text:
Loos, Lewdness, and Literature
Tales from the Boghouse
By Maximillian Novak
April 17, 2019

In the early 1730s, a mysterious editor (known only as “Hurlothrumbo”) committed to print a remarkable anthology: transcriptions of the graffiti from England’s public latrines. For all its misogynistic and scatological tendencies, this little-known book of “latrinalia” offers a unique and fascinating window into Georgian life. Maximillian Novak explores.

The literary scholar Roger Lonsdale once suggested that our knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry has depended heavily on what our anthologies have decided to print.1 For the most part modern anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of “polite taste”. The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Lonsdale is not the only scholar questioning the basis of the canon; indeed, revisionism is fast becoming one of the more ingenious — and useful — parlor games among academics. Modern readers are no longer so squeamish about obscenity nor so uncomfortable with the purely personal lyric as were the editors at the end of the eighteenth century. And we are hardly likely to find poetry written by women objectionable on that score alone. In short, the anthologies we depend upon are out of date.
Among the works that would never have been a source of poems for the canon, and one mentioned by Lonsdale, was the collection of verse published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, commonly known simply as The Bog-House Miscellany. Its contemporary reputation may be described as infamous. James Bramston, in his The Man of Taste (1733), mentioned it as an example in poetry of the very opposite of “good Taste”.2 Polite taste, of course, is meaningful only if it can define itself by what it excludes, and nothing could be in worse taste than a collection of pieces written on windows, carved in tables, or inscribed on the walls of Britain’s loos.
Just as the compilers of a modern work, The Good Loo Guide, were parodying a well-known guide book to British restaurants, so the unknown compilers of The Merry-Thought had some notion, however discontinuous, of parodying the nation’s polite literature. Were not Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift famous for their distinguished miscellanies? What could be more amusing than a collection of poems that represented a different poetic ideal — a collection of verse with none of the pretensions to artistic merit claimed by the superstars of the poetic world — the spontaneous productions of nonpoets in moments of idleness or desperation? Apparently some of the inscribers in the bog-houses used excrement as a medium for — as well as a subject of — their inscriptions (a somewhat literal prefiguring of T. S. Eliot’s claim that, to a certain extent, all poetry was a form of “defecation”.3 The Merry-Thought, then, is not even the kind of art that Dryden attacked in MacFlecknoe and Pope in his Dunciad — the work of bad poets masquerading as geniuses. Rather, it is a primitive form of folk art produced as a more or less spontaneous act of play or passion, and achieving some small degree of respectability only when practiced by a respected poet and collected with his more serious verse.4 Like modern “serial” graffiti, it could function as a form of communication since the first inscriptions often provoked those who followed to make their own contributions. (In this way too we could perhaps even see it as some kind of early incarnation of Twitter.)
Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects of graffiti is that in an impermanent form it testifies to the continuance over the centuries of certain human concerns. Studies of graffiti have often focused on particular modern conflicts between races or nations, on drug problems, and on specific political commentary.5 But such local matters aside, the content of modern graffiti is surprisingly like that of earlier periods: scatological observations, laments of lovers, accusations against women for their sexual promiscuity, the repetition of “trite” poems and sayings, and messages attributed to various men and women suggesting their sexual availability and proficiency. And if the political targets have changed over the years, many of the political attitudes have remained consistent. Graffiti is an irreverent form, with strong popular and anti-establishment elements. As actions common to all classes, eating, drinking, defecation, and fornication find their lowly record in graffiti-like form.
On the most basic level, a writer will observe that the excrement of the rich differs in no way from that of the poor. Thus one poem, taken supposedly from a “Person of Quality’s Boghouse”, has the following sentiment:
Good Lord! who could think,That such fine Folks should stink?6
There is nothing very “polite” about such observations, and no pretension to art. These verses belong strictly to folklore and the sociology of literature, but they suggest some continuing rumbles of discontent against the class system, the existence among the lower orders of some of the egalitarian attitudes that survived the passing of the Lollards and the Levellers. Who were the writers of these pieces? Were they indeed laborers? Or were they from the lower part of what was called the “middle orders”? Is there some evidence to be found in the very fact that they could write?
Graffiti may, indeed, tell us something about degrees of literacy. One wit remarked that whatever the ability to read or write may have been at the time, almost everyone seemed to have been literate when presented with a bog-house wall: “Since all who come to Bog-house write”.7 The traditional connection between defecation and writing was another comparison apparent to the commentators. One wrote:
There’s Nothing foul that we commit,But what we write, and what we sh - t.8
And the lack of some paper or material to clean the rear end provoked the following sentiment in the form of a litany:
From costive Stools, and hide-bound Wit,From Bawdy Rhymes, and Hole besh - - t.From Walls besmear’d with stinking Ordure,By Swine who nee’r provide BumfodderLibera Nos----9
Other types of graffiti, however, vary from the very earnest expression of affection to the non-excrementally satiric. One of the more unusual is a poem in praise of a faithful and loving wife: ※※Indexed under…Kissas subject for earnest boghouse poem
I kiss’d her standing,Kiss’d her lying,Kiss’d her in Health,And kiss’d her dying;And when she mounts the Skies,I’ll kiss her flying.10
Underneath this poem, The Merry-Thought records a favorable comment on the sentiment.
