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Race and the White Elephant War of 1884

By Ross Bullen
October 11, 2017

Feuding impresarios, a white-but-not-white-enough elephant, and racist ads for soap — Ross Bullen on how a bizarre episode in circus history became an unlikely forum for discussing 19th-century theories of race, and inadvertently laid bare the ideological constructions at their heart.

The Lydian Monarch had been sighted from Fire Island and was expected in Jersey City that evening. Everybody in New York City was already buzzing about what was on board. It was March 28, 1884, and P. T. Barnum, the circus proprietor and showman, after great effort and expense, had brought the first “sacred white elephant” to America. An earlier attempt to buy a white elephant from Siam (Thailand) had ended in failure, but now Barnum’s agent, J. B. Gaylord, had successfully purchased an elephant named “Toung Taloung” — or “Gem of the Sky” — from King Thibaw of Burma. From Rangoon, Toung Taloung was brought by ship through the Suez Canal, and arrived in Liverpool, England on January 14. After several weeks at the London Zoological Gardens where it became something of a sensation in both the British and American press, the white elephant, its handlers, and Barnum’s agents eventually sailed for New York on March 8. When the Lydian Monarch arrived twenty days later, Barnum and his entourage rushed to New Jersey to meet Toung Taloung.
The following day, in a story titled “The Sacred Beast Here”, the New York Times offered a dramatic account of Barnum’s first encounter with his prized white elephant. “Of course we have all learned by this time,” Barnum told his retinue, “that there is no such thing as a really pure white elephant. This is a sacred animal, a technical white elephant, and as white as God makes ’em. A man can paint them white, but this is not one of that kind.” Although readers who had followed the coverage of Toung Taloung’s reception in London would indeed have learned that white elephants are not literally white, Barnum’s matter-of-fact statement belied the controversy that the color of white elephants had already engendered in the popular imagination. In 1884, Toung Taloung was the catalyst for a broader public debate about race and authenticity.
A few months after Toung Taloung arrived in New York, Frank Vincent Jr., author of the popular 1874 travelogue The Land of the White Elephant: Sights and Scenes in South-Eastern Asia, used explicitly racialized terminology to explain the color of white elephants to readers of the Manhattan. In an article titled “White Elephants”, Vincent writes,
It should always be remembered that the term white, as applied to elephants, must be received with qualification. In fact, the grains of salt must be numerous, for the white elephant is white only by contrast with those that are decidedly dark. A mulatto, for instance, is not absolutely white, but he is white compared with a full-blooded negro. The so-called white elephant is an occasional departure from the ordinary beast.
For Vincent, both the white elephant and biracial people share a kind of “qualified” whiteness that serves to distinguish them from “full-blooded” black bodies (Vincent refers to regular elephants as “black”), but stops short of aligning them with the kind of privileged white identity that Vincent himself possessed.
In his article Vincent constantly explains white elephants to his readers in terms of race, from noting the labor performed by “black” elephants and speculating about why whiteness is “worshipped” in Siam, to claiming that “[w]hen you possess an elephant whose color is that of a negro’s palm you possess a white elephant.” Vincent’s descriptions reflect a truism that can be found throughout nineteenth-century writing on white elephants: although these animals are not literally white, they are approximately the same color as white people. For example, the author of “The Sacred Beast Here” writes that Toung Taloung “has a large pink splash on his forehead, which extends over his eyes and half-way down his trunk. His ears, which are of a peculiar triangle shape, are edged with the same flesh-colored pink, and mottled in large spots, and his breast and shoulders are likewise spotted. The under side of his trunk is also flesh-colored.” (The “flesh” referred to here, of course, being the flesh of the presumed white author.) In The Land of the White Elephant, Vincent makes a similar observation, noting that the body of “the so-called ‘white’ elephant” has “the peculiar flesh-coloured appearance termed ‘white.’” Vincent’s description reflects a broad cultural consensus that the epidermal signifiers of white identity must be carefully circumscribed so that they only have meaning and value when observed in white persons. When such physical characteristics are evident in a non-human form like an elephant, or in a human body that is considered to be biracial, these privileged markers become “qualified” or “so-called”.
Further complicating the relationship between human whiteness and white elephants is the fact that the English term “white elephant” is an inadequate and misleading translation of the Thai phrase for these animals. The Thai word for elephant is chang, and a white elephant is a chang pheuak. According to Rita Ringis, “chang pheuak . . . literally means ‘albino (or strange-coloured) elephant’, the usual word for the colour ‘white’ being different entirely.” Like virtually every other American or European who wrote about Siam and white elephants in the nineteenth century, Vincent was open about the fact that “white elephant” was a poor translation of chang pheuak. And yet he still describes these animals as “so-called ‘white’ elephant[s]”, glossing over what he admits is a semantic problem in order to cast creatures like Toung Taloung as racial imposters who — like a light-skinned African American — might try to pass as white in order to access the closely guarded privileges of white identity.
If the white elephant is viewed as an imposter because of its improper claim on whiteness, this conception of the animal as a kind of fraud is also supported by the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “white elephant” as both “a rare albino variety of elephant which is highly venerated in some Asian countries”, and
“A burdensome or costly possession (from the story that the kings of Siam (now Thailand) were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious, in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance). Also, an object, scheme, etc., considered to be without use or value.”
Although this story of the Siamese king and his ruined courtier does provide a compelling explanation for why “white elephant” can mean “an object, scheme, etc., considered to be without use or value”, it is nevertheless a complete fabrication. Indeed, if read together, the OED’s two definitions for “white elephant” present a paradox: If white elephants are “rare” and “highly venerated”, why would the king of Siam give one away to punish a subordinate? Unsurprisingly, there is no recorded instance of this practice in Thai history. Nevertheless, this figurative definition of “white elephant” as a kind of fatal gift has had a lasting influence on the English language. It can be detected today in phenomena like “white elephant sales” or “white elephant gift exchanges”, but in the 1880s, “white elephant” was a common expression for any kind of useless or burdensome object.
The story of Barnum and Toung Taloung illustrates the significant fascination with white elephants in nineteenth-century America. The controversy surrounding the reception of this animal was ironic since Barnum, who had made a fortune passing off frauds and imitations as genuine articles, now possessed a real curiosity but was afraid that nobody would accept it as authentic. Moreover, since Barnum supposedly paid a considerable sum to purchase Toung Taloung (in his autobiography he claims to have spent $250,000 — about $5.5 million in today’s money — although this is almost certainly an inflated figure) and the elephant was only a moderately successful attraction, we can also note the irony of Toung Taloung’s transformation from a literal to a figurative white elephant.
Toung Taloung became a flashpoint for broader cultural debates about racial identity. One of the most curious effects of this debate was the tacit admission, in newspaper articles and a series of soap advertisements, that whiteness and white privilege were socially constructed. If a white elephant had a merely tenuous grasp on its white identity, couldn’t something similar happen to white people? In order to best understand how the story of Barnum’s elephant intersected with broader ideas about race, it is necessary to consider two other elephants who were introduced to the American public in 1884: Forepaugh’s “Light of Asia” and Barnum’s own “The White Fraud”. Both of these animals were regular “black” elephants that had been painted white by their owners. Although Forepaugh’s elephant, originally named “Tiny”, was designed to be a whiter rival to Toung Taloung, and Barnum’s animal was created as a parody of Forepaugh’s obvious forgery, both “white” elephants demonstrated the considerable cultural anxiety about the malleability of whiteness as a racial category.
Eight days before Barnum welcomed Toung Taloung in Jersey City, the steamer City of Chester arrived in New York with Forepaugh’s white elephant on board. From the moment Light of Asia appeared in America there were doubts about its authenticity. In the two days after Light of Asia’s arrival, the New York Times published at least three articles that treated both the elephant’s skin color — and the story of its acquisition from Siam — with a great deal of suspicion. All of these articles note that Light of Asia’s color — a uniform white evenly distributed over its entire body — did not match any existing description of a Siamese white elephant, and spend some time speculating how Forepaugh must have dyed this animal (whether by using paint or some kind of chemical process). An editorial titled “A Very Seasick Elephant” quotes at length a “gentleman . . . whose travels in Asia have fitted him for expressing an opinion on the genuineness of this elephant.” This elephant expert (possibly Frank Vincent Jr.) explains that Light of Asia’s white toes do not indicate that it is a genuine white elephant since this characteristic is “very often found in elephants of the ordinary kind, without any pretension whatever to ‘white blood.’” Whiteness, in this context, cannot be evaluated solely by physical characteristics. Rather, whiteness is dictated by “white blood”. A white elephant must not be judged by its appearance alone. In fact, its physical appearance — its toes, in this instance — could actually belie its true “black” identity.
