text:
Beastly Clues
T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword
By Roddy Howland Jackson
January 12, 2022

Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” —  Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew. Roddy Howland Jackson reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada's lively grids.

London Zoo was having a bad month. On January 4, 1925, the acquisition of a thirteenth ostrich had led to public pressure “to train one of them for police purposes”, a feat supposedly “accomplished some years ago on an ostrich farm in Florida”, reported the Evening Post.1 A fortnight later, a “fugitive monkey” named George escaped from the zoo, bruising a naturalist’s knee on his way out.2 To add insult to (genicular) injury, the zoo was under siege by “requests for aid in solving ‘cross-word’ puzzles’”: “What is a word in three letters meaning a female swan? What is a female kangaroo, or a fragile creature in six letters ending in TO?” London Zoo, as one reporter suggested, “has enough to do with the care of its own animals, and cannot act as consultant to the world at large”.3 The poor zookeepers were at the thin end of a puzzle wedge; fated, as Ernie Bushmiller joked in his popular comic strip, to serve buckets of alphabet soup to animals prized and poached for their phonemes alone.4
The “crossword craze” of the 1920s had hit Britain like a “meteorological depression”, and, as was traditional, Americans were to blame.5 Following the publication of the first crossword in New York World by Arthur Wynne in 1913, the Tamworth Herald lamented the misfortune of a nation where “10,000,000 people have caught the infection of unprofitable trifling”, estimating the loss of productive American labour to crosswords at roughly five million hours per day.6 In the UK, so much damage had been inflicted by ham-thumbed solvers on the dictionaries of Wimbledon that all such reference works were withdrawn from public access.7 Thesaurus sales skyrocketed while library use crashed.8 By the time Vladimir Nabokov published the first Russian krossword in 1924, the Nottingham Evening Post’s “world at large” estimation was quite right: the grid truly had run a girdle around the earth.
Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were aghast at the forfeiture of intellectual capital to a game that seemingly traded on automatic, transactional thinking. To the New York Times in 1925, crosswords were little more than “a sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex”.9 (During 2018, the New York Times netted roughly $33 million from crossword products alone).10 In 1920s London, The Times, likewise, sneered that “everywhere, at any hour of the day, people can be seen quite shamelessly poring over the checkerboard diagrams, cudgelling their brains for a word meaning idler, or whatnot”.11
Modernist Crosswords
As newspapers were lamenting the labour frittered away on crossword puzzles, they also had cross words to say about another form of cryptic writing and time-consuming interpretation: modernist literature. With London Zoo barely recovered from the alphabetic siege, a journalist for the Aberdeen Press and Journal remarked, in a review published on November 8, 1926 about Gertrude Stein’s “The Fifteenth of November”: “Cross-word puzzles are like eating toffee to this stuff”.12 Stein’s story, glossed as “a portrait of T. S. Eliot”, reads, through squinted eyes, like someone shuttling over the rows and columns of a weekly crossword’s clues: “In this case a description. Forward and back weekly. In this case absolutely a question in question. Furnished as meaning supplied.”13 Another humorous critic writing for the Daily Mirror on “Rhymes to Cure the Cold”, that is, on literature as medicine — Longfellow, for instance, gets prescribed to insomniacs — disagrees with the toffee analogy: “Much more modern [medically] and infinitely more powerful in its effects is Gertrude Stein. Up to date disease like cross-word mania can be banished in one dose.”14
Whether an analogue to or cure for the crossword frenzy, Stein’s portrait of Eliot failed to inoculate his work from similar diagnoses. In 1939, a poetry critic at the Birmingham Daily Gazette could not decide if Eliot’s masterpiece was cryptically brilliant or merely an overwrought cryptic: “‘The Wasteland’ may be a great poem; on the other hand it may be just a rather pompous cross-word puzzle”.15 Here again we find a question asked about labour and idleness in this period: are crosswords and difficult poems worth the efforts required to elicit literary pleasure and linguistic revitalisation? Or merely a waste of time?
Ironically — or perhaps felicitously — only two decades after The Times had typecast cruciverbalists as “idlers” chasing their own tails, a bestselling Times crossword compendium included a clue for IDLERS, which T. S. Eliot failed to solve, angrily scoring himself an “X” in the margin:  ※※Indexed under…X (letter)as a mark of failure
20. Written by Johnson; edited by Jerome. Unlike bees and ants (6)
Eliot only got as far as the crossing letters, which he correctly reckoned to be ▢🄳▢🄴▢🅂.16 He had seemingly forgotten Samuel Johnson’s The Idler (despite having written on Johnson throughout his career), as well as Jerome K. Jerome’s The Idler (despite having been his neighbour in Marlow between 1917–1920), which, alongside a nod to nature’s busiest workers — the classical models of allusion itself — yielded the answer. Eliot’s voracious appetite for puzzles certainly seemed idling (or even addling) to many of his colleagues, who often found him smuggling The Times crossword into “tedious” editorial meetings under the table.17 Undeterred by Ezra Pound’s disdain for such games as “an abomination” in his ABC of Reading (1934), Eliot held the cryptic crossword in enough esteem to consider “finding a reference to myself and my works in The Times crossword” a crowning achievement, aspiring to a rank on the same allusive food chain in which he had chewed, without satisfaction, over Johnson and Jerome.18
Flummoxed by bees and ants, T. S. Eliot nevertheless wound up as a fly. In a strange misdirection of his ambition to an afterlife in the crossword, he is often abbreviated and doubled to clue TSETSE, an African insect known for transmitting insomnia. How apt that the author of The Waste Land, skewered as a “maggot breeding in the corruption of poetry” by F. L. Lucas in 1923, should metamorphose posthumously into a tsetse.19 Eliot’s magnum opus may have struck Lucas as a “toad”, but Eliot actively embraced animal personae throughout his career, not only as the Old Possum behind a Book of Practical Cats (1939), but also as a March Hare in his juvenalia, T. S. Apteryx (a kind of flightless kiwi) in his articles for The Egoist, and familiarly as “the elephant” amongst his co-workers.20 He addressed letters to Ezra Pound with “Dear Rabbit”, and while preparing to publish Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa” for Faber, wondered if Pound was “maybe not a Rabit at all but a Gerboa a Little Animil wich I understan does illustrate the Quantum Theory by being at two Places at once even if he don’t understand it” [sic].21 ※※Indexed under…RabbitEzra Pound as
In the cryptic crosswords Eliot enjoyed, creatures could indeed behave multiplicitously; like Schrödinger’s Cat (or, indeed, Eliot’s fondness for playing Possum), animals could quantum leap between being alive or dead, vegetable or mineral, real or fictional, rabbit or jerboa. Take, for example, ten randomly sampled clues for CAT or DOG from cryptics in the broadsheets of the last fifty years:
1. Leo caught both sides of argument (3)2. Best friend rejected god (3)3. Maybe Lion King not shown in Barrow? (3)4. Do good as a follower (3)5. Pet fur has nothing removed (3)6. Hound party girl initially (3)7. A natural killer disturbed in the act (3)8. Shadow boxer, maybe (3)9. Being crafty, occasionally (3)10. Perhaps setter ultimately tried to ring (3)
Not one of these clues mentions cats or dogs, yet through the quiet conspiracy of syntactic misbehaviour, all of them yield a precise answer (given in the footnotes).22 They are, and they aren’t, animals. In a 1915 poem, “Portrait of a Lady”, Eliot daydreamed of being footloose from animal taxonomy:
And I must borrow every changing shapeTo find expression. . . dance, dance,Like a dancing bear,Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.23
The CAT and DOG clues exemplify the expressive opportunities licensed by letting language dance promiscuously between categories. Each clue is straitjacketed by its obligation to solubility, but the endless possibilities of wordplay supply new opportunities to wriggle free. Letters and lookalikes — collaged from idiomatic, sporting, classical, allusive, and glyphic shorthands — form unlikely alliances, aggregated from vocabularies momentarily in dialogue with one another.
In his cutting review of The Waste Land, then, Lucas’ comment that “a poem that has to be explained in notes is not unlike a picture with ‘This is a dog’ inscribed beneath” must have been particularly stinging to Eliot. Not only did it needle his pet preferences (Eliot was firmly team cat), but it also revealed how Lucas misunderstood the pleasure produced by both crosswords and difficult literature, as William Empson implied in a comparison between “obscure puzzles” and “obscure poetry” in The Gathering Storm (1940).24 One poem in Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats seems to claw back at Lucas with its tongue-in-cheek refrain: “Again I must remind you that / A dog’s a dog — A CAT’S A CAT.”25 Unbidden by nominative determinism, the beasts of Eliot’s poetry, personae, and puzzles were under no such obligations, free to hurdle freely across arbitrary Linnean boundaries; free, as it were, to cross-breed.
Torquemada’s Crossbred Bestiaries
The cryptic crossword was still inchoate during the career of Edward Powys Mathers, the English translator and poet, who popularised the difficult form and wrote under the alias Torquemada, after the Spanish inquisitor. His style of puzzle delighted in exploiting the materiality of language to revive words from the inert familiarity into which they had fallen: taking the modernist injunction to “make it new” and defamiliarise deadened language as a principle of radical reassembly, rather than mere refreshment.