Even more earnest is the complaint of a woman about her fate in love:
Since cruel Fate has robb’d me of the Youth,For whom my Heart had hoarded all its Truth,I’ll ne’er love more, dispairing e’er to find,Such Constancy and Truth amongst Mankind.Feb. 18, 1725.11
We will never know why she was unable to marry the man she truly loved, but her bitterness may have been short-lived. Just after this inscription comes a cynical comment identifying the lady as a member of the Walker family. And the writer insists that like all women she was inconstant, since he kissed her the next night.
This cynical approach to love and women dominates The Merry-Thought. Prevailingly, women are depicted as sexually insatiable, as in a piece written by a man who takes a month’s vacation from sex to recoup his strength.12 And the related image of the female with a sexual organ capable of absorbing a man plays a variation on the vagina dentata theme.13 In a more realistic vein, though equally cynical, is the poem on the woman who complained of her husband making her pregnant so often:
A poor Woman was ill in a dangerous Case,She lay in, and was just as some other Folks was:By the Lord, cries She then, if my Husband e’er come,Once again with his Will for to tickle my Bum,I’ll storm, and I’ll swear, and I’ll run staring wild;And yet the next Night, the Man got her with Child.S. M. 1708.14
S. M. is clearly unsympathetic to the plight of married women in an age with only the most primitive forms of birth control.15 The picture of her as a long-suffering person is undercut by the casual male assumption that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women make too much of the pain and difficulty. That women were often forced to go through thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought had yet been given to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth is apparently of little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent willingness of the woman to have sexual intercourse one more time sufficient reason for contempt.
In addition to giving glimpses into social attitudes, The Merry-Thought has a variety of inscriptions that show the way these writings functioned. Professor George Guffey, in his introduction to part one of the 1982 Augustan Reprint Society edition of the work, remarks upon the proposal scene carried on in Moll Flanders between Moll and the admirer who will prove to be her third husband and her brother.16 Such scenes involving witty proposals and responses cut into the windows of taverns were real enough at the time. An exchange found in part two of The Merry-Thought is not, however, half so satisfactory. The woman takes umbrage at her admirer’s suggestions that the glass on which he writes is “the Emblem” of her mind in being “brittle, slipp’ry, [and] pois’nous”, and writes in retort:
I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass,Can’t prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass.17
Though an easy cynicism about women’s availability and about the body’s insistently animal functions predominates, there is enough variety in The Merry-Thought to provide something of a picture of eighteenth-century society were any future anthropologists to come upon this volume as the sole remnant of that period. They would see a society engaged rather more in animal functions than in intellectual pursuits — a society rather more concerned with drinking, love, and defecation than the picture presented by the polite and intellectual literature of the time allowed. But they would also find in the satirical squibs on Corny, the Cambridge bookseller and printer, evidence of learning and university life as well as a criticism of opera.18 They would see numerous young men longing for their mistresses to soften their hearts toward them, and cynical older men who had lost their illusions about love. But they could also come upon a straight piece of philosophy taken from the still fashionable Flask tavern in Hampstead or lowly bits of pious folk wisdom.19 More often, however, they would uncover a society in which there was little of the generalized style that characterizes even the most personal formal poetry of the period. Many of the writers identify themselves and the names of the women they love or detest. In short, if these volumes do little else, they do provide a vivid glimpse into the personal life of the time, and to that extent an injection of some of these inscriptions into the anthologies of the period might help in providing a lively and piquant context for the serious artistic production of writers like John Gay and Jonathan Swift.
The announced “publisher” of this folio was one Hurlothrumbo, a character drawn from the theatrical piece of that name by Samuel Johnson of Cheshire (1691–1773). Professor Guffey has proposed that James Roberts, for whom the four parts were printed, “was almost certainly the collector of the graffiti” and that the name of Hurlothrumbo was invoked in order to attract some of the attention that Samuel Johnson of Cheshire and his play were still receiving two years after the play’s first performance and publication.20 But Roberts would appear an unlikely candidate for the role of editor.21 I would suggest, rather, the possibility of a more direct and active connection with Samuel Johnson of Cheshire: that he was himself likely the compiler of the four parts of The Merry-Thought and that, whatever the individual versifiers may have intended, this infamous collection of graffiti — as collection — shares very closely with Johnson’s other work a spirit of wild variety, eccentric juxtaposition, and essential anarchism that is meant to lead, not to clever parody of polite literature, but to a new, almost apocalyptic vision of the sublime.