While the Times reported that a panel of New York City white elephant experts had certified Toung Taloung as a genuine chang pheuak, there was far less agreement about Forepaugh’s elephant. At least one of the experts who authenticated Toung Taloung, David Ker, made a point of writing to the Times to express his doubts about Light of Asia’s genuineness, while an editorial published in that paper the same day strongly implied that Forepaugh’s animal had been painted white.
In the weeks following Toung Taloung’s arrival in the United States, the white elephant war between Barnum and Forepaugh intensified. On April 19, Barnum’s retinue headed from New York to Philadelphia where Forepaugh and Light of Asia were already waiting. Barnum’s star attractions were Toung Taloung, of course, and a regular elephant, named “Tip”, which had been dyed white and was now called “The White Fraud”. Forepaugh was far from amused with Barnum’s latest stunt. He responded to Barnum’s arrival in his hometown with a pamphlet — titled “Too White For Barnum?” — that claimed both Toung Taloung and The White Fraud were imposters and that Light of Asia was “the first and only Sacred White Elephant that has ever been landed on the shores of the New World.”
As the title of this pamphlet suggests, Forepaugh used the considerable public confusion about the color of white elephants to his advantage, calling into question Toung Taloung’s authenticity because it was not as literally white as Light of Asia. Whiteness, in the white elephant war, was a fluid category that was unavoidably caught up in discourses of deception, transformation, and authenticity.
In November of 1884 Light of Asia died, prompting the following tongue-in-cheek obituary in Barnum’s 1889 autobiography: “The owner of this imposition soon announced that it had suddenly died. It was simply un-dyed!” While both Barnum and Forepaugh soon moved on to other ventures, the episode of Toung Taloung, Light of Asia, and The White Fraud proved to be a catalyst for broader discussion of whiteness in the United States. Public speculation about the kind of skin-dyeing technology Barnum and Forepaugh might have used to color Light of Asia and The White Fraud quickly gravitated toward discussions of how such technology might affect African Americans. A remarkable article in the New York Times titled “An Interesting Experiment”, published the same day that Barnum displayed The White Fraud in Philadelphia, is worth quoting in its entirety:
Mr. Barnum’s plan of making an elephant white by artificial means in order to contrast it with the dark and genuine white elephant is an ingenious one, but it is of less interest to elephants than it is to another class of our population. The inventor of the process of bleaching elephants claims that it can be applied without the slightest injury to colored people, and that it furnishes a complete answer to Job’s famous inquiry as to the possibility of whitening an Ethiopian. The experiment now making with the elephant is watched by the entire population of Thompson-street with the utmost interest, and if it succeeds the colored man will be as rare among us as the sacred white elephant himself.
The bleaching process, as now conducted, will not make the complexion of the colored man identical with that of the white man. The cleansed Ethiopian will be of a dazzling whiteness, rivaling that of the snow. The purest blonde of Madison-avenue will appear dark by the side of the beauties of Thompson-street, and what was once the white race will suddenly become the colored race.
It will be a curious sensation for white people to find themselves treated with contempt on account of their color by the bleached colored people. All the laws and regulations still existing which are aimed at the colored people will then apply to the Caucasian race. We shall have to pass a new Civil Rights bill to secure admission to hotels and sleeping cars, and we may even hear ourselves contemptuously described as “niggers,” should the bleached colored people condescend to adopt white methods of expression.
To avoid such an embarrassing situation it is to be hoped that the bleacher of Mr. Barnum’s elephant will find some way of accurately imitating the Caucasian complexion. In that case the ex-colored man will be distinguished from the original white man only by the quality of his hair. Probably a method of straightening Ethiopian hair and repressing the exuberance of Ethiopian lips will soon follow the grand discovery of bleaching Ethiopian skin, and in that case all distinctions between the two races will at once disappear, and the negro question will vanish from our politics, never to reappear.
Although the author of “An Interesting Experiment” has adopted an obviously satirical tone, it is nevertheless intriguing to note the candor with which they acknowledge that white supremacy and the “negro question” are contingent on social conventions. By imagining a reversal of social prejudices, the author is implying that whiteness is an absolute social value: the whiter the better. While the scenario described in “An Interesting Experiment” is fanciful, it nevertheless speaks to real social anxieties about race in the 1880s. We have already seen how Vincent described the color of white elephants in terms of the complexion of biracial people. The Times story builds on this analogy; in her analysis of “An Interesting Experiment”, critic Sarah Amato writes that it “makes . . . explicit that the exhibition of Toung Taloung was a forum to discuss theories of race . . . . In post-[R]econstruction America, in the context of the debate about the political future of the union, which was bound up in race relations, the significance of bleaching an elephant was all the more resonant.”
Perhaps the most striking episode in the white elephant war was an advertising campaign launched by Pears’ Soap in March 1884. Although the ad was first published in a British periodical (the Graphic), after Toung Taloung arrived in the United States it was reprinted in American periodicals like Puck, Harper’s Weekly, and Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine. The full-page ad features an elephant and its trainer, a bearded, dark-skinned man. The man is standing on a tall wooden crate, such that he is able to easily touch the top of the elephant’s head. A bucket is resting on top of the elephant, and with his left hand the man holds a cloth that he has been using to scrub the elephant’s skin, transforming it — in the context of the illustration’s monotone range — from black to white. In his right hand, extended toward the viewer, he holds a bar of soap. The text at the bottom of the ad reads, “THE REAL SECRET OF THE WHITE ELEPHANT — PEARS’ SOAP. Matchless for the Complexion.” The ad leaves open the question of whether Pears’ Soap has revealed the “real” white elephant underneath a layer of black dirt or has simply whitewashed a regular elephant to make it appear white, thereby replicating the debate about the white elephant that had played out in London’s newspapers, and anticipating the back-and-forth of Barnum and Forepaugh’s white elephant war in April 1884.
The Pears’ Soap ad strongly implies, in Amato’s words, “that human whiteness is an ephemeral condition that can be regenerated by the commodity.” For Karl Marx, in Capital: Volume One, the fetishized commodity has a secret, namely that its exchange value is a reflection of human labor rather than one of its inherent properties. The white elephant also has a secret, an open secret, acknowledged and satirized by both Pears’ Soap and the author of “An Interesting Experiment”: namely, that whiteness is a social construct, the limits of which must be carefully circumscribed and regulated in order to maintain the power of white privilege. If the benefits of whiteness can be extended to anyone (African Americans) or anything (an elephant), then it would lose its value for the white elite.
Just as “An Interesting Experiment” drew on a racialized elephant to articulate white anxieties about African Americans, so too did the “Real Secret of the White Elephant” image inform a later Pears’ Soap ad that transferred the relationship between soap and whiteness from an elephant to a human figure. First published in the Graphic on December 25, 1884, this well-known ad depicts a white child bathing a black child in a small tub. Like the “Real Secret of the White Elephant” image, this ad was also reprinted in the United States. In the first panel, the black boy is sitting in the tub while the white boy stands over him holding a bar of soap. In the second panel, the black boy is seated outside the tub, while the white boy is holding a mirror in front of the black boy’s face. Although the black boy’s head is still black, the rest of his body has been turned white, thereby creating a visual parallel between this figure and the white elephant in the earlier ad. The surprised look on the black boy’s face suggests that he is pleased with this transformation, although it is significant that he has not been completely whitewashed — while the ad suggests that whiteness is pliable, it stops short of suggesting that Pears’ Soap, or anything else for that matter, can completely eradicate racial difference.
To the extent that this ad takes up “Job’s famous inquiry as to the possibility of whitening an Ethiopian”, it reflects the ideas voiced in “An Interesting Experiment” that connect the controversy surrounding Toung Taloung with African American racialization. Like “An Interesting Experiment”, the whitewashing ad is surprisingly candid about the fact that whiteness is a social construction, or at least it proposes the possibility that “black” and “white” are not always rigid and unchangeable racial categories. However, the humorous tone of both “An Interesting Experiment” and the ad, and the limited effectiveness of Pears’ Soap in whitewashing both the white elephant and the black boy, suggest that despite the apparent malleability of whiteness, it is nevertheless a tightly controlled social privilege that cannot be extended to others.
If, on a figurative level, a white elephant is a possession that, to cite Marcel Mauss in his famous study The Gift, “comes with a burden attached”, then when Toung Taloung stepped off the Lydian Monarch it was accompanied by a host of stereotypes that spoke to anxieties that lay at the heart of American culture. When considered alongside Light of Asia, The White Fraud, and the white elephant war, the arrival of Toung Taloung in the United States was not simply another episode in Barnum’s long history of passing off frauds on the American public. Rather, it marked a curious historical juncture where anxieties about race were represented in a figure, the white elephant, which had long been viewed as an apt metaphor for waste and deception. White elephants were big news in 1884. Although the Americans who lined up to see Barnum’s and Forepaugh’s animals thought they were paying to see exotic attractions, truthfully they were witnessing their own ideas about whiteness played out in a public forum, replete with all the paradoxes and prejudices that accompany theories about the “real secret” of race.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 11, 2017