Animals real and imaginary, hybrid and crossbred, abound in Torquemada’s puzzles, granted a kind of furtive camouflage amidst the foliage of ambiguity. In a plain crossword, the name of an animal is an endpoint to which the clue must point in a straight line — to extend Lucas’ metaphor, “This is a dog (3)” [DOG] — whereas the cryptic pegs its mischief on wilful misdirection — “This is certainly not a dog (3) [DOG]. The key to a good cryptic, wrote Torquemada, is to make the solver think that they are solving one kind of clue when they are “actually doing nothing of the kind, and you can, for a little, postpone the inevitable end”.26 Delayed gratification, staked on the striptease of ambiguity, staves off instrumentalised meaning, diverting the “inevitable end” both in a temporal and teleological sense. Against the baldness of the American quick style, which Torquemada thought “too easy to hold for long the attention of anyone concerned with and interested in words”, he relished the opportunity to turn words on their heads.27 In doing so, his cryptic grids created all manner of strange beast, becoming little Punnett squares for crossbreeding animals, real and imaginary alike.
It is in a Torquemada grid, indeed, that we come across one of Dr. Seuss’s prized specimens, the Lorax, a full forty years before Dr. Seuss believed he had coined it —“I looked at the drawing board, and that’s what he was!”, or so thought the children’s book author.28
24. With enough beer and bromide and borax25 & 30. To fill a crustacean’s thorax27. Any may sheep can be28 & 31. In a threefold degree29. Concealed from the fangs of the Lorax
The rules of the puzzle — named “By the Waters of Shannon” (1934) in reference to Edward Lear’s nonsense oeuvre — dictate that “clues consist of one word or consecutive words in each line”.29 Each quintet of five consecutive clues are formatted as a sequence of limericks. The clues are not to be taken at face value. The answers are, in this stanza, ALE, PEREION, EWE, TREBLE, and HID, masked synonymously amid the continuous verse. The solver poses as a literary critic, performing a caricature of close reading to unlock a secret. It cannot be claimed definitively that Seuss magpied Torquemada’s cryptid — though, suggestively, he studied at Oxford during the peak of Torquemada’s popularity — but it is intriguing that two writers in the service of silliness would invest a fictional animal with the same name.
Animals have always held a certain reverence in the crossword. In the late composer Stephen Sondheim’s guide to the British cryptic for American readers, he caricatures quick crosswords in The Daily News and the New York Times as requiring knowledge of the “Bantu hartebeest” (the KONGONI, an African antelope).30 Grids are crowded with the ASP, EFT, ELAND, GNU, IBEX, NYALA, OKAPI, and XENURUS: animals that have obtained a peculiar hyperreality in the public consciousness, appearing in crosswords more often than in conversation. A 1934 letter from P. G. Wodehouse even credits a crossword setter with “putting the good old emu back into circulation”, embalmed in the rag-tag bestiary of the newsprint puzzle, where the unique character of an animal is, ultimately, subordinate to its unique, alphabetic characters.31 Torquemada, on the other hand, themed many of his experiments around the shapes of animals, preserving their bodies as well as their names — as Vladimir Nabokov had done in a 1926 letter to Véra, which contained a puzzle that looked like a butterfly.
Only two years after the critic Louis Untermeyer slammed writers including T. S. Eliot and James Joyce for being part of the “crossword-puzzle-school”, Torquemada’s Cross-Words in Rhyme for Those of Riper Years (1925) pioneered the verse puzzle, where every single clue is formatted as a metrically regular rhyming couplet.32 Each grid in Cross-Words in Rhyme is designed as a kind of concrete poem, where the lattice of solutions — disparate words drawn into surprising compatibility — forms an (often animal) image. “The Swan” begins self-referentially by telling the solver “I am the cross-word setter’s base device / For making non-existent words suffice” (ANAGRAM).33 Later in the grid Torquemada remixes a nursery rhyme to clue a short word:
29. As hours in days, so many merulaeFound living tombs in me, but did not die.34
Knowing that “merulae” refers to blackbirds is certainly tricky, but the sing-song cadence of the couplet brings to life its solution, PIE, based on “Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds”. The birds are alive, entombed inside a pie; paradoxically, the pie is alive, entombed inside the image of a swan. The crossword apparatus, like George Steiner’s archetypal poet, is constitutionally “a neologist, a recombinant wordsmith. . . a passionate resuscitator of buried or spectral words”.35 Bird inside pie, pie inside bird: both are “encrypted” (etymologically referring to burial) by the setter, and resurrected by the attention of the solver.
The entangled difficulties of the cryptic crossword, then, provided a uniquely vital opportunity for defamiliarising language: for reheating, as it were, Bushmiller’s alphabet soup, and letting the animals run rampant. Whether “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land”, as in The Waste Land, or breeding bird-pie fractals, the experimental aspects of literary modernism found extreme expression in cryptics, which took literature and letters alike as their raw materials. In his Puzzle Book (1934), Torquemada gave as his exemplar clue “I made self into poet” (MASEFIELD, a British poet whose surname recombines the letters in “I made self”), achieving anagrammatically the very metamorphosis trumpeted by the clue.36 Combinatorial, cleverly arranged letters could disclose portals into surprising realities. In this regard, Torquemada owed a great deal to the language games waged in the nonsense literature of the nineteenth century, which, in turn, also influenced modernist poetry, namely Eliot’s more-playful verse.
Lewis Carroll’s Doublets (ca. 1879) demanded a similarly interactive hand in making evolution come to life, turning APE into MAN, or FISH into BIRD by morphological increments, as if speeding up Darwinian selection to the pace of handwriting.37 If, as Eliot put it, nonsense literature employed “a parody of sense” rather than “a vacuity of sense”, then Torquemada took this sideways slant to its fullest extent.38 In “The Bat”, he apes Carroll: “What he was me, that black thing in the middle, / A hatter once confessed to be a riddle”. The solution, AT, as Torquemada explains, refers to the Mad Hatter asking “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, / How I wonder what you’re at” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with “that black thing in the middle” singling out the zoomorphic, batty cavity in the heart of the grid itself.
Broken Knowledge and Aphoristic Grace
In a moving obituary for Torquemada, written by his widow Rosamond Mathers, she recalls his habit for overwriting inert objects with a certain personality: “All the things he ordinarily used were apt to take on the qualities of toys; he had a happy way of naming all the common household objects so that each had its temperament, predominantly mischievous or benevolent”.39 Torquemada, we are told, was not content with things staying in their lanes, and preferred to be “confronted by a haphazard collection of words” than a neat one when he plotted his puzzles. She remembers him “drawing marginal decorations in vari-coloured chalks while he broods on some uninspiring word”, a behaviour that would ultimately be reciprocated by his legion solvers, including J. R. R. Tolkien, whose crossword doodles were recently exhibited by the Bodleian Library.
While going through his more than thirty thousand clues for The Observer in preparation for the posthumous publication of Torquemada: 112 Best Crossword Puzzles (1942), Mathers was astonished to find singular words “cropping up fifty times and more” without replicated wordplay: “it was astonishing how he varied the clue”, she notes, remarking on his gift for “using words in a sense remote from the intention from their author”.40 The epigraph to Cross-Words for Riper Years exemplifies the latter trait, cheekily recontextualising a line attributed to “Anne Wordsworth” for comic effect: “Children, remember each Cross Word / Is written in a dread unearthly Book”. The same is true of his prevailing fondness for animals. When Torquemada was not structuring grids around animals, or penning clues which secretly hatched them, he would enlist their help in all manner of games. “Product of a noise many associated with lobster” yields MAYONNAISE (an anagrammatical “product” of “a noise many”), while “Sound of embrace a crocodile in secret” gave HUGGERMUGGER (a homophone for “hug a mugger”, making use of “crocodile” in slang).41
Reducing the appeal of a word game to a few words is almost self-defeating, but Sondheim came close when he said the British cryptic combined “literary cleverness, humour, even a pseudo-aphoristic grace”.42 Sondheim’s compound adjective refractures an aphoristic mode that, to Francis Bacon, was already “a broken knowledge, inviting men to inquire further”.43 Torquemada’s cryptics implored their solvers to participate in unfamiliarity: to join a collaborative meaning-making based not only on close reading, but in turn, close writing and close arithmetic, where even the most unremarkable words can be seen anew. Sondheim’s antelope may have remained a KONGONI in the “bald clues” of the United States, but uncaged by the cryptic style he favoured, it could flee into whimsical free association with its lexical neighbours; it could, as it were, elope with the ants that escaped T. S. Eliot.
When it came to the affinity between the modernist puzzle and the modernist poem, Torquemada didn’t mince his words. Or, rather, he minced his words very selectively to make the same point: “In shape nothing more than a poet”. The solution is OVOID, a “shape” generated by adding “nothing” (O) to “a poet” (OVID). Torquemada performs a miniaturised Metamorphoses, reconstituting a literary object, and hatching a new adjective most commonly used to describe eggs, and thereby regeneration itself. The clue is alive with association, and nudges the distractible imagination of the solver one way, while its surface inconspicuously leads elsewhere. The attention nurtured by wordplay, a device for defamiliarity based on the bizarre contingencies embedded in language, leavens the word and world alike with surprising potential. Dispensing penny-drop-moments like arcade coin pushers, the best clues reward a reader not with anything empirically valuable, but instead with the giddy excitement of watching words build up, build up, and topple into surprising new riches.
Postscript44
1. Doublespeak in accord protecting large union (9)2. Editing out lines, Lamb guilty over current vagueness (9)3. Imprecision by a doctor, one responsible for cutting trainee (9)4. Uncertainty after my BA and TUI flights essentially exploded (9)5. Occasionally calm, B. B. King quaintly produces doubtful tone (9)6. In the morning, chap who goes both ways welcomes sex with mysterious character (9)7. Postgraduate rebuffed extensive university computer support with variable confusion (9)
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 12, 2022

