text:
Inside the Empty House
Sherlock Holmes, For King and Country
By Andrew Glazzard
January 8, 2014

As a new series of BBC’s Sherlock revives the great detective after his apparent death, Andrew Glazzard investigates the domestic and imperial subterfuge beneath the surface of Sherlock Holmes’s 1903 return to Baker Street in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Empty House’.

Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga has enjoyed -- or in some cases suffered — countless reinventions since its original publication from 1887 to 1927. The BBC’s current television version starring Benedict Cumberbatch is perhaps one of the most successful, not least as its scriptwriters combine a deep knowledge of the original with a flair for departing wittily from it: the show’s strategy of allusion, transformation, and up-to-dateness gives it both freshness and familiarity. The new series begins with ‘The Empty Hearse’, its title alluding playfully to Conan Doyle’s 1903 story ‘The Empty House’ in which Holmes returns from apparent death at the hands of Professor Moriarty in Switzerland.
Conan Doyle’s saga is particularly suited to this kind of treatment: the fan-critics who call themselves “Sherlockians” pore over the details of Dr John Watson’s narratives (known in the trade as “the Canon”), looking for clues, contradictions, and anomalies; they construct often conspiratorial alternative explanations of events, uncover Conan Doyle’s (or Watson’s) apparent errors, and cross-reference the stories with encyclopaedic scholarship. So, while Conan Doyle is often seen as a fairly transparent writer, eschewing complexity, technical innovation, and challenges to orthodox ideology in favour of elegant myth-making, the industriousness of the Sherlockians shows that the simplicity of these stories is often deceptive: in a story such as ‘The Empty House’, a great deal of important information is left unsaid or hinted at. Recovering those subtexts through careful reading and a knowledge of what else was going on at the time can help to show Holmes and his creator in a new light.
‘The Empty House’ weaves together two narratives, a murder mystery and the story of Holmes’s return to London, three years after his apparent death in Switzerland in 1891. Reunited with his old friend and chronicler Dr Watson, Holmes recounts the story of his escape at the Reichenbach Falls followed by an extraordinary and exotic odyssey:
I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office.
These three sentences contain a wealth of allusions to imperial exploration and conquest. ‘Sigerson’ is perhaps an allusion to the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, whose groundbreaking explorations of Central Asia and the Tibetan plateau — his findings first published in a British and American edition in 1903 — had begun to excite interest and admiration. But it was another explorer of Tibet who was really making the headlines, and which alerts us to the imperialist sub-text of the story. By 1903, Francis Younghusband’s “expedition” to Tibet was in full swing. He entered the country in December 1903 with a force of 10,000 and reached Lhasa in August 1904: it was an invasion in all but name, the final episode in what Kipling dubbed “the Great Game” in which Britain and Russia fought a cold war for control of the Asian lands that lay between their two empires. Holmes’s presence in Lhasa in the 1890s disguised as Sigerson was more likely to be read as groundwork for Younghusband’s invasion than disinterested exploration or an extreme method of lying low.
A “Great Game” explanation may lie behind Holmes’s time in Persia, another object of intense Anglo-Russian competition: Russia’s increasing economic involvement with the Shah’s regime at the turn of the century was viewed with alarm in Whitehall and Calcutta as a threat to the frontiers of British India. Mecca, the next port of call, would have required Holmes (who presumably had not converted to Islam) to adopt one of his famous disguises, as the British explorer and diplomat Sir Richard Burton had done during his expedition in 1853. And Holmes’s talent for disguise would most certainly have been required at his next destination: as he makes clear, Khartoum (or more strictly the neighbouring city of Omdurman) was in the 1890s under the control of ‘Abdallahi, the Khalifa, successor to Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi.
The Khalifa and his state in the Sudan, the Mahdiyya, held a similar position in the late-Victorian consciousness as the Taliban and Al Qaida do today. The Mahdiyya’s forces had been responsible for some of Britain’s most disastrous military defeats of the 1880s, leading eventually to the martyrdom of General Charles Gordon, whose portrait, we are told in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, hangs in 221b Baker Street. In 1897 Conan Doyle was accredited as a journalist for the Westminster Gazette to accompany Herbert Kitchener’s expedition into the Sudan to wipe out the Mahdiyya, although his journalism was not much of a success as he was instructed by Kitchener personally to go home. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle’s dispatches for his newspaper reveal an enthusiastic support for Kitchener’s project which climaxed in 1898 with the Battle of Omdurman, in which 10,000 of the Khalifa’s forces were killed in a matter of hours by the British and Egyptian armies (which themselves suffered a mere 47 fatalities).
In ‘The Empty House’, then, Conan Doyle writes of the period before Omdurman but with the knowledge of its outcome. Holmes’s casual reference to communicating with the Foreign Office only seems to confirm what has already been signaled: he has spent the three years after his escape at Reichenbach not merely hiding from Moriarty’s henchmen, but working clandestinely for the British Empire.
*
Holmes returns to London to solve the murder of the Hon. Ronald Adair, a ‘locked room mystery’ in which a young aristocrat is found shot dead in his upstairs sitting room, locked from the inside, at 427 Park Lane. The window is open but there are no signs that anyone could have entered through it; there is no weapon, but on the table next to Adair are piles of gold and silver coins, some banknotes, and a sheet of paper bearing names and numbers. We are told that Adair spent most of his time playing cards in various London clubs, and the names on the paper are of fellow card players. We are also told that his engagement to his fiancée has just been broken off, and that he and his friend Colonel Sebastian Moran had recently won a large sum at cards from Godfrey Milner and Lord Balmoral.
Holmes’s prior knowledge appears to solve the mystery. He knows that Col. Moran is in fact one of Professor Moriarty’s henchmen and “the second most dangerous man in London”. He traps Moran by placing a wax dummy (moved at intervals by Mrs Hudson) in the window of his rooms in Baker Street; he, Watson and Inspector Lestrade look on as Moran takes his position in an empty house with a line of sight to the window, aims his German-made air-rifle adapted to take soft-nosed bullets, and shoots the wax dummy. Lestrade arrests Moran as the murderer of Ronald Adair.
The identity of Adair’s murderer signals another aspect of the story’s imperial sub-text. Col. Moran has entered the worlds of elite leisure (high-class gambling) and elite crime (Moriarty’s gang) from a background in Her Majesty’s Indian Army where he was, Holmes reveals, “the best heavy-game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced”, famous for stalking tigers in the jungle: Holmes calls him an “old shikari” — an Urdu word for hunter. Like Watson, he has served in Afghanistan (unlike Watson, with such distinction as to be mentioned in despatches), and he has empire in the blood: his father was a former British Minister to Persia. Watson is astonished by this renegade’s background as an “honourable soldier”, prompting Holmes to speculate that Moran’s “sudden turn” to evil is the result of some inherited genetic marker.