author: Ross Bullen


text:
Piracy at the Old Bailey

By Ben Merriman
October 1, 2014

Ben Merriman presents a selection of piracy cases from the proceedings of London's Old Bailey. Although a few live up to the swashbuckling heists of stereotype, many reveal the surprisingly everyday nature of the maritime crimes brought before the court, including cases involving an argument over chickens and the stealing of a captain's hats.

For centuries, the Old Bailey was the city of London’s main criminal court. Printed accounts of some 200,000 trials — the Proceedings — were published from 1674 to 1913. The Proceedings describe ordinary people in mostly ordinary legal trouble: three-fourths of the defendants were in the dock for theft, and on the whole the trials deal with mundane affairs. However, the Old Bailey also held jurisdiction over many cases of maritime piracy. These cases stand out from the many trials dealing with occurrences in and around London.
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The Dove was at anchor off the port of Leghorn when EDWARD JOHNSON stabbed Captain Benjamin Hawes with a small blade, puncturing the Captain’s heart. The Captain’s apprentice, Walker, discovered Hawes dead in his cabin. He ran up to the deck to inform the first mate, only to find the mate and crew preparing to sail immediately, for they were all part of a plot to seize the ship. Walker jumped overboard and swam to a group of nearby vessels, whose crews stormed the Dove before it could sail away. The crew had conspired to make off with the ship because it belonged to Jews, from whom it was no sin to steal.
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GEORGE GEERY took to the sea at an early age, and being a man of bad reputation, assumed the surname Wood, after a dead friend who was widely renowned for honesty. Geery, alias Wood, made sail on the Black Prince, which plundered ships throughout the Atlantic until it ran aground on Hispaniola during a storm. There the crew obtained false passports and sailed to Portugal, where Geery deserted with a confederate. He did not hang for his service on the Black Prince, but for a later transgression: illegally boarding the Derge Sustures and stealing several of the captain’s hats.
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The steamship Lion sailed from London to the port of Harlingen, in the Netherlands. As the ship was preparing to return to England, Captain Henry William Neville saw a number of fowls being brought on board. On inquiring, Captain Neville learned that the fowls had been bought by first engineer JOHN JENNINGS SMITH, who planned to take them back to England at no charge. When the Captain informed Smith that he would need to pay the usual shipping rate for his fowls, Smith shouted to the rest of the crew to stop the fires and halt preparations to sail, which they did readily. Neither the first mate, the company shipping agent, a gentleman of the city of Harlingen, nor the British consul could prevail upon Smith and his eight co-conspirators to return to the ship, which returned to London three days later with a replacement crew. At trial, however, it came to the attention of the court that the first mate had not filed proper contracts before the Lion sailed; the nine were therefore not mariners in the eyes of the law, and were immediately acquitted.
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The St. John Pink had left Padras laden with grain. Soon after setting out two of the apprentices heard a commotion in the night: Captain Benjamin Hartley was being attacked by his crew. After his blunderbuss misfired, RICHARD COYLE, a mariner, attempted to throw the Captain from the ship, but Hartley held to the lanyards. Coyle then beat the Captain, dangling from the side, with a small shovel, which proved ineffective. JOHN RICHARDSON, a carpenter,  struck the Captain in the head with an axe, after which the Captain fell into the sea and died. The ship, now under the command of Coyle, sailed for Malta, but did not land, for the apprentices would not agree to unite under the mutineers. Later the St. John Pink neared Foviano, where Coyle, wearing the dead Captain’s uniform, sought to buy liquor. Nobody would sell. That night the apprentices, who had been imprisoned below, escaped. They took a boat ashore to alert the local authorities. Coyle fled the St. John Pink in a long boat, but was apprehended in Tunisia. At trial he produced witnesses to attest to his character, but one scarcely remembered him, and the other recalled that Coyle had once drilled holes through the side of a ship.
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The Jane lay off the coast of Mexico when WILLIAM McCLIVE and LEVI THOMAS stole one of the boats, and with it a good deal of clothing, a silver watch, and other items. Though they did not dispute that they had taken the boat, they noted, by way of mitigation, that they had been very drunk at the time.
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The Experiment, a fishing smack, began to leak and was forced to make port at Scarborough, where it was caulked and refloated. ISAAC COOPER, commanding the ship in the owner’s stead, then landed the ship at New Dieppe and sold off its equipment, along with all of the fish that had been caught on the journey. He kept this money for himself. Cooper continued to sail about until the Experiment was overtaken by a steamship some weeks later. The crew of the larger ship seized the Experiment and its officers, and took them all home.
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Captain WILLIAM LAWRENCE wanted money. After being discharged from the Royal Navy with only a fraction of the wages owed to him, he fitted out the Lark as a privateer and assumed command. However, his crew could never apprehend valid prizes, only neutral Swedish and Dutch ships. Finally becoming frustrated, the Lark attacked and boarded the Enighadt, a Dutch ship sailing for London. Lawrence, with two other officers, stole textiles worth 1,000 pounds, as well as the personal wealth of the passengers. Though Lawrence disputed certain particulars, he admitted that he was a pirate and deserved to die.
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JOHN MACKAREL was indicted for river piracy, but on the appointed day of his trial the prosecutor failed to appear in court. The charges were dismissed.
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The naturalized Maltese JOHN TUNE was the Captain of the privateer Young Eagle, which illegally took a neutral ship, the Guilaume, as it sailed for Bilbao. For two years a woman, presenting herself as his wife, visited him while he awaited trial and execution, but it was at last revealed that his legal wife had died from the shock of his indictment; his visitor was, very likely, a prostitute. The Ordinary of Newgate Prison noted that Tune was a great complainer, and, the Ordinary suspected, a secret Catholic.
*

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

date: October 1, 2014

author: en Merriman

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


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Tribal Life in Old Lyme
Canada’s Colorblind Chronicler and his Connecticut Exile
By Abigail Walthausen
September 2, 2015

Abigail Walthausen explores the life and work of Arthur Heming, the Canadian painter who — having been diagnosed with colourblindness as a child — worked for most of his life in a distinctive palette of black, yellow, and white.