author: Roddy Howland Jackson


text:
Circassian Beauty in the American Sideshow

By Betsy Golden Kellem
September 16, 2021

Among the “human curiosities” in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum was a supposed escapee from an Ottoman harem, a figure marketed as both the pinnacle of white beauty and an exoticised other. Betsy Golden Kellem investigates the complex of racial and cultural stereotypes that made the Circassian beauty such a sideshow spectacle.

If you happened to wander the puzzle-box warren of exhibit halls and saloons that made up Phineas Taylor Barnum’s American Museum in the mid-1800s, no one would have blamed you for feeling bombarded. Frankly, that was sort of the point: this five-story destination in lower Manhattan was a living, thrumming organism that strove to do nothing so much as overwhelm the senses. For a quarter’s admission, visitors could take in fine portraiture and exotic taxidermy, live theater and a lemonade stand, antiquities both real and imaginary, wax sculptures, stereographs, a Canadian beluga whale in the basement aquarium, and — capitalizing on an American strand of the Victorian-era “deformito-mania” — a rotating assortment of human, biological rarities, whose unusual bodies demonstrated the breadth and depth of creation.1
Some of these “living wonders” walked the venue’s halls, speaking with guests and offering souvenir carte-de-visite photographs for sale. Other performers were presented to the public in grand staged receptions known as “levees”. Alongside the likes of conjoined twins, a seven-foot “giantess”, the bearded lady, and the celebrated General Tom Thumb in his Napoleon costume was an act that endured through Barnum’s era and into the twentieth-century sideshow: an enigmatic, captivating woman known as the Circassian beauty, whose only “deformity” was her lack of imperfection.
A staple of dime museums and traveling shows throughout the nineteenth century, Circassian beauties were alleged to be from the Caucasus Mountain region, and were famous for both their legendary looks and their large, seemingly Afro-textured hairstyles. The Circassian beauty was an attraction that required audiences to hold a number of ultimately unresolvable stereotypes in tension with each other. These women were presented as chaste, but were also billed as former harem slaves. They were supposedly of noble lineage but appeared as sideshow attractions. And they were displayed to predominantly white audiences for an exoticism that traded on hair associated with Black women, which came coupled with the paradoxical assurance that, being Caucasian, Circassian beauties represented the height of white racial “purity”.
The pseudoscience of race in the nineteenth century, the development of mass media and entertainment venues at that time, and the employment of women who performed race as though it were a theater role all combined in a jarring and beguiling mix of stereotypes that kept the Circassian beauty attraction going for decades, and has had a lasting impact on how we think about race, class, and gender today.
This particular conception of Circassian beauty can be traced to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a German theorist who used craniometry — the measuring of human skulls — to address the then-pressing scientific question of whether racial variety was evidence of separate species within humanity. Blumenbach firmly dismissed this idea, writing that the color of one’s skin was “an adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species”.2
This is not to say that everyone was equal in esteem according to the German craniometrist. Blumenbach advocated for a hierarchy that considered people of his own race to be humanity’s poster children. Assessing and comparing the contours of various human skulls, Blumenbach ultimately arrived at a taxonomy of five racial groups, among which he considered persons from the Black Sea region to be the physical ideal.3 He coined the term “Caucasian” to describe this group, writing that
I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind.4
Blumenbach considered this Caucasian population, spread across Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa, the “primeval” (or “autochthonous”) human race, which branched into four other categories: Mongolian (Central Asian), American (Native), Malay (Southeast Asian), and Ethiopian (sub-Saharan African).5 It was, he argued, environmental conditions that caused a “degeneration” of the fair Caucasian original into peoples of color.
To support his assertion that white skin had to be humanity’s default starting point, Blumenbach needed little more data than the fact that European ladies who spent their winters indoors exhibited “a brilliant whiteness”, while those who “exposed themselves freely to the summer sun and air” quickly ended up with a solid tan. “If then under one and the same climate the mere difference of the annual seasons has such influence in changing the colour of the skin”, he reasoned, ad absurdum, “is there anything surprising in the fact that climates. . . according to their diversity should have the greatest and most permanent influence over national colour”.6 The Ethiopian and Mongolian races Blumenbach considered “extreme varieties”, with Native American and Malay, respectively, as “intermediate” classifications between these extremes and the Caucasian ideal.7
Blumenbach may not have become especially famous, and craniometry (along with phrenology, a sister pseudoscience devoted to divining personality from the bumps on one’s skull) only had a short period of dubious fame, but the stereotype of idealized Caucasian beauty caught on fast. Circassia, a region of the Caucasus Mountains, became ground zero for Western notions of white beauty. Throughout the nineteenth century, books and magazines extolled the virtues of fair, buxom women in draped gowns and peasant jewelry; stout, bearded soldiers with daggers at their belts, and a certain warmly exotic way of mountain life.8 A smattering of nineteenth-century “Circassian” branded products promised women they could achieve Circassian beauty in their own home: hair dye to turn light-colored tresses into a “soft, glossy & natural” brown or black, Circassian fabric to achieve the right gauzy look, and various skin products promising “that whiteness, transparency and color so highly prized by all civilized nations”.9 The endorsement of “the elite of our cities, the Opera, [and] the stage” was supposed to be reassuring, but the promise of removing freckles, acne, sunburn, “Moth”, and roughness suggests such lotions were little more than a chemical belt sander for one’s face.10
Circassia was more than the rugged, simplistic paradise one might have imagined from cosmetics or travelogues. The target of invasion and ethnic cleansing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Russia and Ottoman Turkey encroached by land and sea, Circassia was invaded during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus and formally placed under Russian control following the end of the Crimean War in 1856. During this period (just before Barnum’s Caucasian beauty appeared on the scene), the Russian Empire carried out systematic murder and expulsion against the region’s predominantly Muslim communities.11 By the middle 1860s, the remaining population was largely and forcibly evacuated to the Ottoman Empire, where overcrowding, price-gouging, and enslavement were enduring risks for Circassian refugees.
There was, concurrently, a mid-century Western fascination with melodramatic narratives of white slavery, popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. Art and drama explored the horror-movie allure of brute men trafficking in the doom of innocent, blushing virgins (suffice it to say that the reality of human trafficking was far broader, harsher, and less discriminating). In the U.S., this manifested in many ways. The sculptor Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave, a statue of a nude woman chained at the wrists by Turkish captors, was adopted as an emblem by abolitionists and seen on tour by more than one hundred thousand Americans in the 1840s.12 Race and slavery were explored in plays like Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, the 1859 story of a young southern white woman whose marriage plans are thwarted when it is revealed that her mother is one of the plantation’s enslaved workers, and who, despite passing for white, is then put up for sale with the assets of her father’s estate. (British audiences got a happy ending, but in American performances the girl commits suicide, avoiding even staged approval of mixed marriage.)13 These audiences liked to raise their collective heart-rate in a safe environment, playing out histrionic fears of subjugation and integration through entertainment.
It was against this backdrop that, in 1865, P. T. Barnum introduced American Museum patrons to Zalumma Agra, the “Star of the East”, the first “Circassian beauty”. Her face framed in a halo of frizzy hair, this alluring young lady appeared in levees at the American Museum dressed in a trimmed, three-quarter-length dress with blousy sleeves, a swath of stocking visible above her mid-calf boots. She occasionally completed the outfit with a sash of luxurious fabric or a moon-shaped headdress.
A biographical pamphlet sold to patrons laid out the story of Agra’s childhood flight from Russian incursion into her native land, and how that path somehow brought a woman who claimed royal descent to the sort of New York entertainment venue that also offered pet taxidermy. Agra was said to have been orphaned by invaders as a child, and discovered by John Greenwood Jr, Barnum’s right-hand man, on the streets of Constantinople among masses of refugees. “Her marvellous beauty and pleasant, intelligent manners at once arrested his attention”, declared the nameless pamphlet author, “while the extraordinary peculiarity of her hair challenged his interest and his admiration”.14
Greenwood, captivated by the child and hoping to save her from “the beautiful but ignorant habitat of a pagan’s harem”, negotiated with the girl’s friends and Turkish authorities to become her guardian, providing tutoring and accommodations to help her grow into the “thorough and lavishly educated woman” of eighteen then entertaining at the American Museum. No one was especially encouraged to inquire in further detail: Agra’s promoters insisted that, since she had left Circassia as a child, her homeland existed in her mind as “an imperfect and confused dream”, and she remembered little of her native language.15
