of “falling, jumping, or being forcibly thrown from windows”, adding that though such “thoughts occupied the writer more than fleetingly”, they only occupied him so long as he remained in Prague.6 Bohumil Hrabal, the pilsner-drinking bard of postwar Prague, was fixated enough on open windows and falling out of them that he wrote, in the spring of 1989, a text enigmatically entitled “The Magic Flute”, in which he assembles his own compendium of historical and literary defenestrations. This was far from the first time he wrote about defenestration, but never had he mustered such depressive pathos. The text meditates on the stymied protests in Prague, on the self-immolation of the student Jan Palach, and on the hopelessness of existence under the communist order, which would incidentally collapse just six months later.
Hrabal mentions the early twentieth century poet Konstantin Biebl, who “jumped out of the window, but [who] first, and this was a long time before, . . . had Štyrský paint him a picture, of a man falling backwards out of a window, just like turning the page of a book.”7 This painting has unfortunately been lost to history, but Hrabal’s description of it prefigures his own end. Eight years later, in 1997, while in a hospital, Hrabal leaned out his window far enough to plummet to his death. He had said over the days prior that he really wanted to feed the pigeons. Could it be said that his obsession with defenestration was what killed him?
It is almost as if, by the twentieth century, the collective attention accorded to defenestration wound the coils of reason too tightly: in becoming an object of literary fixation, it came to occasion a kind of melancholy rumination, one that eats the fruit it bears for the mind. Already a violent form of political murder, the act took on a character even darker and more sinister. Nevertheless, retracing its history reveals a trajectory at least as astounding as the competing claims of Protestant and Catholic pamphleteers after 1618. Here we have concrete historical events that congeal first into an evocative image, then into a figure of thought for historical change in the Czech style, and finally into a style of suicide. But maybe it is simply a trick of historical perspective that makes it possible to excavate defenestration in this way: the early modern defenestrators were probably not reenacting anything, nor were nineteenth-century Romantic painters necessarily aware that they were instantiating a metaphor for historical shifts. There is something off-putting, even suffocating about trying to concoct a grand theory of defenestration. One is compelled to throw open the window, let in some fresh air, perhaps lean out to get a better look . . .
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Thom Sliwowski