For most of his life, Arthur Heming, “painter of the great white north”, painted in a monochrome scheme of black, white, and yellow tones, choosing this style at least nominally because of an early diagnosis of color blindness. These possibly self-imposed restrictions lasted inexplicably until the age of sixty, when a full, nearly technicolor palette suddenly splashed across his canvases. Thematically, he worked with scenes whose colors were appropriately blanched: winter hunting and trapping expeditions that he took for the Hudson Bay Company and alongside people of the First Nations. His narrow focus in painting mirrored his work as a traveler, novelist, and illustrator, and the commercial nature of his output certainly influenced the mixed reception he received in the art market. In Canada he existed as an outsider of both the trapping communities he traveled with in the north and of his peers in the fine art world. His best work is transcendent, calling to mind the rich velvety grayscale of Gerhard Richter’s realistic paintings, while his weakest work is the sort of mystic wolf lore that later became the vernacular of furry bedspreads and black crewneck sweatshirts. Heming was conflicted about both his place in his homeland and his status as an artist. This is perhaps why he was so eager to find an adopted home for many consecutive summers in a distinctively non-arctic landscape, a farming community on the Long Island Sound, Old Lyme Connecticut.
While the Florence Griswold artist colony in Old Lyme Connecticut is generally touted as the “birthplace of American Impressionism”, Heming left a few distinctively Canadian marks on the communal dining room. First, there is his contribution to the collection of panels painted by artists who resided there; his, which depicts a lone canoe flying over rapids as seen from above, stands out from the rest because of its stark black and white color scheme and the narrow focus of its detail. Rather than a miniature painting of the pastoral Connecticut landscape, his seems like a snapshot of a larger, wilder, uncontainable narrative.
Both Heming’s work and his image are featured in Henry Rankin Poore’s 1905 frieze-like painting Fox Chase. All of the colony’s frequent residents appear in this painting as caricatures of their roles in the community. Childe Hassam is depicted shirtless and playing a prank, while Mathilda Brown, the sole female painter in the group, is filled with ladylike shock. Heming himself is depicted as a proper Canadian mountie, standing above the action. So while Heming’s painting sticks out like a sore thumb, his own caricature blends quite nicely into the scene depicted. He is both part of the community and an observer.
While many of the other artists in the mural are either painting en plein air or interacting with one another, there is no evidence that Heming did any painting at all while at the colony. Instead, he worked on his writing, both to create narratives around the paintings he had done on his travels and to record the life of the vibrant communities he had traveled and lived among. At the colony he wrote Spirit Lake, a book he began after illustrating many of the  wilderness adventure stories of others, whose expertise he often found lacking. In all three of his wilderness novels, Spirit Lake (1907), Drama of the Forests (1921), and The Living Forest (1925), Heming delves with great detail into the relationships between people and animals on trapping expeditions.
In spite of its title, Drama of the Forests is quite drama-free. While some hunting scenes involve action, he spends far more time giving detailed descriptions of the variety of animals he encountered in the north. There are the playful otters, the rabbits, whose fresh, untanned pelts make the best socks for trekking, and the mystical beaver, whose dams keep the soil nutrients from being swept away to those “highwaymen”, the major rivers, and out to sea. Nor does the “drama” exist with the people he encounters. He believed quite strongly that guns had no place in the Northern territories. Both in his art and in his writing, the danger is mutual when humans and animals come together in the hunt. When he describes a mother and daughter killing a bear mid-stream, he writes “Their hearts were fired with the spirit of the chase, and — though their only weapons were their skinning knives — they felt no fear”. Conversely, when he comes across a visitor to the northland, he is dismayed by his weaponry.
I encountered a prospector who wanted to cross Portland Canal from Alaska to Canada, and as I was rowing over, I offered to take him across. When, however, he turned to pick up his pack I caught sight of something that fairly made me burst out laughing; for it was as funny a sight as though I had witnessed it on Piccadilly or Broadway. At first I thought he was a movie actor who, in some unaccountable way, had strayed from Los Angeles and become lost in the northern wilderness before he had had time to remove his ridiculous “make-up”; but a moment later he proved beyond doubt that he was not an actor, for he blushed scarlet when he observed that I was focussing a regular Mutt-and-Jeff dotted-line stare at a revolver that hung from his belt, and he faltered:
”But . . . Why the mirth?”
Much more than the titular drama, Heming appreciated mirth, humor, and softness in humanity. In his writing, he relishes the small misunderstandings that happen when European and native cultures collide. He describes a botched correspondence between a Toronto eye doctor and a native man whom he met on an expedition, whose wife suffered from an eye injury:
After much study, however, he decided that the old Indian had signed his name as “Chief Squirrel” so thus the doctor addressed his reply. A couple of weeks later . . . however, he realized he had made a mistake in giving the red man such a name, for another glance at the outside of the envelope not only proved that the Indian was indignant, but that he also possessed a sense of humour, for “Chief Squirrel” had, in return, addressed the noted oculist as “Doctor Chipmunk.”
He describes with equal tenderness and humor the dry goods stock at a Hudson Bay trading post:
At one post I visited years ago — that of Abitibi — they had a rather progressive addition in the way of a millinery department. It was contained in a large lidless packing case against the side of which stood a long steering paddle for the clerk’s use in stirring about the varied assortment of white women’s ancient headgear, should a fastidious Indian woman request to see more than the uppermost layer.
Heming himself stuck to the “uppermost layer” in his writing: just as much as he avoided modern weapons, he avoided modern conflict as well. He had no interest in exploring exploitative practices between the Hudson Bay Comapny and trappers or racial conflict, though he took on a voice that was neither traditionally colonial nor progressive.
Heming, it is clear, was very concerned with simplifying and humorizing the complexities between people wherever he was. Although he never wrote about his experiences in Toronto, London, New York, or Paris, he lavished attention on the community of Old Lyme, writing two books about the summers he spent there between 1902 and 1909. He believed himself to be recording in an anthropological sense, and this showed in the fact that his approach to descriptions of people and their habits was much the same when he visited Old Lyme as when he wrote about trapping expeditions. In his unpublished volume about the colony, “The Lady in the Lion’s Den”, he reverses the idea of the exotic when he writes “we are always hearing, or rather reading, about Americans in that God-forsaken region, but never about a man from Hudson Bay exploring the wilds of New York City or the villages of New England”. His love of humor comes up again and again in his Miss Florence and the Artists of Old Lyme: he describes awkward romances between residents, the scattered housekeeping of the hostess, and the pranks he claims himself to have played on Woodrow Wilson during his visit (apparently substituting wood wool, a byproduct of the logging industry used for packing, for Wilson’s much-loved shredded wheat breakfast cereal).
Why was Heming able to find such an affinity for subject matter so far from his own intense wilderness paintings and narratives?  Although he wrote and painted a land that many considered “wild”, essentially his subject matter was not a barren landscape, but the communities and traditions that he found while traveling through “the great white north”. Despite overlapping styles and subject matter, this tendency placed him worlds away from the contemporary artistic trends of his homeland. The painters known as the Group of Seven dominated the art scene of Heming’s day, and unlike Heming, they were much more interested in portraying an uninhabited northern landscape. Artists like Lawren Harris and Tom Thompson took expeditions to many of the same Northern regions, but they did not study the lifestyles of survival there. They saw grand empty expanses and saw them as symbols of purification and redemption in the modern world and hope for the relatively new Canadian nation. Harris believed that because of the northern wilds, newly independent Canadians were better equipped than continental Europeans to lighten the “heavy psychic blanket” of modern society.  In much the same way that Heming found the interaction of human and animal life to be the great appeal of nature, the artists of Old Lyme were conscious dissenters from the romantic tradition of the Hudson Valley painters who were committed to showing nature in its sublime, untouched beauty. The American Impressionists who populated Florence Griswold’s community were much more interested in an American heritage populated by farmhouses, villagers, and livestock (several residents at the community specialized in painting cows).
Both Heming and the Canadian Group of Seven had a great affinity for the work of the transcendentalists as well as surprisingly similar motifs in their attempts to spiritualize nature. In fact, as painters like Harris moved further into theosophy and abstraction, the work resembled Heming’s clean lines and monochrome more and more.  But though Heming did render his natural settings with streamlined and perfected imagery, the great simplicity with which he imbued nature was much more inspired by the arts and crafts philosophy of seeking the greater truths in design. After some early disappointment in art school wherein he decided he was “deficient in sense of decoration”, Heming sought out the arts and crafts school, going to England to study with Frank Brangywn, a painter who had worked under William Morris. Unlike the Group of Seven, who wanted to claim the Canadian wilderness as a symbol for Canadian patriotism by erasing all life there, keeping it a blank canvas, Heming wanted to claim that idealized land by making both landscape and life decorative — in a sense, by preserving it in black and white.
A trait of personal sensitivity may also have been a great driving force in his colorblindness. At Old Lyme, his position as a mentee of Frank DuMond kept his illustration work from diminishing his worth among peers the way it had done amongst the Group of Seven in Canada. It is clear that he wished to make himself as jovial, simple, and decorative as those things that he described in paint and pen. While the book Miss Florence and the Artists of Old Lyme demonstrates a great love and affection for the colony around him, “The Lady in the Lion’s Den” begins on a very different note. Heming fictionalizes himself as “Gilmour Gilmartin”, and the entire first chapter of the story is devoted to the anticipation that characters at the colony have for the arrival of this “Hudson Bay man”. In one description, a New York artist speaks about a lecture he once saw “Gilmartin” deliver:
It was an amusing yet interesting performance. His maiden speech I believe, and he was bashful and shy as a little girl; and so rattled that when the chairman finished his introductory remarks, Gilmartin, clapping his hands wildly, joined the crowd in applauding his own introduction. Needless to say that brought down the house, for the audience, it seemed, imagined they had discovered a second Mark Twain.
He clearly saw a cultivated naivete as a great part of his own personal appeal and humor. At one point, the two artists recount “Gilmartin’s” first railroad trip, wherein he was not only awed, but faced a fundamental (albeit chivalrous) misunderstanding of the way the railroad worked:
. . . He concluded in a flash that the only way to save the train from total wreck was to use the weight of his body in balancing it, just as he used his body from side to side, as the train rushed around endless curves, and when daylight appeared, he landed it safely at the station in North Bay — just as he had landed many a precious cargo of furs when shooting his canoe through ‘white-waters’”.
Heming’s love of decorative and simplified imagery may have steered him away from taking any artistic risks with color early in his career. His colorblindness may even have been a shield against the frequent accusations by critics and the Group of Seven alike that his work was too commercial, cartoonish, and even American. Towards the end of his life and without much explanation, Heming threw off the limitations of his possibly assumed colorblindness. The paintings of his final decade are vivid, nearly technicolor. At this late stage in life, Heming did receive recognition from a major Canadian museum, the Royal Ontario Museum; however, the recognition came through the wrong channels. This full-color trapping series was not acquired by the fine arts branch of the museum which displayed the works of the elite Group of Seven but by the natural history branch. Even there, the paintings were not fully welcomed. Two museum directors butted heads about the paintings — one arguing that the depictions of nature were subjective and unscientific, the other that they would be a useful part of the trend to activate and contextualize nature scenes for the general museum audience. In 1962, though, the issue became moot when the series was moved to the most appropriate of the ROM’s collections, the Canadiana Collection.
Heming did not live to see this resolution nor did he have a chance to weigh in on the final home for his work. However, art museums had never been the preferred goal for his paintings: years before his death he had put much effort towards selling his work into the private holdings of the Hudson Bay Company. This unsuccessful attempt speaks to his vision of himself as first and foremost a contributor to the history of Canadian wilderness exploration. Ultimately, the fact that his last series of paintings spent so much time in limbo before resting in a place where they were welcomed seems a fitting parallel to Heming’s life — a life spent in uneasy navigation through Toronto, New York, Old Lyme, and the Great White North.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 2, 2015

author: Abigail Walthausen


text:
When Chocolate was Medicine
Colmenero, Wadsworth, and Dufour
By Christine Jones
January 28, 2015

Chocolate has not always been the common confectionary we experience today. When it first arrived from the Americas into Europe in the 17th century it was a rare and mysterious substance, thought more of as a drug than as a food. Christine Jones traces the history and literature of its reception.