As one might expect, the true story was a bit different, and Agra’s promoters took full advantage of the interpretive space afforded by imperfect details and confused dreams. John Greenwood had indeed gone east on a scouting trip in 1864, looking to engage an allegedly horned woman. Greenwood found no one worth exhibiting, and Barnum instructed him via letter to instead look for “a beautiful Circassian girl if you can get one”.16 Barnum, in his autobiography, says little about what followed, except that Greenwood disguised himself as a slave-buyer and saw “a large number of Circassian girls and women” in Constantinople.17 In private correspondence Barnum was more frank about his willingness to conveniently ignore the evils of the Ottoman slave economy if it got him a guaranteed hit: “If you can also buy a beautiful Circassian woman”, he wrote Greenwood, “do so if you think best; or if you can hire one or two at reasonable prices, do so if you think they are pretty and will pass for Circassian slaves . . . if she is beautiful, then she may take in Paris or in London or probably both. But look out that in Paris they don’t try the law and set her free. It must be understood she is free”.18 The Circassian beauty made her debut not long afterward, presented as the result of Greenwood’s expedition. An alternative origin story, uncovered by the disability scholar Robert Bogdan in his 1988 book Freak Show, offers an explanation that seems far more likely for the sort of Circassian lady who spoke in a perfect American accent, and the sort of showman who was not exactly known for his infinite patience: Greenwood came back empty-handed, and the American Museum (not wanting to waste a good story) decided to cast a “Circassian” beauty from the local talent roster.19
That the woman in question had distinctively abundant hair was, as best the historical record can tell us, initially incidental.20 As the act grew in popularity, though, her style created a stereotype for all subsequent women performing as Circassian beauties (completely divorced from the style of actual Circassians): frizzy hairdos, the larger the better. Whether or not “Circassian” performers were originally from the Black Sea region was generally irrelevant, and in truth the role was a character fiction, played by women — often lower class and recently arrived to the U.S. from Europe — who washed their hair in beer to achieve the desired look. Soon enough, a succession of women appeared in public performance as Circassian beauties, with a carefully crafted foreign allure and a particular visual script: voluminous Afro-like hair, exoticized peasant costumes, a bit of skin (more as time went on: dresses eventually gave way to ruffly shorts and tights), and a name that usually began with the letter “Z” — Zula Zeleah, Zoe Zobedia, Zuruby Hannum, and Zobeide Luti, to name a few.
The Circassian character — and she was a character, to be sure, as much as any dramatic role — was presented as the pinnacle of beauty and evolution. But this ideal white woman was also an unfamiliar curiosity from a foreign culture with hair that connoted exoticism and minstrelsy. We have no idea if Barnum retained the hairstyle part of the act on purpose, in a direct effort to imitate Black hair or parody Black identity; nevertheless, the retention irretrievably linked the Circassian Beauty with the racist associations and biases circulating in American society. This entertainment effectively took the prior vogue of Circassian beauty, which had far more conventional aspirations (selling glossy brunette hair dye and flowery journalism), and added a thick layer of Circassian whiteness. In using large textured hairstyles and suggestive poses, Circassian beauties called forth cultural myths about promiscuity, tribalism, and social worthiness, borrowing qualities from other racist stereotypes, like the “Jezebel”, a lascivious seductress. “The ethnic kink”, wrote author Charles D. Martin in The White African American Body, referencing the Circassian beauty’s hair, “supplied a visible bridge between the normalized, exalted whiteness that conferred citizenship and the distinguishing marks of racial difference that facilitated slavery. The emancipated white body still bore the evidence of its dark-bodied captivity.”21 The idea of white beauty relying on non-white stereotypes — that whiteness, taken to its archetypal extreme, blends Black and Caucasian features — is perhaps the strangest, most puzzling, and cunning facet of the Circassian beauty act.22
Within the sideshow ecosystem, the Circassian beauty was more complex than her colleagues. She was not celebrated in her individual identity like Anna Swan the giantess,23 nor was she exaggerated into racialized or ableist inhumanity like many “ethnic curiosities” of the day. Audiences could view her as morally upright, having escaped the harem for a Western lifestyle, but still gasp at her past proximity to prostitution and “pagan” sensuality. Rescued from a life of indentured, sexual slavery (so the story went), the woman began anew in the United States at the very moment that this nation, built on chattel slavery, passed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
At the time Barnum debuted his Circassian beauty, it was an entertainment consistent with a general culture of racial anxiety. In show business, as in science and in the explosive political sphere, matters of race held a particular charge. In the middle 1860s, the increasingly violent politics of abolition and its detractors added a menacing edge to life in New York, which, despite its northern location, was conspicuously unfriendly toward President Lincoln and his refusal to make peace with the South. New York mayor Fernando Wood had suggested in 1861 that the city secede from both New York state and the Union — a “venal and corrupt master” — entirely.24 That did not happen, but New Yorkers rioted in reaction to the federal draft for four days in July 1863, and Confederate press threatening to burn the city in response to Union offensives in the South assured readers that “The men to execute the work [raze New York] are already there”.25 The city remained so staunchly hostile to Lincoln administration policy and abolitionism that Union general Benjamin Butler, nicknamed “The Beast”, was posted to the city along with thousands of soldiers to ensure peace during the 1864 Presidential election. And all manner of then-current arts and “sciences”, from phrenology to miscegenation theory, attempted to explain and reinforce a scheme of racial hierarchy that overlaid itself onto warring political agendas.26
The public’s guilty fascination with white slavery narratives only boosted the Circassian beauty’s popularity, and further crowded the inseparable braid of historical concerns and contemporary biases involved in her exhibition. No one interpretation seems sufficient, yet all, taken together, do not arrive at clarity. In addition to the politics of American slavery and the pervasive social fear of miscegenation, there was the romanticized supposition that enslaved harem women were engaged in a “luxurious and mindless” state of posh lounges, scanty clothing, and day after day of idle indulgence, while Circassian men had to be rough primitives who “value their women less than their stirrups” despite the women’s legendary beauty.27 These stories invoke questions about Orientalism, making enemies of foreign sultans, and showing Circassian ladies as subjects in need of colonizing influence; and they glorify non-intellectual domesticity in a thumbs-up to conventional Victorian-era womanhood. This entertainment was a mixtape that suited the current mood: enough truth about Circassian slavery to ground the story in feasibility; enough of a racialized visual language to invoke race and slavery in American politics; Orientalist harem stories to justify white colonialist hierarchy; and re-education narratives to reinforce female subordination and norms of conduct.
Barnum’s American Museum was an arena in which such questions regarding performance, social structure, and racial status could be considered. This sort of museum model, which purported to show the wonders of the wider world to a mass of people who did not have the ability to travel, was helpful insofar as it democratized access to knowledge (the American Museum drew crowds on par with modern Disneyland); but it was a highly curated presentation, in which people and groups could all too easily be fetishized or tokenized.28 And while Barnum’s reputation as an exploitative sideshow huckster is not entirely deserved — he was a reputable employer, paid well, and insisted his employees were “living wonders” rather than freaks — race undeniably mattered in how performers of color were presented to the paying public. The same P. T. Barnum who in 1865 would speak before the Connecticut legislature to lobby for Black voting rights nonetheless continued to rely on the profitable prevalence of lazy stereotype and exoticism in paid entertainment.29 (For Barnum, as with many prominent men of his era, anti-slavery did not necessarily mean pro-equality, and his unwillingness to alienate any paying customer meant that he avoided taking moral stances on the stage that were justly called for.) Zalumma Agra and other Circassian beauties would have been exhibited under the same roof as the likes of the Lucasie family who had albinism, the “Living Chinese Family”, or “What Is It?”, a piece of racist, pseudoscientific theater in which a Black man played the role of a supposed “missing link” between apes and humans. All of this assumed and proclaimed a certain white social standard, and allowed viewers to feel comfortably superior to the humans who were, in their eyes, reduced to “curiosities” on display.
The stereotype of the Circassian beauty continued in sideshows for quite some time. Dime museums and circuses claimed to have the original Zalumma Agra on display for decades, well past the point of feasibility (not that anyone seemed to mind). In the 1880s, when Barnum was enjoying later-life fame as a circus entrepreneur, his “Greatest Show on Earth” typically included a Circassian woman in its sideshow, and one of the most famous — Zoe Meleke — offered a pamphlet that told the same life story that had accompanied Zalumma Agra decades earlier.30 Into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the Circassian story had less resonance for audiences, performers often doubled as similarly exoticized snake-charmer acts, or displayed their hair as a curiosity without the romance of a Black Sea origin story: this was the case with the likes of Mademoiselle Ivy, the “Moss-Haired Girl”, and Zumigo, played by a Black performer. While the latter character’s name and hairstyle conjured her “Caucasian” predecessors, Zumigo was billed as an Egyptian, swapping peasant costumes for fancy dresses and fringed leotards.31
The legacy of the Circassian beauty endures, beginning with the fact that the word “Caucasian” is now so common in use as to be completely divorced from its origins. Today, the question of race as performance has further crossed the permeable barrier between the stage and the outside world — the Circassian woman, after all, relied not only on prevalent bias but on the suspension of disbelief that was P. T. Barnum’s stock-in-trade. More recent controversies over assumed racial identity, from Rachel Dolezal to Jessica Krug, Hache Carrillo, and Andrea Smith, have been carried out in the public sphere, where there is no ticket booth or stage curtain to signal a space of malleable truth, and where repercussions touch more than an audience or performer.32 Circassian beauties may seem like a distant relic of the Barnum era, their popularity only hinted at from the quiet of a cabinet card or carte-de-visite photograph today, but, in demonstrating the pitfalls of reducing any experience to a performed stereotype, they still contribute to our ongoing dialogue around race, community, and identity.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 16, 2021