At the first level, Hurlothrumbo: or, The Super-Natural (1729) itself appears to be quite simply a parody, in this case of opera in the form of a work mixing dialogue and song in a manner similar to but much wilder than Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. Johnson’s apparent takeoff on the heroics of opera managed to include in its attack a commentary upon the absurdity of contemporary tragedy as well as some specific references to those works that aimed at the sublime. Lines like “This World is all a Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill pav’d with Diamonds” seem to call the very nature of metaphor into question, especially when juxtaposed with other delirious lines such as “Rapture is the Egg of Love, hatched by a radiant Eye” or by songs such as that sung by the king on contemplating the effects of swallowing gunpowder and brandy together:
Then Lightning from the Nostrils flies.Swift Thunder-bolts from Anus, and the Mouth will break,With Sounds to pierce the Skies, and make the Earth to quake.22
Hurlothrumbo may be mostly nonsense, but from the standpoint of literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a revolt against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities with graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity.
Had Johnson’s intention been something as relatively uncomplicated as literary parody he would have achieved some minor fame in a century which could boast any number of geniuses who had specialized in deriding the pretentiousness of the more established literary forms, particularly tragedy, the epic, and the pastoral. But Johnson of Cheshire lacked the aesthetic distance required of sustained irony and had a grander purpose in mind. His tradition was not that of the parodist but rather that of the visionary — the mystic whose tendency is to merge the high and the low, the sublime and the absurd, within a single work.7 He was not attacking the extravagant rants of the heroic play as Fielding was to do in his Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) or reflecting on opera and pastoral as Gay had done in The Beggar’s Opera (1728); rather he was trying, however unsuccessfully, to maintain his own work at the highest reaches of sublimity. He was like one of Pope’s “Flying Fishes”, who “now and then rise upon their fins and fly out of the Profound; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom.”23
In his preface to The Blazing Comet; or the Beauties of the Poets (1732), Johnson of Cheshire noted that “the same thought that makes the Fool laugh, may make the wise Man sigh”.24 Given such an equivocal approach to the ways in which the audience responded to his work, the poet could easily shrug off audience laughter to his most “Sublime” lines. He was always ready “to leap up in Extasy; and dip . . . [his] Pen in the Sun”.25 Parts of Hurlothrumbo, particularly the scene between Lady Flame and Wildfire (both of whom are described in the list of characters as “mad”) in which Wildfire threatens to cast off his clothes and “run about stark naked”,26 bear an odd resemblance to “The King’s Cameleopard” in Huckleberry Finn. But the disconnected verbal structure, along with the music and dancing, achieves a strange mixture that must have amused and, to a certain extent, bemused its audience.
Johnson called upon “Variety” as his most important artistic principle, and he developed his ideas on this subject in A Vision of Heaven (1738), a work which bears a striking resemblance to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Johnson argues that all surface appearances are merely a form of “Hieroglyphic” concealing a true vision of things.27 His narrator is capable of what Blake was to call “mental flight”, and there is a particularly vivid passage in which the stars are seen as throwing down “freezing Daggers” at the poor, starving children in the streets and another in which we encounter an aged woman who wields a broom against spiders and against all the young women who threaten to come near the narrator.28 The mystic temperament is often capable of making connections between the spiritual and the excremental, between the sublime and the bathos of “Thunder-bolts from Anus”.29 Blake, we should recall, has poems depicting himself defecating.30
Whether Johnson actually collected The Merry-Thought or not, the reasons for the association of these volumes with his name should then be clear enough. While Fielding might appropriate the title “Scriblerus Secundus” by way of staking out a line of descent for his humor and satire, Hurlothrumbo was so thoroughly connected with Johnson and his play that I can see no reason why he should not be considered the likely editor of such a varied and eccentric collection of verse and prose as The Merry-Thought. That the “Variety” bears no resemblance to that of serious art, however, should be as obvious as the difference between a William Blake and a Samuel Johnson of Cheshire. As William Hogarth was to remark, “variety uncomposed, and without design is confusion and deformity.”31
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Maximillian Novak


text:
The Khan’s Drinking Fountain

By Devon Field
April 4, 2019

Of all the things described in William of Rubruck’s account of his travels through 13th-century Asia, perhaps none is so striking as the remarkably ornate fountain he encountered in the Mongol capital which — complete with silver fruit and an angelic automaton — flowed with various alcoholic drinks for the grandson of Genghis Khan and guests. Devon Field explores how this Silver Tree of Karakorum became a potent symbol, not only of the Mongol Empire’s imperial might, but also its downfall.

By the time Friar William of Rubruck arrived at the camp of Möngke Khan in the last days of 1253, he had pushed his body to its breaking point. The trip from Acre had taken him by way of Constantinople, across the Black Sea, and then on a punishing overland journey featuring extreme cold, a demon-haunted pass, and little enough food that his travel-companion, Bartolomeo of Cremona, had been close to tears, exclaiming “It seems to me I shall never get anything to eat”.1 And then there had been the Mongols themselves. Passing into their territory was like passing “through one of the gates of hell”, and leaving their presence comparable to escaping “the midst of devils”.2 Safe to say that the Mongols seemed quite alien to this Flemish friar.