There are many intriguing subtexts in this mystery — anxiety about the implications of Germany’s technological preeminence, fashionable theories of degeneration — but the one to concern us here is Moran’s immaculate army record. This story is in part an enquiry into how and why initially decent men of empire might become bad apples. Some clues within the text suggest that Conan Doyle had an actual case in mind. Asked by Watson for Moran’s motive in killing Adair, Holmes’s answer hinges on speculation that Moran was cheating at cards and that this had been discovered by Adair: “Very likely he had spoken to [Moran] privately, and had threatened to expose him unless he voluntarily resigned his membership of the club, and promised not to play cards again.” Rather than give such an undertaking, Holmes hypothesizes, Moran murdered Adair.
Here the story appears to be alluding to one of the biggest aristocratic scandals of the previous decade. What was known as “the Baccarat Scandal” or “the Tranby Croft affair” had obsessed the Victorian newspaper-reading public when it came to the High Court in 1891. A Lieutenant-Colonel in the Scots Guards, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, had been accused of cheating at baccarat — a variation of pontoon or vingt-et-un with a banker, two players, and two groups of observers betting on whose hand is closest to nine — by his hosts and some fellow former army officers during an aristocratic party at Tranby Croft in Yorkshire in September 1890. Gordon-Cumming, a baronet and major Scottish landowner who had fought with great distinction in the Zulu War, and the Egyptian and Sudanese Campaigns (including at the battle of Abu Klea in 1884 as part of the doomed mission to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum), and who was an admired hunter of Indian tigers, sued his accusers for slander and lost. What elevated this from the ordinary was the identity of the banker during two evenings of baccarat and who had to take the stand in the witness box at the High Court: Albert Edward, Prince of Wales who, after his mother’s death in 1901, became King Edward VII and Emperor of India.
Edward was well-known for his indiscretions — not for nothing did Henry James christen him “Edward the Caresser” — but being called as a witness meant that that he enjoyed the dubious distinction of the first heir to the throne to do so under sub poena since the man who became Henry V was prosecuted in 1411. This scandal was, therefore, one of Edward’s most serious, revealing him as an habitual player of an illegal game. It could have been worse for Edward: the parties to the case and their legal representatives agreed not to mention in court the inconvenient fact that Edward travelled around the country with his own set of baccarat tokens.
The Victorian press, cramming the packed court, examined every detail of the case. Gordon-Cumming’s words and actions on two evenings in 1890 became national news, including the question of whether a sheet of paper on which he recorded the progress of each hand had facilitated his cheating or was evidence to support his innocence. But the key events came after some of the other players observed Gordon-Cumming apparently (and in the rules of the game illegally) raising or lowering his stakes in accordance with the turn of the cards. Gordon-Cumming was confronted, but denied cheating: the matter was passed to the most senior guest present. Edward’s judgment was that the whole thing should be brushed under the carpet, but to preserve everyone’s sense of justice, Gordon-Cumming would be required to sign a statement vowing never to play cards again. Edward hoped that the matter would end there, but months afterwards, rumours began to circulate, and Gordon-Cumming felt he had no option but to sue. After his defeat, he was ostracized by Edward and the royal courtiers, so he married an heiress and retired to his gloomy estate at Gordonstoun in Scotland. The popular verdict, though, appears to have been that he was an innocent man unjustly slandered, and more recent enquiries suggest that the accusation of cheating was revenge from fellow-guests fed up at his success in seducing their wives.
Another hint of the Tranby Croft Scandal lies in the name of Moran and Adair’s card-playing associate, Lord Balmoral. No commoner would be allowed to take a title from the Royal Family’s castle in Aberdeenshire. Edward VII would have been much in most people’s minds as he had only been crowned King-Emperor in August 1902, but particularly in Conan Doyle’s: the author had been placed next to Edward at a dinner a few weeks before, and was knighted by Edward in October. Conan Doyle liked Edward, and predicted that his reign would be far more successful than his many critics had suggested.
Lt. Col. Gordon-Cumming, the war-hero and big-game hunter who (allegedly) cheated at cards and was forced to sign a statement following his exposure, seems a likely candidate for Col. Moran who kills rather than sues his accusers. At this point, the problem of the corruption of honourable empire men would seem to be solved: they are bad apples who, in the end, get found out and punished. Another possible allusion, however, complicates matters. Ronald Adair’s mysterious sheet of paper recalls Gordon-Cumming’s which was the focus of so much attention in court, inviting us to consider whether there is something of Gordon-Cumming in Adair as well. And there are other suggestions that Adair — who also has empire in the blood, as his father was a former governor of an Australian colony -- is not the innocent victim of Holmes’s convenient explanation.
Indeed, Holmes’s explanation is not only preposterous but also inadequate in explaining the many tantalizing details at the scene of the crime and in Adair’s personal history. Why did his fiancée break off their engagement? Why did Adair lock the sitting-room door (a detail to which our attention is drawn but which is left hanging)? Most importantly, perhaps, Adair is (like Edward VII) an habitual gambler, “playing continually”, and for money: this idle, moneyed, gambling-addicted bachelor is not the stuff of which empires are made. Holmes’s inability to come up with a credible motive for the murder of Adair forces us to conclude that his partnership with Moran was a partnership in crime that had gone sour.
What then do we make of Holmes’s apparent determination to cover things up? At Tranby Croft Edward had acted as judge and jury, effectively condemning Lt. Col. Gordon-Cumming so that aristocratic codes of form could be preserved and the secrets of the high-life could remain concealed. In exonerating Adair, and pinning all the blame on Col. Moran, Holmes constructs a convenient fiction to preserve the myth that honourable men remain honourable in all but the most rare and exceptional cases. Holmes, the clandestine imperial warrior, had come home to shore up an aristocracy (and in real-life a royalty) that was vulnerable to allegations of impropriety. No wonder that we learn in ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs’ that Holmes was offered — and unlike his creator refused — a knighthood in June 1902 “for services which may perhaps some day be described.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 8, 2014