author: etsy Golden Kellem

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
Little Switzerlands
Alpine Kitsch in England
By Seán Williams
December 8, 2021

Far from the treacherous peaks and ravines of Switzerland, Alpine cottages arose, unexpectedly, amid the hillocks and modest streams of 19th-century England. Seán Williams recovers the peculiar fad for “Little Switzerlands”, where the Romantic sublime meets countryside kitsch.

“Nothing can be uglier, per se, than a Swiss cottage, or anything more beautiful under its precise circumstances”—James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found: Sequel to Homeward Bound (1838)1

One sunny weekend earlier this year, I visited Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, with my young godson. He stood and stared in awe at the historic aeroplanes, hangared at Shuttleworth, whereas I was transported by the country estate’s Swiss Garden: into charming, if uncanny territory. The museum’s planes looked just as they do in children’s books — much to the toddler’s satisfaction. But the ornate ironmongery and the diminutive duckponds of Shuttleworth’s other main, landscaped attraction surprised me. The neatly-turfed hillocks were cute and hardly confounding by themselves, but unexpected for someone who has had the chance to experience the rugged, startling, and at times terrifying Helvetian mountains. The garden’s centrepiece was a thatched and oddly contrived “Swiss” cottage that bore little resemblance to alpine huts. A white peacock came into view as I tried to make sense of this strange scene. The bird symbolised it for me: visually compelling, yet curiously contrary to what I thought I would see.
Thinking more about Shuttleworth’s Swiss Garden after I got home led me into the eighteenth century. And not only to Switzerland, but across the borders of Europe and over to North America, before returning to England. Around 1800, a version of the aesthetic sublime turned sweet, while the pastoral, with its lakes and cottages, morphed into the picturesque: an agreeable aesthetics of landscape, framed or staged for tourists’ pleasure. James Fenimore Cooper’s characters in the novel Home as Found from 1838 complain of the architectural blight of “Swiss Cottages” afflicting the banks of the Hudson, amid a building boom in New York.2 Cooper had hiked in the Swiss Alps himself, and bemoaned an inauthentic imaginary that was now imitated across the world: for easy, uncritical, and comfortable amusement. The image of Swissness became, to use a German word, kitsch — especially in England during Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian times, when a fashion for “Little Switzerlands” peaked. We no longer had to go abroad for alpine scenery; Swiss landscapes were brought home, like souvenirs, and domesticated as ornaments for our own countryside.
Now that popular culture has climbed down from the height of that craze, we might not know what to make of Swiss Gardens in the English Shires today. Perhaps the absence of context and cultural history in our present age is a reason why we can cast an eye, at once appreciative and naïve, onto these eclectic, eccentric mountains in miniature. They’re not stunningly beautiful; they’re no longer fashionably delightful. A weird hodgepodge of styles presented as Helveticism, we can but enjoy these Little Switzerlands for whatever, wherever they are now. But what were these fairy-tale-like, small alpine attractions once upon a time?
Romantic Mountains in Miniature
The story of Swiss Gardens like the one at Shuttleworth begins in 1790, when William Wordsworth stopped, awestruck, while on a walking tour in Switzerland. He was astounded not just by the landscape, but also by an intricate model of Lake Lucerne, of the surrounding Alps, and of characterful cottages — all to scale. Wordsworth did not observe the constructed scene alone: the finely measured mountain-scape, created by the surveyor Franz Ludwig Pfyffer von Wyher, was on display to groups of tourists.3 Nor was Wordsworth the only Englishman or foreigner to traverse Swiss nature. No lonely wanderer, he was joined by a friend, Robert Jones, and accompanied by a whole generation of the European social and intellectual elite. They travelled to Switzerland in search of wonder, sublime scenery, and high ideals.
Switzerland was romanticised as the home of freedom and of intense sentimental attachment. And like most idealised concepts that people coalesce around, Swiss freedom was vague: anything to everyone, the freer space was understood in individual, political, and spiritual terms. If a nation is an “imagined community”, to speak with the theorist Benedict Anderson, then eighteenth-century Switzerland primarily emerged in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers as a mythical, arcadian place.4 A fictional idyll rather than a realistic image, this “Switzerland” could easily be packaged and moved elsewhere. Swiss authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau in French and Salomon Gessner in German shaped the country’s image in print; particularly Rousseau’s novel Julie from 1761 became a pan-European success story. Rousseau’s popularity was due, in no small part, to his depiction of an exoticised Swiss landscape that homes in on the senses. What’s more, in Julie, Switzerland stands in as a superior example of aesthetic sensuality and homeliness compared to the rest of the world:
The nearer I got to Switzerland, the more emotion I felt. The instant when from the heights of the Jura I sighted Lake Geneva was an instant of ecstasy and ravishment. The sight of my country, of that country so cherished where torrents of pleasures had flooded my heart; the air of the Alps so wholesome and pure; the sweet air of the fatherland, more fragrant than the perfumes of the Orient; that rich and fertile land, that unique countryside, the most beautiful that ever met human eye; that charming abode like nothing I had found in circling the earth; the sight of a happy and free people; the mildness of the season, the calmness of the Clime; a thousand delightful memories that reawakened all the sentiments I had tasted; all these things threw me into transports I cannot describe, and seemed to restore to me all at once the enjoyment of my entire life.5
If the strange, stylised image of Switzerland abroad began as a literary narrative, it was also shaped by linguistic, artistic, and cultural exchange. Switzerland’s German dialects may have been substituted by the Saxon (or “Meißen”) standard as a supposedly Enlightened literary language, but the landscape of the German Meißen hills was soon framed as Swiss: it was named “die Sächsische Schweiz”, or Saxon Switzerland, following comparisons by resident Swiss artists. Over in England, painters from Berne, Switzerland’s capital, toured Derbyshire to capture natural scenery, which they believed to be somehow similar to their homeland. The Swiss exported the picturesque familiarity of their native country, drawing connections with foreign cultures from that perspective.
Wordsworth, too, engaged in the pursuit of analogy. His own emotions overflowed as he composed a sonnet at the top of the Gotthard Pass about a rural legend: the apocryphal story that a cowherd’s melody, traditionally played on an alphorn, once caused a Swiss man in foreign lands to die of homesickness. Wordsworth writes that we should not interpret the folktale as “fabulous”.6 Indeed, he invokes what is often called the “Swiss illness” to explain his own longing for home: the Lake District. And so Swiss myth influenced the yearning tone of Wordsworth’s English Romanticism.
Literal comparisons between the landscapes of Switzerland and England took a little longer to gain ground, however. If, in a letter from 1790 sent from Lake Constance to his sister, Dorothy, William claimed that “the scenes of Switzerland have no resemblance to any I have found in England”, this would soon change.7 Once home, Wordsworth moulded the English scenery in response to what he had seen abroad. As much inspired by Wyler’s relief of the alpine landscape as by Helvetic myth, Wordsworth began to make realistic analogies between the Swiss and the English countryside in his poetry and criticism. Although the Lake District is geologically mountainous, its landscape is more undulating and less extreme than the four cantons that surround the Vierwaldstättersee, or Lake Lucerne. Smaller in magnitude, yet all the greater in variety, the Lake District is gentler — strong winds don’t blow you about in Cumbria as much as they can in Switzerland. “A happy proportion of component parts is indeed noticeable among the landscapes of the North of England”, writes Wordsworth in an anonymous essay that accompanied a luxury edition of prints in 1810, and which was expanded and published in his name as a Guide to the Lakes in later editions. Further, the English proportionality of mountains is “essential to a perfect picture”, and surpasses “the scenes of Scotland, and, in a still greater degree, those of Switzerland.”8
Swissness was shrunk, and overlaid onto the English countryside. Not only by Wordsworth — his analogies were already platitudinous. (In composing his Guide, Wordsworth had read Thomas West’s 1778 Guide to the Lakes, which addresses those “who have traversed the Alps” and promises that “the travelled visitor [exploring] the Cumbrian lakes and mountains, will not be disappointed”.)9 But our Lake District poet conceived a popular comparison more theoretically, staking out a claim about sublimity and smallness for those who might not have been to, and could no longer reach, Switzerland. Wordsworth prefaced his reflections in 1810 by recollecting the model he had seen in Lucerne twenty years beforehand, which he now considered from an aesthetic point of view:
The Spectator ascends a little platform, and sees mountains, lakes, glaciers, rivers, woods, waterfalls, and valleys, with their cottages, and every other object contained in them, lying at his feet; all things being represented in their appropriate colours. It may be easily conceived that this exhibition affords an exquisite delight to the imagination, tempting it to wander at will from valley to valley, mountain to mountain, through the deepest recesses of the Alps. But it supplies also a more substantial pleasure: for the sublime and beautiful region, with all its hidden treasures, and their bearings and relations to each other, is thereby comprehended and understood at once.10