William grumbled at their (in his view) incurable greed, commented repeatedly on his distaste for the women’s noses, and spoke of the foolishness of their religion. Though in many ways a clever traveller and, despite this xenophobia, an at times astute observer, he was in other ways a fish out of water, even going about at first in bare feet on the frozen winter ground. But not everything was so unfamiliar, so strange to him.
There at the heart of the Mongol Empire, he found a surprisingly cosmopolitan scene comprised of Hungarians, Greeks, Armenians, Alans, Georgians, and more. In the capital of Karakorum, he found a “Saracen” quarter with its markets and a “Cathayan” one with its artisans; he found temples and mosques, and he found a church.3 He met a Christian from Damascus who represented the Ayyubid Sultan, a woman from Metz named Pacquette who had been captured while on business in Hungary, and the son of an Englishman named Basil. Most helpful to him during his stay was an artisan from Paris named Guillaume Boucher. This Parisian smith created several pieces which William saw — an altarpiece, a kind of mobile oratory, an iron to make communion wafers, and, perhaps his most significant mark left at Möngke’s capital, the Mongol khan’s wonderfully elaborate drinking fountain.
Now the words “drinking fountain” might evoke high school hallways and awkwardly hunching over to bring your face to the faucet, but this was something else entirely. Crowned by a trumpet-wielding, angelic automaton, the main structure formed a magnificent silver tree, wrapped in silver serpents and complete with branches, leaves, and fruit. At its roots sat “four lions of silver, each with a conduit through it, and all belching forth white milk of mares.”4 Up in the branches, four pipes emerged to splash a different alcoholic beverage down to silver basins waiting below. There was grape wine, fermented mare’s milk, rice wine, and honey mead, all to be ready when the khan so desired. This so-called “drinking fountain” was, for all intents and purposes, a most convoluted and extravagant bar.
Sadly, this curious creation, completed while William was at the camp of the Mongol khan, has not survived for us to admire. We are left with only the friar’s words to go on and, subsequently, with many questions. Was it as imagined in the eighteenth-century edition of geographer and poet Pierre de Bergeron’s work? Most visual representations since have been based on Bergeron’s, but did it really tower so high and appear so baroque? Was it even actually as William described? Have we correctly translated from his Gallicised Latin? Might his “lions” have been tigers or his “serpents” in fact dragons? How did it all work?
A press a button, lean down, and sip affair it was not. Originally, bellows had been placed within the tree to pipe air through the angel’s trumpet whenever the khan called for a drink, but that hadn’t worked out. There was a flaw in the fountain. The bellows simply hadn’t been powerful enough, so in a slightly comedic twist, a man was placed in a space beneath the tree instead, a space which may or may not have been large enough not to be nightmarishly claustrophobic.
When the call came, the man would blow, and the angel would raise the trumpet to its lips. The sound produced was loud enough to bring servants scurrying from the cavern outside the palace where drinks were stored. They would pour liquids into the tree’s roots that would quickly siphon up and pour out from above and into the basins. From there the drink would be collected by cup-bearers and delivered, in great style, to the khan and his guests.
It was all quite unnecessary and inefficient. Simply carrying skins of milk and other beverages directly into the palace would have been quicker, with no pipes or angels required, but then, as William noted, it would be “unseemly to bring in there skins of milk and other drinks”, even common one might say.5 Basic function aside, the khan’s drinking fountain was a wonderfully grand, eye-catching piece. It had certainly caught the eye of William, who otherwise unfavourably compared the Mongol palace to the village of Saint-Denis.
The fountain’s possible religious meaning is somewhat difficult to parse between French creator and Mongol client (and through the veil of William’s report), but there are possible readings. The serpents and fruit, with an angel hanging above them all, are suggestive of the Tree of Knowledge, its four liquids the four rivers of Eden. And, indeed, the designer of the fountain was a Christian who was at times called upon to play the role of priest in his community. Yet these and other elements do each yield to other interpretations, ones rooted in Chinese symbology, in Mongol Tengriism, or in Buddhism. What Guillaume’s creation perhaps expressed most clearly was riches and imperial power.
One of the laundry list of items that bothered William about the Mongols was their incredible arrogance in assuming that he must be there to beg for peace, but they had every reason to expect it. Their empire was, arguably, at its peak, and envoys, kings, and sultans from far afield did indeed often come to them to do just that. They brought gifts, and the Mongol rulers would, in turn, put their tokens of imperial might on display.