author: Andrew Glazzard


text:
1592
Coining Columbus
By Michiel van Groesen
April 16, 2014

For many, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas is inextricably linked to a particular image: a small group of confident men on a tropical beach formally announcing their presence to the dumbfounded Amerindians. Michiel van Groesen explores the origins of this Eurocentric iconography and ascribes its persistence to the editorial strategy of the publisher who invented the initial design, a full century after Columbus' encounter.

Theodore de Bry, born in the Prince-Bishopric of Liege in 1528, lived and worked in Strasbourg, Antwerp, and London before he ultimately settled in Frankfurt, the centre of the European book trade. Trained as a goldsmith, he had successfully re-invented himself as a graphic artist in the 1570s and 1580s. In the final decade of the sixteenth century he would crown this transformation by introducing the technique of including copper engravings into printed books to Germany, thus creating a niche in the market for his lavishly illustrated coffee table books. His most monumental series of publications was the so-called ‘De Bry collection of voyages’. Initiated in 1590, it would run until 1634, and comprise twenty-five folio volumes of European travel accounts to America, Africa, and Asia. Theodore and his two sons translated these narratives into German and Latin (occasionally modifying the texts), and added illustrations if the original versions did not contain any images, or if they did not meet their high artistic standards. Both the thirteen-volume America-series and the twelve-volume India Orientalis-series became luxurious collectors’ items almost overnight, and have remained so to this day.
De Bry opened his America-series with the famous watercolour drawings by John White and Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues which Richard Hakluyt had given him for this purpose during his time in London. But when he had to find material on his own, he quickly turned to Columbus. De Bry devoted Volume IV of the America-series, published in 1594, to the account of the Milanese traveller Girolamo Benzoni who recounted the Genoese explorer’s first voyage of 1492. One of the tailor-made engravings De Bry designed in his workshop in Frankfurt, predictably, captured the moment Columbus first set foot in the New World (pictured below). The illustration is centered around the encounter between Columbus, backed by two other servants of the Spanish monarchy, and a group of Native Americans. The way De Bry depicted both groups emphasizes the contrast between the Europeans and the Indians. On one side Columbus, immaculately dressed after a long oceanic crossing, is supported by two men who are heavily armed. It is clear that they are in control, both of the situation and of themselves. Their erect, confident poses are — metaphorically — still a world away from the unorderly manner in which the Amerindians of Hispaniola present themselves. They are naked, and appear to be unsure of what the encounter will bring. In an attempt to give the Spaniards what they desire, the Indians offer Columbus their precious metals, conveniently cast in traditional European shapes to ensure a good understanding.
The background of the engraving substantiates that what De Bry is showing us here is essentially a shift in power, something of which European readers in the late sixteenth century were all too aware. Columbus’ impressive ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, refer to both this prologue to the moment De Bry captured, and the fundamental inequalities of the intercultural relationship that lie ahead. While more Spaniards disembark to take possession of the island, the natives flee after apparently having first approached the ships. The power shift is made abundantly clear by the planting of the cross on the left-hand side of the composition. One of the Spanish soldiers has even put his gun to one side to help establish Christianity in the New World — a powerful symbolic gesture that appears to be a precursor to Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima in August 1945.
The planting of the cross was particularly meaningful for Theodore de Bry. According to his own testimony, De Bry, a Calvinist, had been forced to leave his native Liege because of religious persecution. In Frankfurt, too, Calvinists were tolerated only because of their commercial importance to the city. It led De Bry to develop an ingenious strategy for his collection of voyages that would be acceptable across the Old World, for readers of every confessional background. Whereas the Latin translations he made were intended for a Catholic readership, his seemingly identical German editions reveal Protestant sympathies. When comparing the two versions one sees differences in words, sentences, paragraphs, and occasionally even entire accounts. Making alternative engravings, however, was too costly for De Bry’s editorial strategy of confessional differentiation. Different illustrations for different readerships, moreover, would not enhance the authority of his flagship publication that was crucial to the commercial well-being of his publishing house. So for his engravings, De Bry’s method was to enhance the contrast between civilized Christian travellers and the uncivilized heathen peoples of the non-European world, thus creating an iconography that could be appreciated in all corners of the divided continent.
Hence, for reasons entirely unrelated to his own adventures, Columbus was depicted in this fashion one-hundred years later. Yet De Bry’s image, rather than a belated conclusion to Columbus’ expedition, is only the beginning of the story. The De Bry collection was the single most influential European set of images to summarize what has traditionally been called ‘the Age of Discovery’. Altogether it contained up to 600 high-quality copper engravings, around 40% of which were invented from scratch by the De Bry family in Frankfurt. The combination of these beautiful designs, printed at the hub of early modern European book culture by a highly skilful engraver from the Low Countries, and the increasing importance of colonial affairs for the European balance of power throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, meant that the De Bry images — especially those of America for which there had been no previous iconographic tradition — were copied time and again. Copies and derivations appeared in various contexts with every conceivable newly-attached meaning (and they still do today, mostly as book covers for studies on a myriad of different topics). For Columbus, in retrospect, we can establish that he was finally canonized — visually — in 1592 by Theodore de Bry.
The image has since been changed in order to meet new stylistic conventions, but several elements have proved extremely persistent. In 1732, the Amsterdam-based Huguenot writer Bernard Picart, for his book entitled Ceremonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous les Peuples du Monde, created a very similar illustration of Columbus’ landfall, which, if anything, only enhanced the contrast already insisted on by De Bry (pictured above). Picart’s Columbus, surrounded by a more reassuring number of troops this time, was once again in obvious command of the situation. His own men clearly venerated him for his achievements, perhaps indicating to the Native Americans the identity of their leader. The standard with the coat of arms of the Spanish monarchy is a new addition, possibly a step too far for a Protestant like Theodore de Bry in an age of widely shared anti-Spanish sentiment, but a convenient means for Picart to emphasize the increasing importance of national sovereignty. Meanwhile the offering of gold, an intrinsic aspect of the sixteenth-century Leyenda Negra of Spanish greed, is gone. The Amerindians Columbus encounters here appear even more awe-struck than their indigenous predecessors in the De Bry engraving. The Indians in the foreground were probably given a darker complexion in order to put the encounter behind them in a fuller light, but the fact that skin colour became a yardstick to measure civility in the eighteenth century could have been an additional incentive. Finally, and intriguingly, even though Picart’s agenda was one of religious toleration, the raising of the cross retained its place in the design.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Amsterdam draughtsman Reinier Vinkeles was another artist to use the template Theodore de Bry had created almost two centuries earlier. In 1788, Vinkeles made an etching of Columbus’ arrival in the New World that discarded Picart’s addition of additional Spaniards, and reinstated Columbus as the singular hero of the expedition, much like De Bry had done before him (pictured below). The sword still conveyed the reassuring message that the Europeans were in control, despite the turbulent developments in North America immediately prior to Vinkeles’ composition. The perspective of Vinkeles’ image is identical to that of De Bry, with ships in the distant background and sloops with additional colonists approaching the shore. Behind Columbus, the cross is planted in a way that faithfully resembles the De Bry composition, watched with curious interest by the Native Americans who display the similar mixture of fear and respect that characterized De Bry’s naked Indians. Vinkeles, like Picart before him, did not depict the giving of New World gold and silver, but instead appears to have embellished the image by adding a crowned head among the Amerindians (with arguably the most fearful complexion of the entire group). Once again, although this time deliberately, the skin colour of the Amerindians has been modified to underline the racial differences between both groups.
The nineteenth and twentienth centuries produced many more designs that were directly or indirectly derived from the De Bry engraving, as anyone who does a Google search on ‘Columbus’ and ‘1492’ can establish. They are all different, but very few of them are new. All insist on the juxtapositions between technology and handicraft, civility and innocence, religion and ignorance, and, most importantly, power and dependence. Some of these ‘modern’ representations of the arrival of the first European fleet in America are bound to make most twenty-first century viewers cringe, especially when we contemplate that some of them were (and still are?) used in primary schools in the United States and elsewhere to celebrate the historic birth of a ‘new’ (all too often implying ‘better’) world. Theodore de Bry’s design already harbours these uncomfortable notions of an irreversible shift in power. One could argue that it assisted in facilitating the demographic and humanitarian disaster that followed. That, of course, is something historians will never be able to ascertain. Perhaps, if nothing else, at least this wonderful engraving can help us to reflect on how detrimental the routine of simple ethnographic copying-and-pasting can be.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Michiel van Groesen