In the seventeenth century, Europeans who had not traveled overseas tasted coffee, hot chocolate, and tea for the very first time. For this brand new clientele, the brews of foreign beans and leaves carried within them the wonder and danger of far-away lands. They were classified at first not as food, but as drugs — pleasant-tasting, with recommended dosages prescribed by pharmacists and physicians, and dangerous when self-administered. As they warmed to the use and abuse of hot beverages, Europeans frequently experienced moral and physical confusion brought on by frothy pungency, unpredictable effects, and even (rumor had it) fatality. Madame de Sévigné, marquise and diarist of court life, famously cautioned her daughter about chocolate in a letter when its effects still inspired awe tinged with fear: “And what do we make of chocolate? Are you not afraid that it will burn your blood? Could it be that these miraculous effects mask some kind of inferno [in the body]?”1
These mischievously potent drugs were met with widespread curiosity and concern. In response, a written tradition of treatises was born over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Physicians and tradesmen who claimed knowledge of fields from pharmacology to etiquette proclaimed the many health benefits of hot drinks or issued impassioned warnings about their abuse. The resulting textual tradition documents how the tonics were depicted during the first century of their hotly debated place among Europe’s delicacies.
Chocolate was the first of the three to enter the pharmaceutical annals in Europe via a medical essay published in Madrid in 1631: Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate by Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma. Colmenero’s short treatise dates from the era when Spain was the main importer of chocolate. Spain had occupied the Aztec territories since the time of Cortés in the 1540s — the first Spanish-language description of chocolate dates from the 1552 — whereas the British and French were only beginning to establish a colonial presence in the Caribbean and South America during the 1620s and 30s. Having acquired a degree in medicine and served a Jesuit mission in the colonies, Colmenero was as close as one could come to a European expert on the pharmaceutical qualities of the cacao bean. Classified as medical literature in libraries today, Colmenero’s work introduced chocolate to Europe as a drug by appealing to the science of the humors, or essential bodily fluids.
“Humoralism”, a theory of health and illness inherited from Hippocrates and Galen, was still influential in 1630. It held that the body was composed of four essential liquids: black bile, blood, yellow bile, and phlegm. Each humor echoed one of the four elements of nature—earth, air, fire, and water—and exhibited particular properties that changed the body’s disposition: black bile was cold and dry, blood was hot and wet, yellow bile felt hot and dry, and phlegm made the body cold and wet. Balanced together, they maintained the healthy functioning of an organism. When the balance among them tipped and one occurred in excess, it produced symptoms of what we now call “disease” in the body. While common European pharmaceuticals had long been classified as essentially cooling or heating, cacao presented both hot and cold characteristics. Later treatises faced the same conundrum regarding coffee. Depending on how it was administered/ingested, hot chocolate’s curative effects also crisscrossed the humoral categories in unexpected ways.
On the surface, its combinations of effects did not make intuitive sense to Europeans, and in practice, threatened to wreak havoc among the self-medicated, à la Madame de Sévigné. By applying the dominant theory of the body to chocolate’s uncommon powers — was it sorcery, magic, alchemy? — Colmenero endeavored to make its mystery at least debatable in terms readily accessible across the countries of Western Europe. Because Colmenero was a doctor and surgeon who was said to have traveled to the West Indies, his Tratado was received as medical lore and remained an important reference throughout the early history of writing on hot beverages. It also supplied the very first recipe2 for hot chocolate on the Continent (featured below) to the delight of the less learned who encountered his expertise in a mug.
Both England and France imported Colmenero’s wisdom along with the cacao beans they sourced from the American colonies and each country exploited it as a powerful marketing tool. The very first translation of the Tratado was published in English by army captain James Wadsworth, whose travels to Spain had introduced him to the wonders of the cacao beverage: A Curious Treatise of The Nature and Quality of Chocolate. Written in Spanish by Antonio Colmenero, Doctor in Physicke and Chirurgery. And put into English by Don Diego de Vades-forte (1640). Wadsworth published it under the feisty pseudonym Don Diego de Vades-forte, which may well be a metaphor for the drink: vādēs forte is Latin for “you will go” and “strong one.” Whatever the source of the name, the Latin offers the modern reader a good sense of the reputation with which chocolate entered British culture. That said, aside from an equally feisty introduction, Vades-forte/Wadsworth claims none of the writing or the knowledge therein as his own. By rendering Colmenero’s expertise under a pseudonym that gave him credibility as a translator of Spanish, Wadsworth preserved the exotic flavor of the drink he offered his countrymen. His translation was popular enough to be republished in 1652 under a title that speaks more clearly to the British colonial experience in America: Chocolate: Or, an Indian Drinke, by the Wise and Moderate Use Whereof, Health is Preserved, Sicknesse Diverted, and Cured, Especially the Plague of the Guts. It was this later edition that became the standard translation for referencing Colmenero in subsequent English-language treatises.
While the treatise itself takes up foreign knowledge, Wadsworth’s original introductions directly address their new audience in familiar terms. His introduction to the 1652 edition pitches the drink as a cure-all for British consumers, promising help to “every Individuall Man and Woman, Learn’d, or Unlearn’d, Honest, or Dishonest”, who could afford chocolate’s “reasonable rates”. The benefits of ingesting chocolate swirl inventively around the promises of bodily repair and vigor:
The vertues thereof are no lesse various, then Admirable. For, besides that it preserves Health, and makes such as drink it often, Fat, and Corpulent, faire and Amiable, it vehemently Incites to Venus, and causeth Conception in women, hastens and facilitates their Delivery: It is an excellent help to Digestion, it cures Consumptions, and the Cough of the Lungs, the New Disease, or Plague of the Guts, and other Fluxes, the Green Sicknesse, Jaundise, and all manner of Inflamations, Opilations, and Obstructions. It quite takes away the Morphew [discolored skin], Cleanseth the Teeth, and sweetneth the Breath, Provokes Urine, Cures the Stone, and strangury [urinary infection], Expells Poison, and preserves from all infectious Diseases. But I shall not assume to enumerate all the vertues of this Confection: for that were Impossible, every day producing New and Admirable effects in such as drinke it (sig. A4r).
As much as Wadsworth’s translation anchored its knowledge in Colmenero’s first-hand medical testimony, the litany of diseases that make the case for taking the chocolate cure in the preface speak directly to threats to the body in England around 1650. In a century of dirty cities, plagues (which peaked in 1665), and terrible infant mortality rates, the medical need for chocolate must have seemed acute. Chocolate’s seemingly endless applications provided a brilliant marketing strategy for anyone who stood to benefit from the trade. At the same time, creating a British dependence on the drug served to justify the country’s colonial presence in the Caribbean, something scholars of the transatlantic conquest have not failed to point out.3
Not surprisingly with a drug from an “exotic” colonial territory known for its natural ways and steamy climate, sexual arousal — inciting to Venus — tops the list of ways in which chocolate from the West Indies would fortify the British subject. Colmenero fed Wadsworth the compelling argument about increased rates of conception and ease of birth, but the latter poetically combined that news with the promise that drinking a lot of hot chocolate will make  anyone “faire and amiable”, a precondition, it seems, to chocolate’s working its magical generative effects on the womb. If pleasure and parenthood were not enough, it tackles everything from coughing to bad teeth. In short, chocolate would prove stronger, claims the introduction, than any hazard or resistant lover life might throw a Londoner’s way.
By the time the French came around to capitalizing on the chocolate drug two decades later, exoticism and fashionability were more important branding criteria for chocolate than its medical application. Circa 1670, self-described French merchant-tradesman Philippe Sylvestre Dufour published Usage du caphé, du thé, et du chocolate (1671). Dufour, “from the oven”, may be another witty pseudonym (some speculate for physician and archeologist Jacob Spon, whom others claim was Dufour’s friend), as the drinks were served hot. What we do know is that the author claims in his introduction to work as a pharmacist whose “commercial ties make him more knowledgeable than a learned man could ever be through intellectual contemplation.” Certainly he read avidly enough to discover a collection of international writers who had pontificated on the merits of coffee, hot chocolate, and tea. Claiming to translate them all himself, he took the unprecedented step of binding them together into one volume. He placed a poorly-known 1643 French translation of Colmenero by René Moreau alongside articles on coffee and tea derived from writings by a number of French and Dutch diplomats, as well as Jesuit missionaries. The Usage thus gathered the world’s hot beverages under a single title. What’s more, the physical binding of the drugs in one volume echoed “the strong connection these drinks have to one another”, a main theme in the new introduction for the 1685 edition. Both in their preparation by boiling and in their physiological effects, drugs from three different corners of the earth behave in a strikingly similar fashion. That disparate world cultures make similar use of steeped tonics in medicine and ritual gave Dufour enough insight to deduce that they indeed form a pharmacological category unto themselves.
Raw materials from Arabia, America, and Asia thus entered the French medical literature as a new drug group. Dufour did not have the language of caffeine, but grasped that their common denominator is an ability to stimulate and fortify. Beyond this shrewd scientific insight into the behavior of coffee, chocolate, and tea, the collected works also force the idea of cultural comparison. Dufour shows that these widely dispersed lands with vastly different climates, flora, fauna, peoples, and languages, nevertheless share the cultural practice of boiling stimulants for medicinal purposes. From its binding to its title, Usage du caphé, du thé, et du chocolate, Dufour’s treatise uproots the drinks from their native lands and showcases their relationship. As his title orders the beverages, it offers a basic chronology of the caffeine trades as they developed in France during the seventeenth century: Arabia, then Asia, and finally the Americas.
If the idea of a small world seems obvious now, it was not then. Since the Age of Discovery, it had been commonplace to depict the world as a wide rectangle with each of the Four Continents at an angle: Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Early visual traditions represented peoples of these lands racially, painted with different colored skin, or allegorically, flanked with elephants, hunting bows, and parasols. A frontispiece added to Dufour’s 1685 edition (pictured below) participates in the visual tradition of the continents but does not follow the same logic of depicting difference. Instead, it follows the logic of the treatise: to relate the global areas associated with coffee, tea, and chocolate through their similar habits. Accordingly, the frontispiece pictures men who are racialized and dressed to evoke the Middle East, Asia, and Mesoamerica sitting in a room around a table enjoying a drink together. The world suddenly looked quite small.
The Middle Eastern figure, in Ottoman dress, wears a decorated turban and beard; the Chinese figure balances in lotus position under a conical hat, and the Mexican (as Dufour identifies him), stands in mid-stride with a bow, wearing only feathers and gold. Each of them holds a visibly steaming beverage and is flanked by the specific vessel of his drink tradition. The ceramic teapot sits at the focal point of the image, while the coffee and chocolate pots are on the floor at the feet of their drinkers. China looks guarded, as though keeping his cards (his tea) close to his chest and separated from the viewer by a table. The Middle East — Dufour identifies coffee with Turkey, Yemen, and Egypt — raises his cup to the event. The figure of the Americas appears to be walking in armed with an Aztec bow but has left the arrows at home. Posed around a small, round table in close proximity, the world’s corners look comfortable, as though it is not at all odd that they should be enjoying a drink together.
Of the statements made by this beverage summit of world empires, one is that the globe is vast and varied, but all its people seek good health and enjoyment; that is, they are as similar as coffee, tea, and chocolate. But the presence of the dynamic Mexican figure, a culture newly “discovered” to Europe about 175 years before, makes an even stronger commentary. HHe looks young and simple in both pose and dress, but he shares the hot beverage habit of the older Ottoman and the dapper Mandarin. In fact, he drinks out of the largest, most ornate cup and looks the most exposed to the viewer in body and pose. His presence there and desirable serving ware make him the equal of his older imperial neighbors, a surprisingly generous suggestion in 1685. Yet, in his open posture he also extends an invitation to come join him for a drink that is not so apparent in the allegories of the others. If so, he heralds a time when aggressive trade with the Middle East and Asia would be brutally complemented by large-scale exploitation of the lands of the former Mesoamerican empires. Beckoning to the reader to take the chocolate cure makes him uniquely vulnerable among this group, an idea borne out by both British and French colonial history in the Americas.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 28, 2015

author: Christine Jones


text:
Dr Mitchill and the Mathematical Tetrodon

By Dr Kevin Dann
September 16, 2015

One of the early Republic's great polymaths, New Yorker Samuel L. Mitchill was a man with a finger in many a pie, including medicine, science, natural history, and politics. Dr Kevin Dann argues that Mitchill's peculiar brand of curiosity can best be seen in his study of fish and the attention he gives one seemingly unassuming specimen.