An example of this was the costly chapel-tent made of fine scarlet cloth and featuring Christian imagery that King Louis IX had sent to the Mongols as part of a 1249 diplomatic mission. It and other items, including fragments of the cross, were intended as gifts, but they were reported to have been received as tribute, the chapel-tent an object to be displayed and to proclaim “See? Even the Franks, as distant as they are, submit to us.” The drinking fountain, pouring Persian grape wine and Chinese rice wine from the empire’s conquered territories, would have transmitted a similar message.
Unlike the chapel-tent, the fountain had been created on-site. It had not been carried there from afar, but of course, its creator had. He had been captured by the Mongol armies that had pierced central Europe and then withdrawn in 1242, and he had neither been taken nor survived at the center of the Mongol world by chance. His captors recognized the value of skilled craftsmen and, in their conquests, would set them aside and collect them. Just as they had the tremendous wealth of an empire, so too did they collect our Parisian metalworker, Guillaume Boucher.
Guillaume created something wonderful for them, an imposing testament to the reach of the Mongol Empire in the craft of a metalworker plucked from the other end of the Eurasian landmass. He, with the help of an unknown number of unknown assistants, created a towering spectacle for the khan and his guests that dispensed liquids as if by magic, a seemingly endless torrent of drinks for their enjoyment.
They wouldn’t sit down to enjoy it throughout the year. It was more of a seasonal delight. Friar William reported Möngke’s court travelling in a circuit and only at times coming to the settled capital, to the palace, to the site of Guillaume’s work where they would feast and drink. And Mongol royalty did not do such things daintily.
In William’s narrative, the Mongols’ drinking habits form something of a low background hum against which events are set. He doesn’t linger over the topic, but it’s always there. At each audience, he noted the bench with drinks and goblets to the side. His first audience with Möngke had been encumbered by his interpreter’s drunkenness. Making the rounds of the royalty meant drinking with all of them, often a great deal to drink. Sometimes, as the khan spoke, William would count the number of times he drank before he finished. It was not, to say the least, a dry society, and health issues among the Mongol leadership were predictably prevalent.
Möngke’s uncle, Ogedei Khan, had problems with alcoholism recognized even within his social milieu, and he died from them despite the efforts of those around him to slow his drinking.6 Of Ogedei’s son Guyuk Khan’s death, it was sometimes said he had been killed or poisoned by a family member, but it’s often thought that he succumbed instead to his unhealthy lifestyle. A bit of a pattern was developing, and it was one that was going to haunt Genghis Khan’s dynasty for quite some time to come. It is striking then that the fountain, a symbol of wealth and empire, was also a symbol of something that so troubled that empire.
Friar William’s time among the Mongols would ultimately prove a frustrating experience for him. The goals of his trip — whether you take them to be diplomatic on the part of King Louis IX or, as William would frequently claim, those of a simple missionary — were left largely unachieved. There was to be no Mongol military assistance coming Louis’ way, and William himself admits to having baptized a grand total of six souls. His travelling companion, fearful that he could never survive the return journey, remained behind in Karakorum with Guillaume, at least temporarily, his host.
Guillaume seems to fall off the map after William’s account of their time together. Artifacts have been found which may or may not have been his creations, but little else is known of him or his fate. Presumably, he ended his life there at the center of what was then the most powerful empire on earth. Likely, he lived long enough to see it cease to be the center, as Möngke’s brother Kublai moved it in the direction of China and the vast empire broke up into khanates that were largely independent of one another and, increasingly, at war. For his part, Guillaume had succeeded in creating a grand symbol of a far-reaching empire and an impressive accessory to the khan’s courtly binging, an expression of wealth and power but also of the unhealthy habits that would continue to eat away at the Genghis dynasty.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Devon Field

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
Lustucru
From Severed Heads to Ready-Made Meals
By Jé Wilson
June 13, 2019

Jé Wilson charts the migration of the Lustucru figure through the French cultural imagination — from misogynistic blacksmith bent on curbing female empowerment, to child-stealing bogeyman, to jolly purveyor of packaged pasta.

In France in the year 1659, an almanac was published that contained a scene of a forge filled with women’s severed heads. Mass-produced as ephemeral booklets, almanacs were popular reading material in seventeenth-century Europe. Astrologists, physicians, and surveyors compiled them, and the old ones were recycled as wrapping paper or toilet tissue.1 They contained a digest of facts and entertainment, calendars, festival details, tide tables, exchange rates, and astrological predictions, as well as songs, stories, medical advice, recaps of recent events, and prints such as the one above, which could be enjoyed even by those who couldn’t read.
This almanac of 1659, now lost, featured the first appearance of a character named Lustucru, a blacksmith turned brain surgeon or “operateur cephalique”. In the later print above, he appears at right in the central trio of blacksmiths, his mallet upraised over a woman’s head, which he’s gripping with a pair of tongs. Other female heads swing from meathooks, waiting their turn. In the left foreground, two men drag a still intact woman to the forge; the words near her mouth say, “I won’t go”. The sign of the shop, hanging at upper left, displays a decapitated woman’s body above the words “Tout en est bon”, from the saying, “Une femme sans tête: tout en est bon”, meaning “A woman without a head: everything is good”. To make the message absolutely clear, the block of text encourages men to bring their difficult wives to this head doctor, where their brains will be reforged and purged of all screechy, angry, lunatic, obstinate, rebellious, willful, and lazy ways. Any woman with a mind of her own is guaranteed a graphically brutal straightening out.