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
“O, Excellent Air Bag”
Humphry Davy and Nitrous Oxide
By Mike Jay
August 6, 2014

The summer of 1799 saw a new fad take hold in one remarkable circle of British society: the inhalation of "Laughing Gas". The overseer and pioneer of these experiments was a young Humphry Davy, future President of the Royal Society. Mike Jay explores how Davy's extreme and near-fatal regime of self-experimentation with the gas not only marked a new era in the history of science but a turn toward the philosophical and literary romanticism of the century to come.

See also our book Oh Excellent Air Bag: Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920, with an introduction by Mike Jay.
On Boxing Day of 1799 the twenty-year-old chemist Humphry Davy — later to become Sir Humphry, inventor of the miners’ lamp, President of the Royal Society and domineering genius of British science — stripped to the waist, placed a thermometer under his armpit and stepped into a sealed box specially designed by the engineer James Watt for the inhalation of gases, into which he requested the physician Dr. Robert Kinglake to release twenty quarts of nitrous oxide every five minutes for as long as he could retain consciousness.
The experiment was taking place in the lamp-lit laboratory of the Pneumatic Institution, an ambitious and controversial medical project where the young Davy had been taken on as laboratory assistant. It had opened the previous March in Hotwells, a run-down spa at the foot of the Avon Gorge outside Bristol. Originally developed to rival nearby Bath, Hotwells had dwindled to a downmarket cluster of cheap clinics and miracle-cure outfits offering hydrotherapy or mesmerism to those in the desperate last stages of consumption; but the Pneumatic Institution was a new arrival with revolutionary ambitions. Its founder, the brilliant and maverick doctor Thomas Beddoes, believed that the new gases with which he and his assistant were experimenting had the power to put the treatment of this most lethal of diseases onto a proper scientific footing for the first time, and in the process to transform the art of medicine.
In the centre of the laboratory, Davy had set up a chemical reaction: nitrate of ammoniac bubbled in a heated retort, and the escaping gas was being collected in a hydraulic bellows before seeping through water into a reservoir tank from which the sealed box was filled. After an hour and a quarter, by which time he estimated that his system was fully saturated, Davy stepped out of the box and proceeded to inhale a further twenty quarts of the gas from a series of oiled green silk bags.
While seated in the box breathing deeply, Davy had felt the effects that had become familiar from his many previous experiments since he had first inhaled the gas earlier that year. The first signature was its curiously benign sweet taste, followed by a gentle pressure in the head as he continued to inhale. Within thirty seconds the sensation of soft, probing pressure had extended to his chest, and the tips of his fingers and toes. This was accompanied by a vibrant burst of pleasure, and a gradual change in the world around him. Objects became brighter and clearer, and the space in the cramped box seemed to expand and take on unfamiliar dimensions.
Now, under the influence of the largest dose of nitrous oxide anyone had ever taken, these effects were intensified to levels he could not have imagined. His hearing became fantastically acute, allowing him to distinguish every sound in the room and seemingly from far beyond: a vast and distant hum, perhaps the vibration of the universe itself. In his field of vision, the objects around him were teasing themselves apart into shining packets of light and energy. He was rising effortlessly into new worlds whose existence he had never suspected. Somehow, the whole experience was irresistibly funny: he had ‘a great disposition to laugh’, as all his senses competed to exercise their new-found freedom to its limit.
Now the gas took Davy to a dimension he had not previously visited. Objects became dazzling in their intensity, sounds were amplified into a cacophony that echoed through infinite space, the thrillings in his limbs seemed to effervesce and overflow; and then, suddenly, he ‘lost all connection with external things’, and entered a self-enveloping realm of the senses. Words, images and ideas jumbled together ‘in such a manner, as to produce perceptions totally novel’: he was no longer in the laboratory, but ‘in a world of newly connected and modified ideas’, where he could theorise without limits and make new discoveries at will.
After an eternity he was brought back to earth by the sensation of Dr. Kinglake removing the breathing-tube from his mouth; the outside world seeped back into his ‘semi-delirious trance’ and, as the energy returned to his limbs, he began to pace around the room. Yet a part of him was still present in the dimension of mind that had swallowed him whole, and he struggled for the words to capture it. He ‘stalked majestically’ towards Kinglake ‘with the most intense and prophetic manner’, and attempted to shape the insight that had possessed him. ‘Nothing exists but thoughts!’, he blurted. ‘The world is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!’
Davy’s Boxing Day experiment was the culmination of a freewheeling programme of consciousness expansion into which he had co-opted some of the most remarkable figures of his day. Within days of his first self-experiment in April he had offered the gas to his friend Robert Southey, the future Poet Laureate, whose reaction was as effusive as Davy’s own: ‘the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this gas’. Southey’s ecstatic report to his brother Tom set the tone for the explorations that were to follow:
O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gasoeus oxyd! O, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. O, Tom! I am going for more this evening; it makes one strong and so happy, so gloriously happy! O, excellent air-bag!※※Indexed under…Experienceof nitrous oxide inhalation
In the early summer of 1799 the nitrous oxide trials began in earnest. In the evenings, after the Pneumatic Institution had closed, the nitrate of ammoniac reaction would begin to bubble in its upstairs drawing room as Davy and Beddoes’ circle — doctors and patients, chemists, playwrights, surgeons and poets — experimented on themselves and each other. Davy was master of ceremonies and also, by his own account, inhaling the gas himself three or four times a day. The laboratory became a philosophical theatre in which the boundaries between experimenter and subject, spectator and performer were blurred to fascinating effect, and the experiment took on a life of its own.
Although the trials commenced within a medical framework, they came to focus increasingly on questions of metaphysics and, in particular, language. Davy was struck by the poverty of the ‘language of feeling’ available to his subjects, and the awkwardness of their attempts to put their experiences into words. The standard medical question ‘how do you feel?’ took on imponderable, existential dimensions. The subjects were not mentally impaired by the gas, but overstimulated beyond the reach of words themselves: as Davy himself put it, ‘I have sometimes experienced from nitrous oxide, sensations similar to no others, and they have consequently been indescribable’. James Thompson, one of the volunteers, captured the magnitude of the task precisely: ‘We must either invent new terms to express these new and peculiar sensations, or attach new ideas to old ones, before we can communicate intelligibly with each other on the operation of this extraordinary gas.’
Davy instituted a loose reporting protocol, asking every volunteer to produce a short written description of their experience. Some subjects produced answers that were oblique but highly imaginative: one of the clinic patients answered ‘how do you feel?’ with ‘I feel like the sound of a harp’. Musical analogies emerged repeatedly, attempting to catch the aural effect of ringing harmonics that often accompanies the rush of nitrous oxide intoxication. Beddoes, emerging from a deep immersion, once shouted out the single word ‘Tones!’. This resonated with images that were emerging in the poetic writings of Southey and his friend Coleridge: the Aeolian wind-harp, for example, which draws its harmonies directly from Nature herself.
Davy also took enthusiastically to experimenting on his own. On full moon nights in particular, he would wander down the Avon Gorge with a bulging green silk air-bag and notebook, inhaling the gas under the stars and scribbling snatches of poetry and philosophical insight. One one occasion he made himself conspicuous by passing out and, on recovery, was obliged to ‘make a bystander acquainted with the pleasure I experienced by laughing and stomping’. He noted an element of compulsion in his use, confessing that ‘the desire to breathe the gas is awakened in me by the sight of a person breathing, or even by that of an air-bag or air-holder’. He began to push his experiments into more dangerous territory. He tried the gas in combination with different stimulants, drinking a bottle of wine methodically in eight minutes flat and then inhaling so much gas he passed out for two hours. He also experimented with nitric oxide, which turned to nitric acid in his mouth, burning his tongue and palate, and with ‘hydrocarbonate’ — hydrogen and carbon dioxide — which left him comatose, the air-bag fortunately falling from his lips. On recovering, he ‘faintly articulated: ‘I do not think I shall die’’.
By the end of the summer, the energy of the trials was dissipating: for most of the volunteers, the novelty of the experience wore off after a few sessions. Davy’s experiments became increasingly solitary, partially focused on resolving technical questions such as how much gas was absorbed into the bloodstream and whether it should be classified as a stimulant or a sedative, but also searching for a framework — scientific, poetic or philosophical — to account for its effects. In this he was assisted by the arrival of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who returned to Bristol in October from an extended visit to Germany.
Coleridge and Davy’s friendship would evolve and endure through the many phases of their future careers; but it began with a green silk bag of nitrous oxide. As Coleridge inhaled and felt its warmth diffusing through his body, he did not reach for extravagant metaphors but stated precisely that the sensation resembled ‘that which I remember once to have experienced after returning from the snow into a warm room’. In a subsequent trial he ‘was more violently acted upon’ and confessed that ‘towards the last I could not avoid, nor felt any wish to avoid, beating the ground with my feet; and after the mouthpiece was removed, I remained for a few seconds motionless, in great ecstacy.’
Coleridge was captivated by the young chemist: ‘Every subject in Davy’s mind’, he wrote, ‘has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like turf under his feet.’. Davy was equally swept up in his new friend’s expansive vision, which he felt had the power to transform science as well as poetry. Coleridge had returned from Germany in thrall to the new idealistic turn in its philosophy: the theories of Immanuel Kant and the emerging ‘Naturphilosophie’, according to which the human mind was the ultimate source of our reality, and the material world only an illusion projected by it. The dissociative effects of nitrous oxide, in which consciousness seemed to escape and transcend the physical body, made compelling sense of this insight; and Davy’s climactic revelation that ‘nothing exists but thoughts’ would echo it through the century to come.
Despite their chaotic melange of hedonism, heroism, poetry and philosophy, Davy’s report on the trials, when it emerged, made a coherent and powerful case for their scientific worth. After his climactic Boxing Day experiment, he began writing at top speed and by Easter of 1800 had produced a 580-page monograph on the new gas and its effects. Under the businesslike title Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide, or dephlogisticated nitrous air, and its Respiration, he described the synthesis of the gas, its effect on animals and animal tissue and, in an unprecedented final section, the descriptions of the subjective effects of nitrous oxide intoxication on himself and two dozen further subjects, including Beddoes, Coleridge and Southey.
Davy’s report combined two mutually unintelligible languages — organic chemistry and subjective experience — to create a groundbreaking hybrid, a poetic science that could encompass both the chemical causes of the experience and its philosophical consequences. By the end of 1800 his reputation had spread through Britain’s scientific community and beyond, and he was already preparing to leave Bristol for a post at the Royal Institution, at the centre of the London network of power and privilege through which he rose to prominence with breathtaking speed. His dazzling lectures there would make him the public face of science for the coming generation, and the nitrous oxide experiments would become an emblem of the heroic commitment to discovery that it would demand of its practitioners in the new century.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: August 6, 2014

author: Mike Ja


text:
In the Image of God
John Comenius and the First Children’s Picture Book
By Charles McNamara
May 14, 2014

In the mid 17th-century John Comenius published what many consider to be the first picture book dedicated to the education of young children, Orbis Sensualium Pictus - or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures, as it was rendered in English. Charles McNamara explores how, contrary to Comenius' assertions, the book can be seen to be as much about the invisible world as the visible.

John Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures) is, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the first children’s picture book.” Originally published in 1658 in Latin and German, the Orbis — with its 150 pictures showing everyday activities like brewing beer, tending gardens, and slaughtering animals — is immediately familiar as an ancestor of today’s children’s literature. This approach centered on the visual was a breakthrough in education for the young, as was the decision to teach the vernacular in addition to Latin. Unlike treatises on education and grammatical handbooks, it is aimed directly at the young and attempts to engage on their level.
The Orbis was hugely popular. At one point it was the most used textbook in Europe for elementary education, and according to one account it was translated into “most European and some of the Oriental languages.” Its author John Comenius, a Czech by birth, was also well-known throughout Europe and worked in several countries as a school reformer. His portrait was painted by Rembrandt, and according to an 1887 edition of the Orbis, Comenius was even “once solicited to become President of Harvard College.” (Although he never came to Harvard, one can still find his name engraved on the western frieze of Teachers College at Columbia University.) Even if he is less celebrated today by name, his innovative ideas about education are still influential. In his Didactica Magna, for example, he advocates for equal educational opportunities for all: boys and girls, rich and poor, urban and rural.
Despite his progressive aims and lasting educational influence, Comenius does not come off as a thoroughly modern schoolmaster. When we turn to the first page of the Orbis, we find an opening sentence that would seem peculiar in today’s children’s books: “Come, boy, learn to be wise.” We see above the text a teacher and student in dialogue, the former holding up his finger and sporting a cane and large hat, the latter listening in an emotional state somewhere between awe and anxiety.  The student asks, “What doth this mean, to be wise?” His teacher answers, “To understand rightly, to do rightly, and to speak out rightly all that are necessary.”
The first chapter of the Orbis looks to the third of these goals in what reads like an early version of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Children learn how “to speak out rightly” by imitating animal noises. These two pages are a trove of Latin onomatopoetic verbs and peculiar renderings of animal sounds: cats cry out “nau nau” instead of “meow meow,” and we learn that “the Duck quacketh” (anas tetrinnit), “the Hare squeaketh” (lapus vagit), and “the Crow crieth” (cornix cornicatur). This introduction to animal noises is familiar territory for modern educational toys, as any trip to Toys R’ Us confirms. The teacher explains that first the student must learn “the plain sounds . . . which living creatures know how to make, and thy tongue knoweth how to imitate.” After mastering these noises, the student and teacher “will go into the World, and we will view all things.” ※※Indexed under…Soundsof animals in Latin
But after learning how to quack and how to squeak, the children do not “go into the World,” and they do not actually view anything either. Instead, the Orbis abruptly shifts to the philosophical and the invisible, perhaps hoping that a firm grasp of ducks and mice is sufficient for understanding the divine. Chapter 2 presents children with a crash course in theological metaphysics, where they learn that God is “in his Essence Spiritual, and One. In his personality, Three.” They learn that He is “A Light inaccessible; and yet all in all. Every where and no where.” Even if the Orbis is devoted to showing the world visually, its discussion of God is abstract and opaque. And the illustration for this chapter is nothing like the bearded old man we see on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is instead a complex diagram, faceless and geometric. So much for the goal of showing “The World of Things Obvious to the Senses.”
Comenius reveals the rationale for this lesson at its end, where he calls God “the Creator, so the Governor and Preserver of all things, which we call the World (Mundum).” Only after introducing God can the author describe His creations: “The World” (Mundus), “The Heaven” (Caelum), the four elements, plants, and animals. In fact, the Orbis loosely mimics the order of creation found at the beginning of Genesis. Comenius expands upon the sparse Biblical narrative with colorful examples of fauna. We learn about a staggering variety of exotic animals: there are six chapters on birds (“Water-Fowl” (Aves Aquaticae), “Ravenous Birds” (Aves Rapaces), among others) and a chapter on “Flying Vermin” (Insecta Volantia), including mentions of the “Gad-Bee” (Oestrum) and the “Glow-worm” (Cicindela).
After thirty-five chapters on theology, elements, plants, and animals, Comenius finally introduces man. He again opts for the Biblical account and addresses Adam and Eve before more immediate topics like “The Outward Parts of a Man,” where we learn that women have “two Dugs, with Nipples” and that below the stomach we find “the Groyn and the privities.” The anatomical terminology is vast, including words for each finger and for a number of bones in the body. But amid instruction on the corporeal and familiar, Comenius again injects the abstract and invisible into his picture book with Chapter 43, a discussion of “The Soul of Man.” A dotted outline of a human, opening his arms as if to welcome the students’ gaze, stands at the top of the page. Despite this illustration, Comenius’ discussion of the soul is not dumbed down for children. He lays out the categories of souls for his young students: the “Vegetative” soul of plants, the “Sensitive” soul of animals, and the “Rational” soul of man.
Other chapters address more mundane topics. Comenius discusses deformed people (“the blubber-lipped” and “the steeple-crowned” among others) and a variety of basic commercial practices including but not limited to honey-making, beer-brewing, bread-baking, shoe-cobbling, and box-making. The later chapters of the book concentrate on the activities of learned elites, fitting for our student who has passed from the earliest stages of imitating animal noises through lessons on the human soul.  Comenius includes chapters on music, philosophy, astronomy, and a number of virtues like temperance and fortitude. And a student who has progressed so far in his studies perhaps has earned a little free time, so the Orbis introduces him to tennis, dice games, and fencing.
To parallel his first chapter on God and the Trinity, Comenius concludes the Orbis with an extensive discussion of theology and religion, beginning in Chapter 144. Comenius’ allegiances are clear: he devotes one page of text to “Gentilism,” about one page to Judaism, but over two full pages to Christianity. (He also includes a half-page on “Mahometism.”) Appropriately, Comenius’ final topic is The Last Judgment, where “the last day . . . shall raise up the Dead with the sound of a Trumpet” and when “the Godly & Elect, shall enter into life eternal into the place of Bliss.” It seems that as much as the student must learn how God created the world, he must also learn how God will end it.
The final page, mirroring the first, again shows the teacher speaking and the young student listening attentively. But in his second appearance, the student says nothing: we might say Comenius’ lesson was not a matter of dialogue and discussion but of assiduous memorization. The teacher, too, seems to have changed his approach. He tells the student, “thou hast seen in short, all things that can be shewed,” but he recommends that the student also “read other good Books diligently” so that he may become “learned, wise, and godly.”
Perhaps, then, Comenius’ project was a clever ruse all along. Recognizing that his students would never learn theology from looking at trees and birds, he wrote the Orbis, his own “good Book” where children could learn their metaphysics and Biblical basics. Even if the first page of the book urges the student to become “wise” and promises to “shew thee all,” the final page concedes that such wisdom does not come from mere sights and sounds. Comenius, in fact, finishes the book with an admonition not to go out into the world at all. A student should instead learn to “fear God, and call upon him, that he may bestow upon thee the Spirit of Wisdom.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Charles McNamara


text:
The Tale of Beatrix Potter

By Frank Delaney
July 23, 2014

This year, the works of one of the most successful and universal writers of all time came into the public domain in many countries around the world. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck  - in all, thirty-three books bearing the name “Beatrix Potter” have sold close to 200 million copies. Frank Delaney enquires into the more complex woman behind the safe and warm-hearted stories.