On the streets of lower Manhattan in the early nineteenth century, the “Nestor of American science,” Dr Samuel Latham Mitchill (1764–1831) was the commonest of sights, going about in his blue coat, buff-colored vest, and buckled shoes. Though a conspicuously local figure, Dr Mitchill was equally cosmopolitan. After the British occupied New York City, he had left his medical practice to study at the University of Edinburgh, where he rubbed elbows with such notables as Sir James Mackintosh, who would become the preeminent Scottish jurist; physician and anatomist Caspar Wistar; and Thomas Addis Emmet, Irish revolutionary and later American lawyer and politician. He was also a colleague of the leading philosophes of London and Paris. Perambulating the streets of Gotham, Dr Mitchill’s voracious curiosity treated his native city as inquisitively as if he were on a pioneering scientific expedition abroad.
“Pioneering” is in no way too provocative a word for Dr Mitchill, whose entire biography seemed to play out along the frontier of science and technology. An early advocate of the new Lavoisierian system of chemistry, his 1797 mineralogical survey of New York included an analysis of the Saratoga mineral waters. Sir Humphry Davy’s conception that acids were substances that contained replaceable hydrogen was aided by Dr Mitchill’s research on septic acid. He exchanged observations and speculations upon American climate, geology, paleontology, and ethnology with Thomas Jefferson; brought out the first American edition of Cuvier’s Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1818); and then improved it considerably for his American audience by his detailed narrative of the bedrock landscapes of “Fredonia” (the alternative name he proposed, and long cherished, for the United States of America), especially the New York City region. With Priestley he penetrated phlogiston, that mysterious substance transcending the alchemists’ four classical elements; with Jefferson and Peale, he probed the “American incognitum” — the mastodon. In the words of a late-nineteenth-century biographer:
He wrote largely to Percival on noxious agents. He cheered Fulton when dejected; encouraged Livingston in appropriation; awakened new zeal in Wilson the ornithologist, when the Governor, Tompkins, had nigh paralyzed him by his frigid and unfeeling reception; and, with Pintard and Colden, was a zealous promoter of that system of internal improvement which has stamped immortality on the name of Clinton.
Through no other single person could one receive such a capacious window upon the intellectual landscape of early-nineteenth-century Gotham; indeed, Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History (1809) was inspired largely as a satirical response to Mitchill’s straight-laced and rather soporific history, Picture of New-York (1807). Dr Mitchill’s curiosity knew no bounds, so that two hundred years later, if one follows him in his inquiries, one gets the most extravagant and inviting picture of the rapidly changing city. Everywhere and always he was concerned with life, and so the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan become enlarged and enriched through his eyes.
In 1826, in a discourse to his fellow Lyceum of Natural History members about the scientific accomplishments of his old friend Thomas Jefferson, Dr Mitchill — who in 1817 had traveled to Chester, in Orange County, to disinter the teeth, bones, and tusks of a mastodon — took special note of Jefferson’s own interest in the incognitum, a key element in his patriotic effort to refute Count Buffon’s proclamations of American “degeneracy”. Sharing Jefferson’s acute republicanism and cosmopolitan erudition, Dr Mitchill’s zoology was also loftily political and expertly informed but always tinged with homespun wisdom. In his report on the Chester mastodon, when he noted that the “dexter prong” (the right-hand tusk) was more heavily worn than the “sinistral” (left-hand side), he took it to be a “manifest indication of preference for what the drivers of animals call the off-side limbs”. He was constantly alert to the peculiar sagacity of his neighbors.
The taxonomic range of Dr Mitchill’s scientific investigations may have rivaled Barnum, but of all the strange creatures that caught his perspicacious eye, the piscatorial tribe was paramount. From his quarters on Barclay Street, a block from City Hall and the Park, he would make frequent strolls to the Fulton Fish Market — sometimes accompanied by students from Columbia College or the College of Physicians and Surgeons — to see what the local nets had lately brought up from pelagic parts both far and near. Having grown up in “Plandome” (North Hempstead, Long Island), he was well-acquainted with the fish of Long Island Sound, and for all his exotic interests, the humbly vernacular fishes about the North River, East River, and their confluence just off the Battery were at the epicenter of his ichthyology.
Along with the routine anatomical descriptions that make up the main body of his “The Fishes of New York, Described and Arranged”, published in Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York, Volume 1 (1815) (1815), nearly every one of the 166 species described offers some small literary or historical gem. Of Sparus ovis, the sheepshead, he declared:
Nothing, in the opinion of a New Yorker, can exceed boiled sheep’s head served up at a sumptuous dinner. . . This noble fish . . . the feats of hooking and pulling him in, furnish abundant materials for the most pleasing and hyperbolical stories.
Dr Mitchill imagined some future day when the fish would be brought to New York “in perfection”; for now, he regretted, “the sheep’s head too often corrupts for want of ice.” Centronotus, the crab-eater — the last entry in his “Fishes of New York” and the only species for which he felt obliged to invent a new taxon — also merited high culinary praise: “This fish was boiled and served up at my table; on which occasion, my family, servants and all, had but one opinion — that it was one of the best we had ever eaten”.
In Dr Mitchill’s day a vast repository of natural history still lay in local folklore, and he was keen to record it. In earlier days the custom was to bait one’s hooks for Tautog, or Blackfish, in early April, when the dogwood came into blossom; now that the dogwood was nearly gone from lower Manhattan’s streets and yards, the American chestnut tree served as phenological prognosticator, and Dr Mitchill duly noted a common rhyme among fishermen:
When chestnut leaves are big as thumb-nail,Then bite blackfish without fail,But when chestnut leaves are big as a span,Then catch black-fish, if you can.
Children too were ready sources for Dr Mitchill. Writing about the different species of sturgeon, he included the bit of arcana that local boys found the gristle taken from sharp-nosed sturgeon was much less elastic than that of the blunt-nosed, and so a ball made from it did not bounce so well. As a longtime intimate of Robert Fulton (Dr Mitchill was among the passengers on the Clermont’s maiden voyage in 1807), one should not be surprised to find that the steam wizard supplied him with ichthyological specimens. Fulton had caught an Orange file-fish (Balistes aurantiacus) on August 1, 1814, and promptly passed it on to Dr Mitchill, who then asked his brother-in-law, Staten Island physician (as well as pioneering agricultural reformer and co-founder of the New York Institute for the Blind — all of these men seem to have been prodigious polymaths!) Samuel Akerly, to draw the fish.
In Dr Mitchill’s day — as it still often is in our own — natural science was in its essence a pursuit of sensuous Beauty, masquerading as a heroic quest for Truth. Even the lowliest of fishes revealed the beauty of Creation to Samuel Latham Mitchill, and in glancing back at his encounter with a lowly local fish, we can witness his response to that beauty, framed by the meeting of the local with the cosmopolitan.  He examined his single specimen of the Mathematical Tetrodon, Tetrodon mathematicus, on June 29, 1814. The War of 1812 was still going on; a month before, the Treaty of Paris had been signed, and Napoleon had been exiled to Elba the same day. The two-dozen cannons installed at the West Battery Fort (today’s Castle Clinton) were still trained out onto the waters from which the Tetrodon and most of Dr Mitchill’s other specimens had come.
It seems rather an unassuming fish, standing there as it does on the same Plate VI with such lovelies as the phantasmagorical Spot-striped Diodon; its congener Hairy Diodon — which looks for all the world like some Ed Koren rendering of a small Upper East Side dog; and the diminutive but arresting Spinous Dory. One must turn to Dr Mitchill’s species account to find why the little pufferfish becomes a much more luminous member of both his taxonomy and lexicon:
Lateral line departing from the ring encompassing the eye, like a tangent; ascending in a superb curve toward the back; sweeping boldly down from the olive of the back through the satin of the side; and then running direct to the tail; putting one in mind of the ecliptic cutting the equator. . . Another line from the eye-circle to the transverse line, and parallel to the lateral line, making a sort of parallelogram.
He seems here to be some kind of piscatorial William Blake, seeing a World in the external markings of a humble fish, as if he were holding the infinity promised by mathematics in the mucus-covered palm of his hand.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 16, 2015

author: Dr Kevin Dann


text:
Scurvy and the Terra Incognita

By Jonathan Lamb
May 6, 2015

One remarkable symptom of scurvy, that constant bane of the Age of Discovery, was the acute and morbid heightening of the senses. Jonathan Lamb explores how this unusual effect of sailing into uncharted territory echoed a different kind of voyage, one undertaken by the Empiricists through their experiments in enhancing the senses artificially.