As sexist satire goes, this is dark. Even darker is the fact that, as soon as the image appeared, the head-pounding blacksmith “became all the rage” in France.2 Publishers began to churn out stand-alone broadsheets of his image in order to feed a demand for cheap copies, and versions of him in his forge spread from France to Germany and Italy.3 An entire almanac calendar for 1660 was dedicated to Lustucru.4 He was written into the latest comic plays and poems, and his image was even stamped on tokens or “jetons” (metal coins used mainly as counters in the age before calculators). In today’s terms, he went viral.5
His name, Lustucru, comes from a slurring of “L’eusses-tu-cru?”, a stock phrase used in that period by theatrical fools, which meant, “Would you have believed it?” or in this case, “Would you have thought a woman’s head could be fixed?” According to the seventeenth-century French writer Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Lustucru was born from a desire for male revenge. In his Historiettes, a collection of biographical sketches completed around 1659, he says that the “médecin céphalique” who appears in the almanac of that year was drawn by an anonymous “joker” specifically in response to the Langey affair, a divorce case involving two aristocrats.6
This case had been winding its way through the French courts for two years and had just then reached a verdict amid a flurry of public gossip and titillation.7 The Marquis de Langey, by that time aged thirty-one, was accused of impotence by his twenty-year-old wife (she’d been fourteen when he’d married her), and she wanted to leave him.8 Both parties were forced to undergo humiliating physical exams, and in the second round, after hours of trying, the Marquis could not get it up in front of a jury of ten doctors and five matrons.9 His wife was granted the divorce.
Horrified at the nerve of this young dissatisfied wife, the anonymous artist of the engraving imagined a “brain surgeon” who could provide surgical redressing on behalf of all men for the public humiliations undergone by the Marquis de Langey. After some surgery, the wife would be put back in her place as a mindless, compliant entity who’d no longer have the will or gall to question her husband’s virility or wish for a better life.
Male anxiety regarding the growing influence and power of women was generally on the rise in France during the 1650s. Women had begun to gain some standing in the literary arts and were established enough to have been satirized as “les précieuses”, a type of clever woman who frequented Parisian salons, wrote books, and favored an elegantly refined (or, to other minds, affected and pretentious) speaking and writing style. In 1659, Molière staged his Paris debut of Les précieuses ridicules (The Affected Ladies), a short satirical play that mocks a pair of young conceited women who think they are too smart and sophisticated for their suitors. They are given their comeuppance and made fools of.10 Some of the hastily written plays in the year Lustucru first appeared featured both Lustucru and the précieuses, capitalizing on the popularity of both subjects.11
As the scholar Joan DeJean has noted in an essay on “strong women” in Early Modern France, the speculative novel Épigone, histoire du siècle futur (Epigone, history of the future century) was anonymously published the same year the almanac appeared. This novel was a parody of tales about heroic women and imagined a future controlled by a race of Amazons, terrifying women who “privilege the life of the mind, thereby making life for all ‘unhappy and prudish.’”12 Once vanquished, the leader of the Amazons is first lobotomized (“debrained”) and then beheaded. These futuristic Amazons were yet another satire of the précieuses.
The extreme violence of both the Lustucru imagery and some of these literary satires powerfully expresses “the tensions underlying seventeenth-century debates over new roles for women”, as another scholar of the period, Katherine Dauge-Roth, has put it.13 Entering a climate already hot with mockery and hostility toward learned women, Lustucru’s character became the perfect figurehead for those who believed that women’s brains were a threat to society. Unsurprisingly, the danger of a female takeover became the explicit subject of a new set of Lustucru-themed images that appeared on the scene soon after the almanac was published.
In these new engravings, the wronged women get their revenge by grabbing Lustucru’s tools and smashing his head to “rid the world of this enemy of our sex”, as the text on this similar print explains.