As Wordsworth remembers the miniature scene, it was not only delightful, but also pleasurable in a “solid” and “substantial” way. The Alps at scale allowed him to survey the scenery in one go, like a diorama, and to understand, supposedly, its total, overall effect. Wordsworth goes on to admire a “tranquil sublimity”, which was apparently true of the English Lake District too.
For any earlier, eighteenth-century readers, seeing the sublime as sedate would have been a contradiction in terms. Sublimity, and above all the Alpine mountain-scape, was supposed to be awesome, scary. The sense of terror that lay in wait for the observer of the Alps was thanks, in part, to the enduring influence of Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise on the sublime. (His section titles say it all: Terror, Obscurity, Privation, Vastness, Infinity).11 Immanuel Kant’s equally tremendous discussion of “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublimity also transformed both aesthetic theories and intellectual alpine travellers’ experiences of his day.12 A new tranquil, more domesticated, and overly diminutive sublime, shrunk to scale, now came to define England’s rolling hills and mountains for Wordsworth — a sublimity that “depends more upon form and relation of objects to each other than upon their actual magnitude”.13 His conception of the English small sublime did not fit the existing, European grand theories — but it was an image that stuck.
Wordsworth’s analogies represented his own nation as all the better. Yet his motives did not stem merely from national competition. For most Britons during the first decade or so of the early nineteenth century, Switzerland could be accessed only in the mind. The Napoleonic wars of 1803 to 1815 meant that the tourist population in general had to retreat and stay at home. More significantly, the age of conflict was an obvious cause for patriotism. As Patrick Vincent has pointed out, in this warring period, Switzerland was now staged as a setting for anti-Jacobin morality plays in Britain.14 Although not all poets, staycationers, and armchair travellers used Switzerland as an excuse for comparative national pride, the Alps could no longer be idealised entirely.
That wartime tendency held true across Europe. The German Friedrich Schiller had also expounded on and nuanced the sublime (or das Erhabene), and he dramatized the Wilhelm Tell legend in 1804 as well, with a good degree of ambivalence. On the killing of the tyrannical overlord Geßler, Tell declares that the mountain huts (or “cottages” in the words of the mid-nineteenth century translator into English) are free of Habsburg control by proxy — and innocence is thereby safeguarded.15 Schiller’s play re-works a medieval alpine narrative of self-sufficiency and greater democratic governance, for a political present in which Switzerland had once again become a confederation (following the collapse of Napoleon’s centralised Helvetic Republic the year before, and having been a sister state of France since 1798). Significantly for a German, Schiller romanticises Swiss folklore and society as a Germanic story of liberation. Yet Wilhelm Tell is also ambiguous in its assessment of how revolutionary politics really works. The Enlightenment idyll was marred by historical reality, around the same time as the sublime was split into new sub-categories.
When peace was restored, international travel resumed. And, even as more people experienced Switzerland first-hand, the old fictions of Swiss authenticity were re-issued in the minds of many. The simple beauty and arcadian happiness of the country seemed straightforward once again. Wordsworth returned to Switzerland, accompanied by Dorothy, and his wife, Mary. Other English Romantics holidayed there as well: Percy and Mary Shelley famously stayed with Lord Byron near Lake Geneva, where they told stories to each other through the night — giving rise to Frankenstein in 1818. Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel compares Derbyshire’s Matlock to “the scenery of Switzerland; but everything is on a lower scale, and the green hills want the crown of distant white Alps”.16 In Cumberland and Westmorland, too, the titular character fancies himself “among the Swiss mountains”.17 And during correspondence written from Jura, while observing the mountains, Mary Shelley casts Switzerland’s famed alpenglow as quintessentially English: “that glowing rose-like hue which is observed in England to attend on the clouds of an autumnal sky when daylight is almost gone”.18 Literary analogies between England and Switzerland were either explicitly positive, or passing observations that went unquestioned.
Matlock in Derbyshire and the Lake District were both in demand with day-trippers and domestic holiday-makers by this time, just as the Alps were. (Jane Austen bemoaned the absence of a friend in 1817, who was “frisked off like half England, into Switzerland”.)19 In fact, Percy Shelley complained of tourists as he tried to picnic on the mountainside near Chamonix in 1816 — irritated that they made the place “another Keswick”20 — while Byron, in his journal from the same trip, recalls overhearing an English woman exclaim “‘Did you ever see anything more rural?’ — as if it was Highgate, or Hampstead, or Brompton, or Hayes”.21 Ironically, though, the Romantic writers themselves contributed to this very tourism — as travellers, and as authors whose words were taken out of their mouths and printed in pocket guides. In 1817, Byron wrote from Venice to ask Thomas Moore if he’d ever been to Dovedale in the southern Peak District, assuring him that “there are things in Derbyshire as noble as Greece or Switzerland”.22 Guidebooks soon plucked that quotation, and some changed it: in one case, in 1879, from “things” to “prospects”, implicitly relocating the view to Matlock Bath — fifteen miles or so further north.23
The Victorian travel journalist with a liberal attitude to literary lines proceeds to defend the comparison between Matlock and Switzerland in Wordsworth-like logic: “The Peak is Alpine on a reduced scale; it is Switzerland seen through a lessening lens; its hills are mountains in miniature”.24 A German guidebook to Luxembourg from 1934 that I picked up in Hay-on-Wye over the summer, a bookish Welsh border town in the small shadows of the Brecon Beacons, justifies the Petite Suisse Luxembourgeoise in the same way: smallness relative to Switzerland, and magnitude (at a mere 400m) when compared to the surrounding Luxembourg flatlands. The idea of pocket-sized Swiss mountains was pan-European, then, but in England it had an especially poetic inflection from the nation’s literary canon. The above line from the English journalist is similar wording to that which Percy Shelley had used when writing to Thomas Peacock from the Alps in 1816: “The scene, at the distance of half-a-mile from Cluses, differs from that of Matlock in little else than in the immensity of its proportions”.25
The legacy of Romantic musing has not only been canonical literature about Switzerland, it seems, but signposts, postcards, and tourist brochures as well. The slogans of the tourist trade were thus also the commonplaces of English Romanticism. Old postcards in Buxton Museum caption Matlock as “Little Switzerland”, or as a location with a “Switzerland view”.26 Copy-writers in Southern England seized on the words of Romantic poet Robert Southey, for the so-called Little or English Switzerland in Devon’s Lynton and Lynmouth. Of the latter, he wrote: “the beautiful little village — which I am assured by one who is familiar with Switzerland, resembles a Swiss village”.27 Southey saw an Alpine likeness without ever having seen the real thing himself. These analogies became practically contagious, passed by word of mouth, and are still employed by the tourist industry to this day. Why else does a cable car dangle above the A6 in Matlock Bath, Derbyshire? Installed in the 1980s, the visitor attraction seeks to capitalise on the area’s Swissophilia that stretches back in time over two centuries.
Swiss Kitsch Everywhere