Her appeal is so powerful that museums hold her in permanent exhibition — and some of them even commemorate her solely. Hollywood has trawled through her life, if somewhat on tiptoe. The great and the good have acknowledged her influence and the affection she inspires. Pottery, apparel, wallpaper — all kinds of domestic accoutrements bear her quaint, unthreatening drawings; her inescapably fluffy image has driven a licensing industry that has been worth millions. Yet Beatrix Potter was a sharp-edged, and reclusive woman, serious and complex, and her “nursery” reputation does her scant justice; she was much more than a “mere” children’s writer. Which, however, is where and how her famed “product” began — with the famous letter from Beatrix aged 27 to Noel Moore, aged 6, the little son of her final governess;
Sep 4th 93My dear Noel, I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were — Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail — and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sand bank under the root of a big fir tree. . .
She called it a “picture letter.” In among the words she had sketched each character in the tale, with Peter unquestionably the perkiest: he’s the only one standing upright. As adults’ novelists do, she had taken him from life — Peter Rabbit was based on a Belgian buck, she’d given him the name “Peter Piper” and described him thus: “Whatever the shortcomings of his fur, and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet.”
The daughter of Manchester Unitarians rich out of the cotton trade, Helen Beatrix Potter, born Saturday, 28 July 1866, grew up in a fully-serviced Kensington house. Notwithstanding the butlers, governesses, grooms, nurses and maids she suffered early that writer’s boon, the angst of loneliness. A cold, uninterested mother raised the child at arm’s length, and the warmest early companionship came from pets — lizards, guinea-pigs, newts, birds, mice, bats and rabbits, cats and dogs. And since the coldness of the household bred no sentimentality, Beatrix was happy in time to put down any little creature who fell ill, skin it, and boil the carcass to extract the skeleton for drawing.
Does this — let’s call it “objectivity” rather than “ruthlessness” — does it explain why she gave her stories such raw edges? Benjamin Bunny received a whipping from his father. Amid the “barking, baying, growls and howls, squealing and groans,” did the collie-dog and the foxhound puppies, Jemima Puddle-Duck’s rescuers, actually eat “the foxy-whiskered gentleman” of whom “nothing more was ever seen?” And what about The Tale of Two Bad Mice, vandals who wreck a doll’s house? Legion readers may still find Beatrix Potter rosy and twee: she had no such compromising intent.
We can trace her talent. The gorgeous paintings bubbled up from clear springs (let’s not any more diminish them with the word “illustration:” just look again at the owl in Squirrel Nutkin). To begin with, the dysmaternal mother fobbed off the nursery with picture books: Hans Andersen; the brothers Grimm; an illustrated bible — the usual suspects. But the lonely child savoured the drawings more than the text; for instance, when she got around to Alice in Wonderland, Beatrix, of her own later admission, became much more compelled by the pictures of Sir John Tenniel than the whimsies of Lewis Carroll. By the age of seven, she herself was already drawing with individual line, tone and competence.
As prime material she made life drawings of her pets. She commented on her hedgehog model, the real Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, “So long as she can go to sleep on my knee she is delighted; but if she is propped up for half an hour she first begins to yawn pathetically, and then she does bite. Nevertheless, she is a dear person.”
Her dear creatures opened a portal into the widest and most powerful arena of all — the natural world. In the year she was born, her Potter grandfather purchased a 300-acre Capability Brown estate at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. How enchanting to a child with a sketch-pad and burgeoning powers of observation; “The oaks moaning and swaying close to the bedroom windows in winter. . . trees in every hedgerow. . . in summer the distant landscapes are intensely blue. . .”
Annual family trips to the Lake District and Scotland clinched the deal. She recorded “the night-jar’s eerie cry, the hooting of the owls, the bat [that] flitted around the house the roe-deer’s bark. . .” Back in London, she used the solitude of the playroom to recollect in tranquility the cool woods of summer, and in a very short time the universe of wild nature, whence, after all, her pets had originated, became the permanent home of her spirit.
Another influence grew alongside. Her father, a barrister and club gentleman, had always longed to paint but could scarcely draw a straight line. So he indulged, as did many excited Victorians, in the new art form of photography; he bought all the latest equipment, and hired a servant to hawk it about for him. Naturally he photographed his family without ceasing, and no matter what her age or pose, his daughter always looks as serious as a century.
He also rendered her an even greater service than keeping her record. His friend, the painter John Everett Millais, deputed Rupert Potter to photograph landscapes that Millais could use as backgrounds in canvases. He also asked him to take, for reference, “likenesses” of the more important sitters (Gladstone, for example), to save them having to sit so often and long.  On some of these forays Beatrix went along with her father. She met Millais in his studio, he perceived her talent and interest, and he bared to her the very soul of working in oils — how to mix paint.
The creatures, the countryside and its enchanting details, the smell of the palette — by and large, this jigsaw of childhood experiences pieces together Beatrix Potter’s early adult portrait. That same leaning toward science that she practised in dissections and anatomical drawings, also led her into botany; look at the rich and accurate flora alongside her rabbits and pigs and foxes.
Several years ago, an Irish agricultural scientist, Fionnbhar O’Riordain,  alerted me to the game of finding where mushrooms appear in Beatrix Potter, because she had served a self-taught but distinguished apprenticeship to mycology. He described her botanical work as “brilliant,” and authenticated his faith in her by making slides of her drawings.
At 31 years of age, she had submitted a scientific paper to the respected Linnean Society in London. The Society’s practice was to have its papers read aloud by other than the authors, even if it were Darwin. One April night in 1897, “Miss H.B. Potter’s paper, On the Germination of Spores of Agaricineae [Mushrooms],” was presented to the Society by a principal of Kew Gardens. Later, in her development of her research, she mounted arguments connecting spores to lichens. Dismissed at the time, she had the pleasure of eventual vindications, and by 1901 she had produced almost 300 water-colours of mushrooms, fungii, the world of spores. Through her donation they now reside in the Armitt Museum in Cumbria.
Being, though, a dilettante, however serious and well-founded, was never going to settle her. She had always had earnings in mind, had been drawing greeting cards for art publishers — to earn money for microscopes and slides, for perhaps a printing press, and unquestionably for ways of escape. Pressed by Noel Moore’s mother (once a governess always a teacher), Beatrix now turned to the “picture letters.”
For The Tale of Peter Rabbit she created extra drawings, added the mouse with the “large pea in her mouth,” the white cat “staring at some goldfish,” and printed Peter as a Christmas gift in 1901. The warmth of its reception from friends and family astounded her, so she then made an edition for sale, price one shilling, plus tuppence postage. All who received it enthused; Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle had “a good opinion of the story and the words.”
This modest repute reached a publisher, Frederick Warne in London, who said he would take it on provided that Miss Potter’s drawings could be in colour. She refused: “I did not colour the whole book for two reasons: the great expense of good colour printing; and also the rather uninteresting colour of a good many of the subjects which are most of them rabbit-brown and green.”
Her practical sense supervened. She provided colour, worked with the publishers on proofs and emendations — and then a great deal more. As The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published on 2 October 1902, she already had in the hopper The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (look out for mushrooms) and The Tailor of Gloucester (her own all-time favourite). She was 36 years old, and so began the universal author.
In the intensity of the publishing experience over the next two years, she and her editor, the youngest Mr. Warne, began to take notice of one another; Norman was tall, thin and kind, with a benign mustache. The relationship flowered and in July 1905 — she was 39 — an engagement materialised, but marriage plans could not be discussed with any openness because to the Potters Norman Warne counted as “trade.” The two families agreed to keep it secret: there had been precedent: Beatrix’s brother was married eleven years before his parents were informed. A few days after this new happiness, however, Norman fell ill. Beatrix had just left for Wales to summer with her parents, where within three weeks she was to hear that, on the 25th of August, Norman Warne had died of pernicious anemia.
To contain — and hide — her grief, Beatrix quit London and went to Cumbria, where she had already been arranging to buy a small farm, Hill Top, near Sawrey, in the fells. It was to have been the summer home of Mr and Mrs Norman Warne, and despite all the poignancy, she yet completed the purchase. At Hill Top she gave birth to a host of later characters; Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddle-Duck and Samuel Whiskers and Pigling Bland, because even with — or perhaps because of — a heart breaking off at the edges, and even though writing into the void left by her loving, admiring editor at Warne, she continued to produce. In time, having already devised a Peter Rabbit doll, and a board game, she would develop further merchandise and help make herself a rich woman.
She steeped herself in her new northern world; she made herself a significant figure in these steep fells that climb so close to the floor of Heaven. Farming took her into its deep embrace, and she became a champion of causes — Herdwick sheep, for instance, a local breed, had been dying out; she founded a breeders’ association to bring them back. She also began to buy tranches of this beloved land, assembling in time as much as four thousand acres, which she left to the National Trust.
In 1913, eight years after Norman Warne’s death, she married the country solicitor who had been conveyancing the fells for her. His name was William Heelis, at 42 five years younger than Beatrix; “Dreadfully shy,” she said of him, “but I am sure he will be more comfortable married. . . he is in every way satisfactory, well known in the district and respected.” As with Norman Warne her parents objected again, and as with Norman Warne her new swain was also tall, thin and kind, with a benign mustache.
In Ambleside, I met an old man who had known Beatrix Potter, and who told me the “tramp story.” One rainy winter’s day, dressed as she liked to, in the opposite of high fashion, Beatrix encountered a tramp on a high road near Hill Top. He assumed her to be of his tribe, and greeted her with, “Brave hard weather for the likes of thee’n me, missus.” She had done the thing she’d always wanted — merged with her countryside.
Some years ago, when I was presenting Radio Four’s Poetry Please, a listener left a message at the BBC with a question for James Fenton as to the meaning of one of his poems. I telephoned Mr. Fenton and he answered, “Don’t ask the poet, ask the poem.” Therefore — go thou and do likewise with Beatrix Potter, and you will find — to take some examples — a self-containment brought on by nursery loneliness; see the inner space in her work: note the predominance of interiors. Her gallantly perfect language demonstrates the unwavering control with which she presented herself; “In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets — when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta — there lived a tailor in Gloucester.” (In respectful observance of her constant mission to explain let’s note that “paduasoy” comes from peau de soie, literally “skin of silk,” and is a French medieval grosgrain fabric.) Hail her superb drawing of flora and fauna; note, however, that she had lesser skill drawing humans.
But she rendered landscape with the true love of someone who understands the way the countryside stretches out under the sun, and who will one day want some for herself. In the work after 1905 you will find exquisite views of the Lake District.
In 1940, she was asked by a publisher “to tell again how Peter Rabbit came to be written.” Having first mentioned that Noel Moore, the Peter Rabbit boy, had grown up lame, and was now “an air warden in a bombed London parish,” Beatrix, not writing books any more — “My eyes are too weak” — offered, in effect, a thumbnail autobiography.
“I do not remember a time,” she answered, “when I did not try to invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland amongst the wild flowers, the animals, fungi, mosses, woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the countryside; that pleasant, unchanging world of realism and romance, which in our northern clime is stiffened by hard weather, a tough ancestry, and the strength that comes from the hills.”

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

author: Frank Delane


text:
Elizabeth Bisland’s Race Around the World

By Matthew Goodman
October 16, 2013

Matthew Goodman explores the life and writings of Elizabeth Bisland, an American journalist propelled into the limelight when she set out in 1889 - head-to-head with fellow journalist Nellie Bly - on a journey to beat Phileas Fogg's fictitious 80-day circumnavigation of the globe.