In a Bacchic frenzy, the women in the scene announce they will “give him a hundred strokes and after his death tear him to pieces and carry his devilish head everywhere as evidence of our courage”.14 The lesson in these new engravings is that the danger is real: if they put their heads together, women can crush men. As he succumbs to the blows, Lustucru warns his fellow men: “Help me quickly because without me you are lost.”15
*
In the few years following Lustucru’s first appearance, the symbolic associations attached to the figure seemed to shift. The manner of his actions became just as pertinent as their goal: from the violent saviour of threatened men, Lustucru came to represent simply violence itself. In 1662, there was a violent revolt by thousands of French peasants in the Boulonnais region over tax increases imposed by Louis XIV. The event came to be known as the Lustucru Rebellion and the angry peasants were given or took for themselves the nickname Lustucrus. Over the next couple of centuries, Lustucru’s belligerent and menacing reputation further permeated the French cultural unconscious so that, by the nineteenth century, his name had become attached to a giant folkloric bogeyman of nursery rhymes and lullabies:
Do you hear in the plainThis noise that’s reaching us here?It sounds like the noise of chains,Dragging on the pebbles.It’s the great Lustucru who is passing,Passing by and will go away,Carrying off in his knapsackAll the little children who aren’t asleep.16

Branching out from kidnapping to catnapping, he emerges in another popular song of the nineteenth-century called “La Mère Michel”. Sadistic and grim in the manner of many nursery rhymes, the verses describe a man named Lustucru who steals an old woman’s cat, cooks it, and sells it to diners as “rabbit”.
This rhyme, with its cooking theme, forms the link to Lustucru’s twentieth-century rebirth. These days, if you google his name, you’ll be met with a brand of French pasta. In a surprising turn of events, Lustucru experienced a sudden makeover in the early 1910s when his name became synonymous with packaged egg noodles. ※※Indexed under…Eggnoodles and misogyny
The logo and checkerboard design of the brand (which now sells other secondary staples in addition to pasta) may be familiar to grocery shoppers in France. Some might even be familiar with the original mascot, a jolly egg-shaped man named Pèr’ Lustucru (Father Lustucru), who began appearing on advertising posters in the 1910s, eager to sell premade pasta to French housewives.
This fellow with a bon vivant shape and a jovial face made his debut in 1911, shortly after the owner of the Cartier-Millon pasta factory in Grenoble launched a competition to create a new look and name for his egg noodles. The winning design was the blue checkerboard pattern still in use, while Lustucru was chosen as the new brand name for the pasta.
According to company annals, the Lustucru name came into being when Jean-Louis Forain, one of the winning illustrators, began singing the Mère Michel nursery rhyme during the banquet for the contest. Reminded, in a moment of whimsical kitchen humor, of a song from his childhood, Forain burst out with a musical salute to the grotesque chef Lustucru who cooks the cat of Mother Michel. His exuberant song resonated with the crowd and the owner. It was decided that same night that “Lustucru” should be the catchy new brand name for the egg pasta. Perhaps there was a sense that the name Lustucru connected the noodles to memories of childhood, nursery rhymes, homes, and mothers. Perhaps also, by that point in time, Lustucru’s name was already less threatening than nostalgic, a character feared only by children.
Whatever the motivating spark, Lustucru once again captured imaginations and became, two and a half centuries after he first invaded the scene, fully transformed from the brute of French folklore into a smiling and palatable figure. In a curious echo of his past role as a lobotomizing blacksmith, an early poster campaign for the pasta featured a basket of eggs which, when the imagery from Lustucru’s sinister past is recalled, cannot help but bring to mind those baskets of female heads in the forge. But the new Lustucru would have been more interested in feeding those heads than beating them. One might argue that, as a promotional mascot, he was still trying to bend French women (and their purses) to his will, but at least he was no longer sadistic. The twentieth century saw him a reformed character, fixing pasta meals instead of defiant women. L’eusses-tu-cru?  Who would have thought that his head could be fixed?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jé Wilson


text:
Filling in the Blanks
A Prehistory of the Adult Coloring Craze
By Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael
February 6, 2019

Its dizzy heights may have passed, but the fad for adult coloring books is far from over. Many trace the origins of such publications to a wave of satirical colouring books published in the 1960s, but as Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael explore, the existence of such books, and the urge to colour the printed image, goes back centuries.

For many publishers around the world 2015 was, fiscally speaking, an excellent year — a welcome boost in an otherwise uncertain decade. But this upturn had a perhaps surprising source: coloring books for grown-ups. What strange winds conspired to suddenly urge adults in their droves to take up colored pencils again? Whatever the reasons, sales rocketed: Nielsen logged sales of 12 million for the category in 2015, up from a measly 1 million the year before. In February 2016, with the craze still going strong, New York Academy of Medicine Library gave birth to a new initiative called Color Our Collections Week, a scholarly take on the coloring trend. Now in its third year, the campaign sees, on the first week of February, archives, special collections, and libraries take to social media with individual images and even entire books compiled from their holdings for the public to color. While these chosen works are all in the public domain, and so can technically include (in the US at least) works published up until 1924, the images in these coloring books more typically hail from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. And it is in these images — published in the centuries prior to the advent of color printing — that we can see a precedent for this seemingly modern fad. While it may seem like simply jumping on the adult coloring bandwagon, Color Our Collections Week, with its naturally historical focus, is actually tapping into (and shedding light on) a tradition much older.
Last year, the New York Academy of Medicine Library chose an image from Leonhart Fuchs’ monumental 1542 botanical work, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (“Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants”), to promote the event. An archivist from the History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma chimed in on Twitter to say their own copy of this book had already been colored in.