It was in this context that Swiss Gardens were dug and designed throughout England, both on private estates for the aristocracy and on land for attractions marketed at the general public. These ornate gardens centred on a stylised “Swiss Cottage”. Inspired by Rousseau’s novel Julie, Marie Antoinette had a little Swiss cottage built at Versailles in the eighteenth century already, complete with cows and even a real-life dairy maid. The word chalet was borrowed into English from Swiss French, and by the mid-nineteenth century follies and cottages ornés were erected almost everywhere in a picturesque, and only nominally Helvetian style — from the cosmopolitan centres and out into the provinces. London’s “Swiss Cottage” goes back to a pub that was built in the Swiss chalet style in 1804. Extraordinary examples of Swiss Cottages can be found in Tipperary, Ireland, or at Endsleigh in Devon, England — which was designed around 1815, and is rented out as holiday accommodation today. In the Peak District, there is a village of Swiss chalets and a cottage-style school-house in Illam, Staffordshire (near Dovedale), and a Swiss Cottage by a lake on the Chatsworth Estate as well, built in 1842. The latter is also let for holiday amusement.
At first, all of these odd cottages looked similar. Hardly quintessentially Swiss, but quaint for some visitors. John Ruskin was scathing in The Poetry of Architecture around 1837, however, about “what modern architects erect, when they attempt to produce what is, by courtesy, called a Swiss cottage.” He wryly opposes, on aesthetic grounds, “the modern building known in Britain by that name”.28 Ruskin is right insofar as the Swiss Chalet was appropriated by national architectures. It differed throughout Europe, but was generally regionally consistent: in Norway, for example, Swiss cottages were wooden structures — most magnificently seen in the Hotel Union Øye, constructed in 1891, and the Kviknes Hotel from 1913. In England and among the Irish aristocracy, the fashion often signified a thatched building with an acutely gabled roof, and usually bow windows — until even English Victorian terraced houses had “Swiss Cottage” etched into their brickwork. In Britain, architectural Swissness soon became but a name.
Leaving aside architectural adaptations, Ruskin’s main objection was that the Swiss Cottage abroad had always been inauthentic and contrived. He repeatedly describes its ornamental features, derisively, as “neat”. The structure aspires to the picturesque, but fails. The idea doesn’t work, he writes, “the whole being surrounded by a garden full of flints, burnt bricks and cinders, with some water in the middle, and a fountain in the middle of it, which won’t play; accompanied by some goldfish, which won’t swim; and by two or three ducks, which will splash.”29 Although Ruskin had an airbrushed view of real life in the Alps, it is true that the Swiss cottages of England and elsewhere were fakes. But the foundation of Switzerland they built upon in the popular consciousness was itself a fiction of authenticity: the literary and artistic image of a nation from the late eighteenth century, now evoked for the nineteenth century in new Swiss stories of homesickness and an Alpine state that in the end apparently offers the best of both educated and civilised, as well as sublimely natural worlds. (Joanna Spyri’s Heidi was translated into English in 1882.)
Such a stylised Swissness became more and more fashionable over the late nineteenth century, and moved ever-further away from any plausible comparison to Switzerland — or its fictions that continued to influence public perception of the country. Around 1900, Swissophilia in England was at its height: as ornaments at home and as local holiday amusements. On the Norfolk Broads, for instance — an implausibly flat place for the Alps — there were at least two “Little Switzerlands”. The names of these attractions seem to have signalled little other than neatly landscaped waterside parklands for public pleasure.
Ruskin would lay the blame for the kitschy craze of Swiss cottages and Little Switzerlands at the foothills of modernity. Europe around 1800 set mass consumer culture and increasing commercial tourism in motion. And once the train tracks were laid, more and more working- and middle-class day-trippers flocked to places such as Matlock from industrial cities like Manchester. Switzerland became more accessible, too, because of the tours of Thomas Cook, the new railways, and cable cars. But Ruskin erred in seeing the antidote as authenticity and the genuine arts. We should remember that it was Wordsworth and his Romantic circle who first made the Alps less terrifying or remote for the British, and the foreign more familiar. And yet these authors were both participants in, and critics of, a nascent capitalist society and an emergent culture of European travel which was briefly paused by the Napoleonic wars — with tropes packaged up and brought home. Causal connections here are complex, so it suffices to say that the amusingly acerbic but simplistically anti-modern, pro-arts criticism of Ruskin doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny.
Perhaps an easier question for our purposes is: what was wrong, aesthetically speaking, with the conventional, if unauthentic, experience of Swissness in nineteenth-century England? Why criticise Swiss kitsch? The German philosopher Ludwig Giesz conceives of kitsch as not only, always, or even necessarily about a lack of authenticity. His list of kitschy characteristics from 1960 maps onto Little Switzerlands well: for him, kitsch is a sentimental idyll with pseudo- or vague ideals that feel real. It’s about making the sublime insignificant and unthreatening. It renders the exotic everyday; the uncertain quotidian. There is no transcendence of the trivial.30 Such qualities may have been true for the experiences of Little Switzerlands in earlier centuries, but not nowadays. Swiss kitsch is problematic when we compare it to the original Switzerland — but not if we don’t perceive a relationship between Little Switzerlands and the actual Alps any longer.
Reclaiming Curiosity
The Swiss Garden at Shuttleworth that I visited earlier this year is one of the leading examples of the ornamental Swiss style, completed in the 1820s and 30s and extending to the architecture of Old Warden, a village on the estate. The brainchild of Lord Robert Henley Ongley, the garden’s plans were explicitly influenced by handbooks such as the J. B. Papworth’s Hints on Ornamental Gardening from 1823. But this text did not yet illustrate a Swiss Cottage — rather a “Polish Hut”, which was said to be “not unlike those of Switzerland”.31 It remains my speculation that Lord Ongley read the Romantics, as well as obviously following a mainstream fashion for Switzerland in Regency England.
Ongley spent thousands of pounds on his picturesque project. Yet contemporary visitor Emily Shore was unimpressed. In her journal entry for July 23, 1835, she wrote that the feature was “a very curious place” — a damning verdict that would surely have made Ruskin smile.32 For “the whole of this garden is in very bad taste, and much too artificial. The mounds and risings are not natural. . . . Even the Swiss cottage is ill imagined”.33 We can only guess how she would have perceived the Victorian additions of the industrialist John Shuttleworth, who, in the late nineteenth century, threw parties in this kitsch alpine playground. (The era, incidentally, when the word kitsch was coined.)
But as the years have passed, we have forgotten the original aesthetic aims of imagining English pastures or lawns as Little Switzerlands, or that such aspirations were turned into common attractions across the country — and, indeed, the continent and America (and in time, Australia too). I think that loss of context allows for a lighter, and certainly less loaded appreciation of their strangeness in our contemporary landscape. We can look on, amused or bemused, at their foreignness amid the familiar. They appear to be not so much out of place, but instead representative of no immediately comprehensible setting at all. Nowadays, the charm of a Little Switzerland is neither a lofty, aesthetic ideal of Romanticism, nor a conventional offer from the leisure industry. Wrenched from any referent that makes intuitive sense to us, today’s Little Switzerlands have become wonderfully weird.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 8, 2021