When the archangel Michael in Milton’s Paradise Lost explains to Adam that his sin cannot be purged in Paradise, but must be worked off over time in the world at large, he opens a door to discovery that is at once promising and depressing.  On the one hand there is the whole earth to traverse and to exploit, and on the other Adam is reminded that he is about to infect it with the taint of mortality.  Two sides of discovery are exhibited, then: the prospect of a purer knowledge waiting to be found (the route to ultimate redemption), and the awareness of a degenerate constitution (“a distemper gross to aire as gross”) revealed to Adam as a terrestrial future filled with “th’effects which thy original crime hath wrought”.  The scientists who ushered in the last era of maritime exploration were charmed by the promise of discovery. Robert Hooke wrote, “And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way . . . by tasting too those fruits of Natural Knowledge, that were never yet forbidden”.1 But no matter how many devices Hooke and his colleagues invented to advance this project, there was a distemper infecting all attempts to put it into practice. Scurvy.
Caused by a genetic mutation that prevents humans from synthesising vitamin C, scurvy was inevitable in long voyages of discovery where fresh food was hard to get, causing the body to grossly disintegrate and perish. The disease ensured that the sinister ambiguity of discovery, so cheerfully overlooked in Hooke’s program of restoration, remained intact. If sin came into the world via knowledge and discovery could it really leave the same way? Scurvy seems to indicate, like God, that it can’t; and yet there is another way in which it suggests, like Hooke, the opposite. One of its more remarkable symptoms was a morbid receptivity to sense impressions, one aligned with the preternatural sensitivity scientists were trying to excite artificially. If scurvy is construed as physical manifestation of sin — a consequence of the postlapsarian body, the offspring of illicit knowledge — it has its own interest in the processes of empirical cognition.
Sudden sounds, such as the report of a musket or a cannon, were well known to kill scorbutic sailors.  Even pleasant stimuli such as a drink of fresh water, or a long-awaited taste of fruit, could provoke a seizure and put an end to their lives.  In his Omoo, Melville recalls how once
the Trades scarce filled our swooning sails; the air was languid with the aroma of a thousand strange, flowering shrubs.  Upon inhaling it, one of the sick who had recently shown symptoms of scurvy, cried out in pain, and was carried below.  This is no unusual effect in such cases.2
When, badly afflicted with scurvy, Bernardin de St Pierre landed on Mauritius, he was disgusted by the trees, which smelt of excrement, and flowers such as the veloutier were alluring only at a distance for the odour “quite close is perfectly loathesome”.3 Sometimes the sensation passed the frontier from pain to pleasure or vice versa. Here is Anders Sparrman, a scorbutic naturalist on the Resolution who was hunting ducks when at last he landed in New Zealand:  “The blood from these warm birds which were dying in my hands, running over my fingers, excited me to a degree I had never previously experienced. . . This filled me with amazement, but the next moment I felt frightened”.4 ※※Indexed under…Odourof trees transformed by scurvy
The scorbutic eye was particularly engaged, so much so that vision seemed to envelop the viewer and turn the orb of the individual organ inside out, as in this description by Pedro Fernandez de Queirós of a festival he organized after he and his scorbutic crew reached Vanuatu:
There were seen amongst the green branches so many plumes of feathers and sashes, so many pikes, halberds, javelins, bright sword-blades, spears, lances, and on the breasts so many crosses, and so much gold, and so many colours and silken dresses, and many eyes could not contain what sprung from the heart, and they shed tears of joy.5
Spectacular novelties such as coral grew more wonderful for Matthew Flinders as scurvy heightened the impression, turning dangerous animate rock into fascinating antiscorbutics: “We had wheat sheaves, mushrooms, stags horns, cabbage leaves, and a variety of other forms, glowing under water with vivid tints of every shade betwixt green, purple, brown, and white”.6 Pleasure and disgust could be aroused by the selfsame phenomenon:  Johann Reinhold Forster was fascinated by the effects of phosphorescence although he believed it was caused by rotting animalcules.  One hundred fifty years later years later, Robert Louis Stevenson was to have the same mixed reactions to coral.  The sea snakes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner excite similar extremes of wretchedness and rapture.
In the previous century scientists had attempted various prostheses for the sense-organs designed to make the work of discovery more exact: telegraph wires to transport the voice to distant ears, hygroscopes for detecting effluvia leaking from the earth, and of course improved microscopes and telescopes designed to bring the infinitely small and the infinitely distant into distinct focus. Hooke’s reactions to the colours and shapes of microscopic specimens were sometimes quite as ecstatic as Sparrman’s, Flinders’ and De Queirós’, but at the same time he was able to make accurate drawings of them that had never been seen before.  In this pursuit he explained how the senses were “wonderfully benefitted . . . and guided to an easie and more exact Performance of their Offices”.7  If other people were using ships, huge machines designed to bring the unknown into the purview of the five senses, Hooke was using his own portable contrivances to arrive at what he explicitly referred to as a discovery of “new Worlds and Terra-Incognita’s”.8 His machines were the forerunners of those that accompanied Cook’s supercargoes:  Kendal’s and Arnold’s chronometers, Knight’s azimuth compass, and Bird’s astronomical quadrant.
Support for Hooke was by no means unanimous.  Margaret Cavendish said his instruments could never penetrate the surface of things and find out the secrets of their constitution; they only disarranged the distances, textures, and angles that made them usual or comely, revealing instead the immodesties, moles, and hairs that cause the maids of honour in Brobdingnag to appear so repulsive to Gulliver. Were we to see things a thousand times more clearly or hear things magnified at the same rate, our lives would be made intolerable, Locke argued: there would be no rest, no power of discrimination.  Such a witness would live “in a quite different World from other People.  Nothing would appear the same to him, and others”.9 For Hooke, temporary alienation from the familiar world was the whole point.  If a terra incognita was to be disclosed, then one had to act in the spirit of foreignness:  “An Observer should endeavor to look upon such Experiments and Observations that are more common, and to which he has been more accustom’d, as if they were the greatest Rarity, and to imagine himself a Person of some other Country or Calling, that he never heard of, or seen the like before”.10 Scurvy, you might say, helped the observer into this estranged position.
By opting for the advantages of normal sense impressions, Locke and Cavendish were defending not just the proportionality and communicability of sensations, but also a very specific notion of how they are received and exchanged as ideas.  Along with Descartes and Hobbes, Locke agreed that the sensory organ, while being stimulated by an object in the real world, did not take a print of it or in any way incorporate its properties.  He said, “There is nothing like our Ideas in the Bodies themselves”.11 The smell of a flower is an event in the sensorium, created purely by the pulsations passing between the olfactory nerve and the brain.  Cavendish did not go as far as that, but she resisted the Epicurean doctrine of films and effigies as streams of matter launched from the surface of the object at the eye, ear, or nose.  Using the analogy of the mirror, she said, “It is not the real body of the object which the glass presents, but the glass only figures or patterns out the picture presented in and by the glass”.12 With this account of representation she denied Lucretius, the arch-empiricist, the indisputable evidence of impressions or any collaboration between them in the production of knowledge, for he had argued that no organ can thwart the receptivity of another.  He asked, “Can th’eare, the sight denie?/ Shall th’eare, or tast, the feeling sense oppose?/ Or shall the eie, dispute against the nose?”.13  Cavendish retorted,  “The nose knows not what the eyes see”.14
For his part, Hooke was convinced of the contrary, for it was only with the help of a microscope that the true roughness of a surface could be felt, a coalition of the prosthetized eye and the imaginary finger:  “The roughness and smoothness of a Body is made much more sensible by the help of a Microscope, than by the most tender and delicate Hand”.15   Walter Charleton, the greatest authority on scurvy and nutrition in the seventeenth century, noticed that under the pressure of great stimuli the eye will engross the functions of other senses, resulting in the kind of imminent synaesthesia Addison vouched for in his essays of the pleasures of imagination when he observed that an appetent eye experiences sight as a “more delicate and diffusive Kind of Touch”.16 Coleridge was fascinated by this phenomenon.  He called it the double touch (“touch . . . co-present with vision, yet not coalescing”) and wondered “whether the Skin be not a Terra Incognita in Medicine”.17
From the beginning of this debate, the issue of enlarged sensations had calqued upon questions of disease.  If you could smell too much like Bernardin de St Pierre and Melville’s sailor, or have your eyes dazzle with the colours of serpents, like the Ancient Mariner, then life was not only lived in a foreign place, that place was a hospital.  Supposing that it might be possible to sense too much, and out of that superfluity for one organ to seize on the function of another, Francis Hutcheson had concluded such a condition to be inconsistent with providential mercy (“Senses incapable of bearing the surrounding Objects without Pain; Eyes pained with the Light; a Palate offended with the Fruits of the Earth; a Skin as tender as the Coats of the Eye”).18 But of course what he had done was to reject as improbable the very scenes of scorbutic distress widely reported in contemporary journals.  In his Essay on Man Pope similarly excludes a list of morbid susceptibilities as exorbitant to the divine plan, concluding with the figment of a man so tender he shrieks at the smell of a flower, as Melville’s sailor was actually heard to do:
Say what the use, were finer optics given,T’inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven?Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er,To smart and agonise at every pore?Or quick effluvia darting through the brain,Die of a rose in aromatic pain?
Approaching the matter of acute sensation from a different angle, Robert Boyle saw a very useful connexion between disease and extraordinary powers of perception.  In his essays on effluvia, he mentions several examples, some of an innate susceptibility (the lady who swoons at the smell of roses) and some of a valuable acquisition of sensibility after an illness.  A man who recovered from bubonic plague found himself able to smell an infected person before any signs of the pestilence had appeared; another who suffered inflammation of the eyes and afterwards could distinguish colours in the dark; a physician who fell sick of a fever and discovered he could now overhear whispered speech at a great distance.19  Boyle’s explanation for these accidental improvements of the subtlety of the senses stems from his belief that effluvia do not bounce off the body, but pierce it and, by affecting its sensory equipment, alter the organs of the body that influence subsequent reactions to their environment.  So from a blind and involuntary susceptibility, the body’s organs may advance to an alertness that is active and what Bacon would call ejaculative or emittent. From this superlative awareness of effluvia, Boyle supposes such a degree of potential discrimination that the size, shape, motion, and colour of effluvia themselves might become perceptible.  So by means of the variations in the internal constitution of the living engine (as Boyle calls the body) he aims at the discovery of an invisible world of particles, just as Hooke with his machines goes in search of a terra incognita in the bottom of a microscope, or Coleridge beneath the porous surface of the skin.
Is scurvy such a disease, capable of prostrating the body and then redeeming it with enhanced perceptions?  Walter Charleton and Thomas Willis, Boyle’s contemporaries and authors of books on scurvy, offered some account of how this might happen.  For both men the healthy state of the sensitive soul resembled Boyle’s idea of the action and reaction of effluvia.  Willis called it dilation or irradiation, Charleton named it corroboration.  It occurs when something powerfully imagined actually takes place:
We imagine the Drinking of excellent Wine, with a certain Pleasure, then we indulge it; the Imagination of its Pleasure is again sharpened by the taste, and then by a reflected Appetite drinking is repeated.  So as it were in a Circle, the Throat or Appetite provokes the Sensation, and the Sensation causes the Appetite to be sharpened, and iterated.20
This corroboration of an image by the addition of a sensation is to be compared with the fixations of the scorbutic imagination observed by Thomas Trotter:
The cravings of appetite, not only amuse their waking hours with thoughts on green fields, and streams of pure water; but in their dreams they are tantalized by the favourite idea; and on waking the mortifying disappointment is expressed with the utmost regret, with groans, and weeping, altogether childish.21
But then when the desideratum is materialized, what a remarkable shift from miserable privation to intense pleasure!  “The patient in the inveterate stage of the disease seems to gather strength even from the sight of fruit:  the spirits are exhilarated by the taste itself, and the juice is swallowed, with emotions of the most voluptuous luxury”.22 John Mitchel, an Irish political prisoner en route for Tasmania aboard a scorbutic transport, wished never to forget the “brutal rapture” with which he devoured six oranges when the ship landed in Pernambuco. There is a gentler example of corroboration when the parched Ancient Mariner wakes from a dream of drinking to find his thirst quenched by the rain falling on his bare skin: “Sure I had drunken in my dreams,/ And still my body drank”.
If we bear this in mind when reviewing one of the great junctions in the history of scurvy and science, Humphry Davy’s tests on nitrous oxide at the Pneumatic Institute in 1799, an unmistakable resemblance seems to take place between the excitements of a scorbutic seaman and the sensations induced by laughing gas in Davy’s fingers, eyes, and ears.  He made and inhaled the gas in order to test a theory that “azote oxyd,” as it was called by Samuel Mitchill (whose theory it was), acted as the source of all contagious diseases, including scurvy.  While finding that he did not succumb to scurvy or any other malady, Davy did find himself changed in ways a scorbutic sailor or a Royal Scientist might recognize:
I imagined that I had increased sensibility of touch:  my fingers were pained by anything rough . . . I was certainly more irritable, and felt more acutely from trifling circumstances . . . My visible impressions were dazzling and apparently magnified . . . when I have breathed it amidst noise, the sense of hearing has been painfully affected even by moderate intensity of sound.23
At the limit of sensory irritation, Davy had discovered that there was no difference between suffering the impression of an object and imagining it.  Like Condillac’s statue, he could not tell the difference between passivity and activity, “between a cause within, and a cause without”.24 At this pitch both were the same, and the consequence was remarkable, explained by Mike Jay as follows: “[Davy’s] culminating experiment had proved, as nothing ever had before, that an altered sensory and mental frame had the power to generate an entirely different universe”.25
Was this universe Boyle’s invisible world? Hooke’s terra incognita? The corroborative assignation with fresh fruit on a desert island? Probably not, for it was experienced, as Coleridge himself was aware from his experiments with opium and laughing  gas, with all sense of “outness” lost:  and then, as he says,  “What a horrid disease every moment would become”.26 Scurvy was a terrible affliction but was not that kind of distemper.  It maintained some link with the real, for no matter how foreign and extravagant it might appear in a dream, it was an authentic message from the body to the imagination, to which the imagination and the will did their best to respond.  Erasmus Darwin called reveries and delusions resulting in total disobedience to external stimuli “diseases of volition”, and we can conclude that scurvy was not of that genus because its morbid sensory alertness preserved (no matter how obliquely) some kind of faith with the empiricist principles that shadowed its history.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jonathan Lamb