On the morning of November 14, 1889, John Brisben Walker, the wealthy publisher of the monthly magazine The Cosmopolitan, boarded a New Jersey ferry bound for New York City. Like many other New Yorkers, he was carrying a copy of The World, the most widely read and influential newspaper of its time. A front-page story announced that Nellie Bly, The World’s star investigative reporter, was about to undertake the most sensational adventure of her career: an attempt to go around the world faster than anyone ever had before. Sixteen years earlier, in his popular novel, Jules Verne had imagined that such a trip could be accomplished in eighty days; Nellie Bly hoped to do it in seventy-five.
Immediately John Brisben Walker recognized the publicity value of such a scheme, and at once an idea suggested itself: The Cosmopolitan would sponsor its own competitor in the around-the-world race, traveling in the opposite direction. Of course, the magazine’s circumnavigator would have to leave immediately, and would have to be, like Bly, a young woman –the public, after all, would never warm to the idea of a man racing against a woman. But who should it be? Arriving at the offices of The Cosmopolitan that morning, Walker sent a message to the home of Elizabeth Bisland, the magazine’s literary editor. It was urgent, he indicated; she should come at once.
Each month for The Cosmopolitan Elizabeth Bisland wrote a review of recently published books entitled “In the Library.” She was a reader with refined tastes and wide-ranging interests; the subjects covered in her first few columns included Tolstoy’s social gospel, the fourteenth-century tales of Don Juan Manuel, the collected poems of Emma Lazarus, and a two-volume history of the Vikings by the Norwegian author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyeson. Born into a Louisiana plantation family ruined by the Civil War, Bisland had moved to New Orleans and then, a few years later, to New York, where she contributed to a variety of magazines and was regularly referred to as the most beautiful woman in metropolitan journalism.
At the time of her race around the world Elizabeth Bisland was twenty-eight years old. She was tall, with an elegant, almost imperious bearing that made her appear even taller; she had large dark eyes and luminous pale skin and spoke in a low, gentle voice. She reveled in gracious hospitality and smart conversation, both of which were regularly on display in the literary salon that she hosted in her small apartment, where members of New York’s creative set gathered to discuss the artistic issues of the day. Bisland’s particular combination of beauty, charm, and erudition seems to have been nothing short of bewitching. One of her admirers, the writer Lafcadio Hearn, called her “a sort of goddess,” and likened her conversation to hashish, leaving him disoriented for hours afterwards. Another said, about talking with her, that he felt as if he were playing with “a beautiful dangerous leopard,” which he loved for not biting him.
Bisland herself was well aware that feminine beauty was useful but fleeting (“After the period of sex-attraction has passed,” she once wrote, “women have no power in America”), and she took pride in the fact that she had arrived in New York with only fifty dollars in her pocket, and that the thousands of dollars now in her bank account had come by virtue of her own pen. Capable of working for eighteen hours at a stretch, she wrote book reviews, essays, feature articles, and poetry in the classical vein. She was a believer, more than anything, in the joys of literature, which she had first experienced as a girl in ancient, tattered volumes of Shakespeare and Cervantes that she found in the ruined library of her family’s plantation house. (She had taught herself French while she churned butter, so that she might read Rousseau’s Confessions in the original.) She cared nothing for fame, and indeed found the prospect of it distasteful. So when she arrived at the offices of The Cosmopolitan, and John Brisben Walker proposed that she race Nellie Bly around the world, Elizabeth Bisland told him no. ※※Indexed under…ButterLearning Rousseau while churning
She had guests coming for dinner the next day, she explained, and besides, she had nothing to wear for such a long journey. The real reason, though, as she would later acknowledge, was that she immediately recognized the notoriety that such a race would bring, “and to this notoriety I most earnestly objected.”
John Brisben Walker, however, had already made one fortune in alfalfa and another in iron and was in the process of making a third, in magazine publishing. He was not easily dissuaded, and six hours later Bisland found herself on a New York Central Line train bound for San Francisco.
Elizabeth Bisland would write seven articles about her race around the world for The Cosmopolitan, which in 1890 were collected and published by Harper & Brothers as a book entitled In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World. Her account began:
If, on the thirteenth of November, 1889, some amateur prophet had foretold that I should spend Christmas Day of that year on the Indian Ocean, I hope I should not by any open and insulting incredulity have added new burdens to the trials of a hard-working soothsayer — I hope I should, with the gentleness due a severe case of aberrated predictiveness, have merely called his attention to that passage in the Koran in which it is written, “The Lord loveth a cheerful liar” — and bid him go in peace. Yet I did spend the 25th day of December steaming through the waters that wash the shores of the Indian Empire, and did do other things equally preposterous, of which I would not have believed myself capable if forewarned of them. I can only claim in excuse that these vagaries were unpremeditated, for the prophets neglected their opportunity and I received no augury.
Bisland was a published poet, and throughout the trip she wrote of her experiences in a highly lyrical, impressionistic style, paying special attention to the ever-changing scapes of land and sea. “In the night a hoar frost had fallen,” she wrote one morning, “that was to snow as sleep is to death; and the pale reaped fields, the sere meadows, and silent uplands were transfigured by the first gleam of day.” She delighted in sitting on the top deck of a steamship and watching the ocean for hours on end. “Sapphires would be pale and cold beside this sea,” she wrote on her trip across the Pacific — “palpitating with wave shadows deep as violets, yet not purple, and with no touch of any color to mar its perfect hue. It flames with unspeakable, many-faceted splendor, under a sky that is wan by contrast with its profundity of tint, and the very foam that curles away from our wake is blue as the blue shadows in snow.”
Prior to the around-the-world trip Bisland had never been out of the country before, and during it she discovered a love of travel that would stay with her the rest of her life. This was perhaps best exemplified in a late-night carriage trip she took to the Tanks of Yemen, a remarkable system of ancient stone cisterns. “Our footsteps and our voices echo in hollow whispers from the empty Tanks and the mysterious shadows of the hills,” Bisland wrote, “though we walk lightly and speak softly, awed by the vast calm radiance of the African night. . . . The world grows dreamlike and unreal in the white silence.”
That was what the trip had given her, she would reflect later: the vividness of a new world, where one was for the first time, as Tennyson had written, Lord of the senses five. “It was well,” she told herself when it was all over, “to have thus once really lived.”
It’s instructive to note that in her book Bisland always described her undertaking for The Cosmopolitan as a “trip” or a “journey,” and never — not even once — as a “race.” Still, she was a loyal employee and she threw herself into the competition with vigor. Near the end of the trip, cold and sleepless and hungry, Bisland hurtled by train and ferry through France, England, Wales, and Ireland to catch the steamship that was her last chance to beat Bly, only to have to cross a storm-tossed North Atlantic in the worst weather that had been seen in many years.
In the end, Elizabeth Bisland succeeded in beating Phileas Fogg’s eighty-day mark, completing the trip in seventy-six days — which would have been the fastest trip ever made around the world but for the fact that Nellie Bly had arrived four days earlier.
She arrived home — as she had feared — famous. The race between Bly and Bisland was closely covered by newspapers across the United States, and heavy wagering on the outcome was reported in the country’s gambling houses. As early as the first week of the race, in San Francisco, Bisland was aghast at the steady stream of visitors who sent up cards to her hotel room with urgent messages scrawled on them, but who, she noted in In Seven Stages, had only “a desire to look at me — presumably as a sort of inexpensive freak show.” Unlike Nellie Bly, who upon her return to New York immediately set out on a forty-city lecture tour, Bisland did all she could to avoid the glare of publicity. She gave no lectures, endorsed no products, and did not comment publicly on the trip after the day of her return. Indeed, at the very moment when the American public’s interest in her was at its height, Bisland chose to leave the United States, setting sail for Great Britain, where she lived for the following year. In London’s literary society she met, among others, Herbert Spencer; the popular novelist Rhoda Broughton (the two women would collaborate on a short novel entitled A Widower Indeed); and Rudyard Kipling, who was as smitten with her as the men in New York had been. “I guess you’ll have enough men censer-swinging under your nose to prevent your waving the thurible too markedly under mine,” he wrote in a letter to her. “All the same and until you go after something else new I am grateful.”
Upon her return to New York Bisland married the corporate attorney Charles Wetmore, and together the two designed and built an estate on Long Island. Applegarth, as they called it, was in the Tudor style, made of brick, half-timbering, and stucco, with leaded windows and doorways framed in limestone. The stone fireplace in the drawing room was modeled on one belonging to Queen Elizabeth I, whom Bisland had long admired as having “rejected the whole theory of feminine subordination.”
Living at Applegarth Bisland would be highly productive as a writer: Between 1903 and 1910 she edited and wrote the introduction to the two-volume Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, and wrote the highly regarded autobiographical novel A Candle of Understanding as well as several essay collections in which she celebrated the pleasures of literature and forcefully decried the domination of women by men. “The oldest of all empires is that of man; no royal house is so ancient as his,” she wrote in an essay entitled “The Abdication of Man.” “The Emperors of Japan are parvenus of the vulgarest modernity in comparison, and the claims of long descent of every sovereign in Europe shrivel into absurdity beside the magnificent antiquity of this potentate.”
Bisland was a working writer right up until the very end of her life. In 1927, at the age of sixty-five, she published her final essay collection, entitled The Truth About Men and Other Matters. In it she considered relations between the sexes (in the title essay she observed, “The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them — or wished to see them. . . . No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life”), country living, travels in Japan; much of the book, though, was about growing gracefully old. In an essay called “Toward Sunset” Bisland observed, “That old age may be agreeable to others and tolerable to itself no other equipment is so necessary as a vigorous sense of humour.” But old age itself, she was quick to point out, “is not an amusing episode.”
Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible. . . . one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry.
Elizabeth Bisland died on January 6, 1929, at the age of sixty-seven. Today, all of her books are out of print, but she deserves to be better remembered than she is — for the gorgeousness of her prose, of course, and the clear-sightedness of her perspective on the condition of women, but also as someone who chose to turn away from the culture of celebrity just as it was dawning. Bisland never breached the promise she made to herself at the end of the race around the world: to conduct the rest of her life in such a way that no journalist would ever again see fit to put her name in a headline.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 16, 2013