author: Seán Williams


text:
The Dust That Measures All Our Time

By Steven Connor
October 13, 2021

From the mythical Sandman, who participates in dream and vision, to an irritating grain lodged in the beachgoer’s eye, sand harbours unappreciated power, however mundane. Steven Connor celebrates this “most untrustworthy” type of matter.

αρχας ειναι των ολων ατόμους και κενόν, τα δ’αλλα πάντα νενομίσθαιThere are atoms, and the spaces between them; surmise makes up the rest.—Democritus in Diogenes Laertius1

Sand belongs to the great, diffuse class, undeclared, rarely described, but insistent and insinuating, of what may be called quasi-choate matters — among them mist, smoke, dust, snow, sugar, cinders, sleet, soap, syrup, mud, toffee, grit. Such pseudo-substances hover, drift, and ooze between consistency and dissolution, holding together even as they come apart from themselves. And, of all of these dishesive matters, sand is surely the most untrustworthy, the most shifting and shifty.
Nobody would seriously consider taking a stand on a cloud, but sand has betrayed many an architect and edifice. Sand is at once architectural and archiclastic. An eighteenth-century continuation of Baron Munchausen’s adventures describes how the Baron and his party survive a whirlwind of sand by scooping an igloo-style sand-chamber in which to shelter from the storm, and then digging a tunnel from their bunker back out into the light.2 Sand has the capacity to engulf and inundate, blearing contours, eroding and erasing every edge and eminence. As such it is the ultimate mockery of the permanence of stone, for it is no more than one of stone’s own moods, the manner in which stone, atomised, consumes itself. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” imagines the monumental statue of Rameses the Great dismembered on the Egyptian sands. The shattered chunks of head, legs, and pedestal portend a further, finer comminution, after the membra disjecta themselves will have been milled away into flatness: “Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,/The lone and level sands stretch far away”.3
Surely the most treacherous of all kinds of sand is quicksand, whose prefix indicates that it is alive enough to hunger for the lives of the unwary. Quicksand doubles the dubiousness of what is already an uncertain substance; where sand is hard and soft at once, quicksand, a fine sand that has become saturated with liquid, is also amphibiously wet and dry, bonelessly loose, yet syrup-gluey. Walter Charleton, in his tormentedly Latinised Englishing of Pierre Gassendi’s neoatomism, uses quicksand to image the paradox of all matter, the “perpetual inquietude of Atoms, even in compact Concretions. . . because the Revibrations, or Resilitions of Atoms regarding several points of the immense space, like Bees variously interweaving in a swarm, must be perpetual: therefore also must they never quiesce, but be as variously and constantly exagitated even in the most solid or adamantine of Concretions. . . To apparence nothing more quiet and calm: yet really no quicksand more internally tumultuated”.4
Sand has also been a source of quickening. Drops of sweat or spittle on sand or dust were thought to breed mites and fleas by spontaneous generation. Mythical beings have frequently been shaped from sand, like the djinns who take flight in the form of the Zôba’ah, a whirlwind that raises the sand in the form of a pillar of great height.5 In Cornish tradition the troublesome spirit Tregeagle was condemned to toil endlessly at the task of making a truss of sand, bound with ropes similarly of sand, and carrying it out of the water to a rock: the howls of the storm are said to be his cries of rage as the waves repeatedly scatter his work.6 A more contemporary emanation of sand is the irascible Psammead, or sand-fairy, of E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It (1902), found by a group of children in a sand-pit, which has the power of granting wishes by blowing itself up to enormous size and then suddenly letting itself down again. Sand fairies are rare now, it explains, because they used to live in the sandcastles made by children on the shore, but nearly all died out after catching cold from the seawater flowing into the moats around the castles.7
Sand is reversible. Only utter desiccation can attain to this pouring, milk-smooth liquefaction. Sand-baths were used in the ancient world both to draw out the damp ague of rheumatism and as a kind of sauna, to promote perspiration. Sand is the product of abrasion, but is also itself abrasive, used in sand-blasting to etch and burnish. Pliny tells us of the use of sand under a saw edge to make a clean cut in marble, and to polish it after it has been carved.8
Sand signifies neutrality, indifference, and uniformity; yet it also has hairtrigger sensitivity and responsiveness. A grain of sand (in actual fact often a tiny parasite) is the irritant that provokes in the oyster the nacreous secretions that build into a pearl. Sand has a favoured relation to sound, putting a hoarse rattle in the throat of the wind, and is itself all ears. In 1787, the German physicist Ernst Chladni showed how drawing a violin bow over a metal plate could induce in the fine sand sprinkled on it hierophantic figurings of the sound, in quivering mandalas and ripple-fingered arpeggios. Though sand can disfigure and obliterate, it can also disclose the ghost wrist of wind and the perturbations of the earth. It is a detection and reception mechanism, forming ridged isobars, shivering musculature, oscilloscape of the air’s sculpting shoves and gusts.
Sand participates in dream and vision. The Sandman brings sleep by throwing or blowing sand into the eyes of children. But the sand does more than merely seal the eyes, for in many versions of this nursery tale, it is the very stuff that dreams are made on, the numb matter of sleep, swirling, particulate, that the sandman carries in his sack. The somnolence of sand is redoubled when in Top Hat (1935) Fred Astaire soothes Ginger Rogers to sleep in the hotel room below him by spreading sand on the floor and hush-dancing a susurrous soft-shoe shuffle. The origins of moon-walking are to be found in the novelty slides and scrapes across a sanded stage by music-hall acts like Wilson, Keppel and Betty. Specious it may be, but sand is also the secret stuff of omen and auspice, in the practice of divination through tossing and scrying handfuls of sand, known in Arabic as ilm al-raml, the science of the sand, or what might have been its Greek equivalent, psammomancy.
Sand is not only temporary, it is also the most temporised form of matter. It is the image or allegory of time, shifting, yet unshiftable. It seems a compiling of the minced, mounded years that go into its making, and grains of sand imitate the elementary atoms of time, moment upon pattering moment. Sand is featureless, without joints or divisions, even though it is nothing but division all the way down. Yet it is this very feature that makes it useful in the measurement of time, for, unlike other materials, sand will flow easily and regularly, even as its volume diminishes. Sand-glasses came into use in part because of the need to measure time at sea, far from any landmark; speed would be measured by counting the number of knots in a rope paid out from the back of the ship in the time it took for the sand to run through a half-minute glass. A half-hour period of watch, known as a “glass”, was also measured in this way. Grains of sand, in the form of quartz crystals, with their precise oscillations, still micro-regulate our time. In fact, the sand of hourglasses was often not quartz sand at all, but powdered marble, or eggshell. But we find it hard to give up the idea of the affinity of sand and the glass through which it runs, since silicates of sand are still the most important source of glass. George Herbert imagines this interfusion when he writes that “flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust/That measures all our time; which also shall/Be crumbled into dust”, while for Gerard Manley Hopkins the soul itself is “soft sift/In an hourglass — at the wall/Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,/And it crowds and it combs to the fall”.9 ※※Indexed under…TimeSand as allegory of
Sand enters into composition with cinema, and cinema is repeatedly drawn to the shimmer and mirage of sand. The graininess that is the signature of film, tiny particles of metallic silver formed from photosensitive silver halides on its surface, is the tactile nap that seems to distinguish analogue from digital images. Yet this granularity is also a reminder of what film shares with sand in its composition, namely the capacity to create the illusion of a continuously variable wave from very large numbers of discrete, indiscernible particulars. Strictly speaking, all apparently analogue forms are smoothed accumulations of digital, that is, discontinuous forms, like the illusion of movement formed from the multiple images on the filmstrip. The glissandi of sand, producing molar solidity and motion from the molecular massings of disparate bits of matter, are therefore essentially cinematic. Filming sand, through the glass lens that is itself another of sand’s semblances, cinema seems to come upon the elementary syntax of its own process.
Sometimes seemingly razor-hewn, the crescent declivities, scoops of duneshadow and chiaroscuro escarpments of sand can make it seem a physiology of light itself. Wind-pestered, sea-sieved, pestled by the sun’s long pulse, sand piles and plies itself, then crumples in sighs. It is an arena of hallucinations, a terrestrial aurora. The eye surmises ledges and laminar curtains peeling away, furling fringes of aching incandescence, frizzling surf-edges of riptide, lifting aprons, sheets of paint that sag and rill, pools of liquid that sizzle dry in an instant, cliffs that collapse in gentle, pensive catastrophes, whole panes suddenly shivering, slowly closing eyelids, a letting down of blinds. Never less, never more, never now again what it once, only just now, was, mulling itself over, taking its own measure, counting up and losing count, showing its workings in its long humped volumes, page turned on crumbling page in the calendar of its becomings, combing and grooming, sieving and riddling, going with the grain, never ceasing going over it all again, keeping on going, going on coming, the desert does itself like an incalculable sum.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 13, 2021

author: Steven Connor