text:
The Eternal Guffaw
John Leech and The Comic History of Rome
By Caroline Wazer
February 25, 2015

At the beginning  of the 1850s, two stalwarts from the heart of London-based satirical magazine Punch, Gilbert Abbott à Beckett and John Leech, cast their mocking eye a little further back in time and published The Comic History of Rome. Caroline Wazer explores how it is not in the text but rather in Leech's delightfully anachronistic illustrations that the book's true subversion lies, offering as they do a critique of Victorian society itself.

Drawn by caricaturist John Leech, the illustrations of Gilbert Abbott à Beckett’s The Comic History of Rome are a Victorian fever dream of ancient Rome. Senators pair their togas with top hats, generals wear muttonchops under their helmets, and priests styled as snake charmers draw gullible crowds with the help of coal-powered rotating billboards. The blending of past and present in Leech’s illustrations is on one level a simple visual joke that reinforces the humor of the text, dragging the glories of Roman history down to the level of the contemporary London street. A closer look at the context of the book, however, reveals a series of interesting tensions beneath the surface humor.
Leech and à Beckett first worked together on the staff of Punch, the satirical London periodical. First published in 1841, Punch quickly gained a reputation for capturing — and mocking — the cultural zeitgeist of Victorian London, from pompous politicians to the unwashed masses. Henry Silver, a Punch contributor, wrote in his diary in 1864 that Leech “sneers at the Working Man, as usual.” A staunch Tory, Leech frequently came into conflict with the more progressive members of the early Punch staff about the content of the magazine. His cartoons often portrayed the urban poor as stupid and the wealthy as frivolous. À Beckett, on the other hand, was a member of the progressive-minded Reform Club and earned a reputation for understanding and generosity when he served as Poor Law commissioner in 1849.
By the time they collaborated on A Comic History of England in 1846, Leech and à Beckett had each already dabbled in the genre of satirical didactic literature. Leech had illustrated Percival Leigh’s The Comic Latin Grammar and The Comic English Grammar (both published in 1840), both of which were in-jokey publications for the elite schoolboy set. À Beckett, drawing on his legal education, published The Comic Blackstone in 1844. Brought out in monthly installments, A Comic History of England was a moderate success, and in 1851 the pair reunited for The Comic History of Rome.
While neither Leech nor à Beckett had attended university, both received a classical primary education. Amid the growth of both capitalism and urbanism in the Victorian period, such an education was increasingly important as a cultural shibboleth, distinguishing elite men from strivers when money alone was no longer enough to do so. Around the time of the birth of Punch, however, there arose a complicating factor to the use of familiarity with the classical past: the at-home educational publication. A result of cheap printing and increasing literacy, these publications — sort of the “For Dummies” books of their day — allowed anyone with a few pennies in his pocket access to knowledge previously kept locked up in elite schools.
The Punch staff initially took an eye-rolling stance at this democratization — and cheapening — of history and learned culture.  One issue from 1843 included a satirical feature titled “History at One View,” which arranged major events according to the month in which they occurred without regard to year, producing a nonsensical historical hodgepodge. The feature proclaimed itself to be “arranged expressly with an eye to the Society for the Confusion of Useful Knowledge,” in a jab at the real and very earnest Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Other targets of ridicule included bad schoolboy Latin and popular retellings of Greek and Roman mythology.
Punch soon stopped wrangling with the new climate of learning, at least in print. Some of the staff found this sneering attitude distasteful. As writer Douglas William Jerrold put it in an 1846 letter to his friend Charles Dickens, “The world will get tired (at least, I hope so) of this eternal guffaw at all things. After all, life has something serious in it. It cannot be all a comic history of humanity.”
À Beckett’s preface to The Comic History of Rome begins with a disclaimer. Despite the casual language and jocular tone, “this work has been prompted by a very serious desire to instruct those who, though willing to acquire information, seek in doing so as much amusement as possible.” Men like Jerrold who doubted the value of comic histories were “grievously mistaken who have imagined that in this. . . the object has been to treat History as a mere farce, or to laugh at Truth.”
For his part, à Beckett mostly lived up to his word. He breezes through Roman history like a professor emeritus at a cocktail party, displaying both a gently dry sense of humor and a deep familiarity with the content and tricky nature of the ancient sources. He closes the first chapter as follows:
Before closing this portion of the narrative of the History of Rome, it is necessary to warn the reader against believing too much of it. The current legends are, indeed, Legenda, or things to be read, because everybody is in the habit of repeating them; but the student must guard himself against placing credence in the old remark, that ‘what everybody says must be true,’ for here is a direct instance of what everybody says being decidedly otherwise. The life and reign of Romulus, are to be taken not simply cum grano salis — with a grain of salt — but with an entire cellar of that condiment, which is so useful in correcting the evil consequences of swallowing too much of anything.
Leech’s images sometimes stick close to the text, as in the full-color plate that portrays the legend of Romulus and Remus as a Mother Goose-esque fairy tale. Often, however, Leech used his illustrations to draw explicit and sometimes cutting connections with modern Victorian life. The subject matter of the text, which covered Roman history through the fall of the Republic, certainly lent itself to comparisons with mid-nineteenth century London. Especially in the latter part of the period covered, Rome saw a booming poor urban population, the growth of a snobby urban intelligentsia, and the development of what many saw as overtly demagogical politics — in other words, the same things that Leech regularly skewered in the pages of Punch.
The subject of Roman history allowed Leech to make some satirical references too obscure or too reactionary for Punch’s pages. A color plate portraying a 5th century BC popular uprising against the patrician Appius Claudius Crassus following his abduction of the plebeian Verginia resembles nothing so much as a scene from the French Reign of Terror, complete with ragged street urchins and a stout cat-wielding proletarian wearing a Phrygian cap.
More frequently, however, Leech used the Roman setting simply to poke fun at familiar urban characters, particularly the working classes. In the images below, Leech portrays the revered Greco-Roman healing god Aesculapius as a crotchety old apothecary, and a Carthaginian soldier as a timid municipal policeman.
Another favorite target was the rich man who, whether out of desire for power or cultural cachet, overinvolved himself with the poor. In one illustration, Tiberius Gracchus, a populist Roman reformer, becomes a top hat-wearing, baby-cheek-pinching demagogue, seedily winning popular favor by charming poor women.
In another, Leech depicted a gladiator and his owner as a brutish modern-day boxer (note the gloves) and his foppish patron (note the dangling cigarette).
Back at Punch, Leech had developed a reputation for overwhelming the text with the approachability and humor of his illustrations. William Makepeace Thackeray, who frequently contributed to the magazine, once wrote that “John Leech is Punch.” A similar statement could be made about The Comic History of Rome, despite à Beckett’s earnest assertion that the book was not meant to make light of history. By projecting his satirical view of the present back onto ancient Rome, Leech injected a certain nastiness into The Comic History of Rome that echoed and reinforced his nasty view of the present.
It is easy enough to imagine a curious but uneducated middle-class Londoner enjoying à Beckett’s avuncular jokes, but what would he make of Leech’s illustrations? Possibly he would be offended, but possibly — conditioned by Punch and similar publications — he would take part in Leech’s eternal guffaw at society.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 25, 2015

author: Caroline Wazer