author: Matthew Goodman


text:
Lost in Translation
Proust and Scott Moncrieff
By William C. Carter
November 13, 2013

Scott Moncrieff's English translation of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is widely hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. His rendering of the title as Remembrance of Things Past is not, however, considered a high point. William C. Carter explores the two men's correspondence on this somewhat sticky issue and how the Shakespearean title missed the mark regarding Proust's theory of memory.

Although Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche du temps perdu is considered by many journalists and writers to be the best translation of any foreign work into the English language, his choice of Remembrance of Things Past as the general title alarmed the seriously ill Proust and misled generations of readers as to the novelist’s true intent. It wasn’t until 1992 that the title was finally changed to In Search of Lost Time. “Remembrance of Things Past” is a beautiful line from William Shakespeare’s sonnet 30, but it conveys an idea that is really the opposite of Proust’s own. When Scott Moncrieff chose this title, he did not know, of course, where Proust was going with the story and did not correctly interpret the title, which might indeed be taken to indicate a rather passive attempt by an elderly person to recollect days gone by.
Proust’s theory of memory rejects the notion that we can simply sit and quietly resurrect the past in its true vividness through what he called voluntary memory. When we attempt to do this, we find that it doesn’t work very well. We remember very little and often only in a haphazard and rather bland way. On the other hand, Proust’s title should be taken to suggest a different approach: the Narrator’s search (recherche means both search and research in French) is an active, arduous quest in which the past must be rediscovered—largely through what Proust called involuntary memory, as demonstrated in the famous madeleine scene—then analyzed and understood, and finally, if your ambition is to preserve it in writing, transposed and recreated in a book. As we will see, Proust lived long enough to see the title Remembrance of Things Past and, while he objected to it, did not take measures to change it.
A native of Scotland, Scott Moncrieff had served as a captain in the Scottish Borderers during World War I. Before reading A la recherche du temps perdu, he had already made a name for himself as the translator of major French works, such as La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) and Stendhal’s two masterful novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma). After the Great War Scott Moncrieff had served as secretary to Lord Northcliffe, in addition to being an editor at The London Times. In January 1920, a thirty-year-old Scott Moncrieff resigned his post at the Times in order to devote himself entirely to translating À la recherche du temps perdu.
Proust was completely unaware of his good fortune in having such a translator; his misgivings were founded in large part by a letter from Sydney Schiff, a British novelist and translator who wrote under the pseudonym of Stephen Hudson. He and his wife Violet, who both knew French, had been among the first in Britain to discover and love Swann’s Way and had subsequently struck up a friendship with Proust. In London, on September 9, 1922, Schiff read this announcement in The Athenaeum:
Messers Chatto & Windus, as publishers, and Mr. Scott Moncrieff, as author, have almost ready the first installment of M. Marcel Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ in the English translation. The title of this initial volume is Swann’s Way.
Schiff, who had long thought he was the only Englishman capable of translating À la recherche du temps perdu, objected to Scott Moncrieff’s titles. As incredible as it seems, Schiff did not realize the overall title came from Shakespeare’s sonnet, whose opening lines read:  “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past. . . .”  In his letter to Proust, Schiff lamented the loss of the French title’s double meaning — time wasted and lost, with its “melancholy nuance, etc.” But even more surprising, was Schiff’s total misreading of his native language; he translated Swann’s Way for Proust as “A la manière de Swann,” (In the Manner of Swann), as though that were its only possible meaning. (Schiff would later make amends and become a good friend of Scott Moncrieff’s.) Naturally, Proust, who knew something about the art of translation from his own translations of works by John Ruskin, became alarmed on reading Schiff’s reaction and his rendering of Scott Moncrieff’s titles.
Proust wrote to Schiff, saying he certainly did not intend to “let Du côté de chez Swann appear under the title you gave me. I knew nothing about this translation.” Of course, Proust did know — or should have known — about Scott Moncrieff’s translation, since his publisher Gallimard had offered to let him inspect it months earlier and the novelist had declined. Proust, whose health worsened again, waited nearly a week before writing to Gallimard. Now, he said, in addition to “falling with every step,” his speech troubles had returned. He then conveyed Schiff’s concerns about the translation to Gallimard. The author could not accept the title that meant “In the manner of Swann.” That was “intolerable.” He reminded Gallimard that Du côté de chez Swann and Le Côté de Guermantes indicated the two separate walks at Combray. The English title was “nonsense;” surely it must be an error. Proust concluded:  “I value my work too much to allow an Englishman to demolish it.”
Gallimard replied that such a distortion of Proust’s titles was indeed out of the question and he would do everything in his power to prevent it. Gallimard soon received the advance copies of Swann’s Way in English. He had also retrieved from the files Proust’s contract with the English publisher and his own letter to Proust offering to let him inspect Scott Moncrieff’s translation. And Gallimard had some encouraging news:  he had spoken to Victor M. Llona, his agent for America and England, “who knew English admirably well” and who assured him that Swann’s Way was not at all bad for the title; it was in fact “quite good.”
In October, Proust, who was not to live long enough to appreciate the excellence of Scott Moncrieff’s work, exchanged letters with his translator: “I was very flattered and touched by the trouble you took to translate my Swann.” Because of his terrible health, Proust said that it was a miracle he could thank Scott Moncrieff. Although he had not read the entire volume, the author did have “one or two criticisms.” The first was to explain that the general title did not mean at all Remembrance of Things Past. Proust regretted the omission of “Lost Time,” which “is found again at the end of the work: Time Regained. As for Swann’s Way that can mean Du côté de chez Swann, but also Swann’s manner. By adding to you would have made it all right.” Proust’s suggested correction to this last title seems to confirm the content of his next sentence in which he admitted having forgotten all his English.
Scott Moncrieff’s reply, written on Savile Club letterhead, was modest and brief:
My dear Sir, I beg that you will allow me to thank you for your very gratifying letter in English as my knowledge of French — as you have shown me, with regard to your titles — is too imperfect, too stunted a growth for me to weave from it the chapelet that I would fain offer you. Are you still suffering — which I am very sorry to hear, and wish that my real sympathy could bring you some relief — I am making my reply to your critiques on another sheet, and by the aid of a machine which I hope you do not abominate: it is the machine on which Swann and one-third of the Jeunes Filles have been translated. Thus you can throw away this sheet unread, or keep it, or inflict it upon M. Gallimard. Charles Scott Moncrieff.
Proust or someone discarded the sheet or lost it. Thus we do not know how the translator justified his choice of the general title that Schiff and Proust were the first, but far from the last, to criticize. Proust was already ill with the chest cold that would kill him in just over two months. He died on November 18, 1922.
Scott Moncrieff died in 1930, at age forty, leaving untranslated the final volume Le Temps Retrouvé. His task would be completed by Sydney Schiff, writing as Stephen Hudson. Schiff dedicated his translation: “To the memory of my friend CHARLES SCOTT MONCRIEFF, Marcel Proust’s incomparable translator.” Le Temps Retrouvé had two other English translators: Andreas Mayor and Frederick A. Blossom.
Proust’s debt to Scott Moncrieff is enormous, as is that of all readers who first discovered this vast novel in English translation. In a 1939 letter to his daughter Scottie, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave his opinion: “Scott Moncrieff’s Proust is a masterpiece in itself.” Harold Bloom observes that Scott Moncrieff made it possible for In Search of Lost Time to become “widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 13, 2013

author: William C. Carter