Should we be surprised by this? Color Our Collections Week might give the impression that these images, from the era before colored printing, are at last being colored — rescued from their hitherto drab monochrome existence. Yet printed images from the early modern period were regularly colored by hand.
The practice goes back to the earliest days of print in the fifteenth century. Artists, printers, booksellers, consumers, and readers all applied color to originally black-and-white images. Before Gutenberg’s innovation of the moveable-type press, both woodblock and engraved prints, single sheets with printed images, were popular in Germany and parts of Central Europe. They were used in various ways, and many people did what we might do with them -- hung them on the walls of their home.
With the emergence of the printed book the coloring trend continued. Colored illustrations were common in medieval manuscript books, most notably in the intricately illuminated manuscripts produced by monastic institutions. The early printed books from the fifteenth century and after often imitated the textual design and illustrations of these medieval manuscript books. Indeed, illuminated manuscripts and printed books were not mutually exclusive: some printed books contain illumination, while some manuscripts have painted prints pasted into them. It would seem that at least some early printers and readers attempted to create color illustrations for these works the only way they knew how: by coloring the pictures themselves.
The images below further demonstrate this transition from medieval to early modern book production, and the role colored illustrations played. Both are from De Claris Mulieribus, a fourteenth-century book by Giovanni Boccaccio (author of the Decameron). This work was a compilation of biographies of women, real and mythical, famous and infamous. It was first circulated as a manuscript, and surviving examples are richly illustrated with images of the women they discuss. The book was among the first to make the leap from manuscript to print, and the illustrations came with it. In order to recreate the feel of previous versions of the work, it needed colored illustrations. The images below are, fittingly enough, of the painter and sculptor (and apparently prolific creator of self-portraits) Iaia of Cyzicus (also known as Marcia). The first two are from manuscript versions of the work, showing Marcia sculpting and painting.
These next two are from printed editions of the work. The Latin edition has some illumination of the letters, while the German book’s image is fully colored.
Most illustrations found in books from the early days of print are in the form of woodcuts and etchings. Woodcuts were most compatible with moveable type because both used relief printing, and early printers could easily print a page with both text and illustrations.
Because of the carving and printing process, woodcuts have simpler designs with less shading. They therefore make for excellent coloring pages, and Color Our Collections participants frequently choose woodcuts for their images. Moreover, art historian Susan Dackerman argues that they were meant to be colored. Many of these color prints were created in a workshop setting, with an engraver, printer, and colorist working together. The “vast majority” of surviving fifteenth-century woodcuts are hand colored, and they were produced in the tens of thousands in the fifteenth century.1
Some images, like this fifteenth-century German woodcut of Christ on the cross, are only complete once colored. In this case, angels hold cups to catch blood that needs to be added with paint. The National Gallery of Art owns a number of examples of this woodcut, each differently colored. Some have been left uncolored, and a couple have only the requisite blood added to complete the image. Among those more fully colored, we can see that quite a bit of artistic license was taken.
According to Dackerman, twentieth-century art historians and collectors denigrated color, seeing it as nothing more than a way to hide the flaws of poorly-executed engravings and woodcuts. Well-executed prints, they argued, needed no color at all. This disdain for colored prints helped to obscure their place in art history. This line of argument harkened back to the debates that emerged during the Italian Renaissance over whether design or color were most important (disegno/colore).
In many of these images, the paint seems hastily applied. This haphazard coloring was often a result of the artist having many prints to paint rather than a lack of skill. Artists applied paint freehand, using a brush, but they sometimes employed stencils made from extra impressions of the images in order to paint more quickly.
Many works were colored not by professionals, but by readers. A lot of the examples we have found of hand-colored illustrations come from botanical works and herbals. For example, a copy of John Gerard’s Herball (1636), with selective images colored in, suggests it was the reader who painted it, perhaps as a way to record plants he or she had seen in person. Botany and painting were favored pursuits of genteel men and women in this period, so it’s not surprising that the same people would share both hobbies.
While publishers may have informally expected these monochrome images to be colored by some readers, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the practice was formalised in the first purpose-made coloring books. And in these the link between botany and painting persisted. Robert Sayer’s The Florist, published in London in 1760, was one of the first books where the author explicitly intended readers to color in the images. Comprised of pictures of various flowers,  the author gives his (presumably) adult readers detailed instructions for paint mixing and color choice (including the delightful sounding “gall-stone brown”).
Botanical works were particularly suitable for readers who wanted to engage directly with a physical book, because they offered images of things that could be observed in the natural world. Although the images in this particular copy of The Florist were left uncolored, the owner used the book to press actual plants. Many botanical works were heavily annotated, sometimes by several different owners, and pressed plants are often found in their pages.
The Florist was produced “for the use & amusement of Gentlemen and Ladies”, but most subsequent coloring books were created with children in mind. By the nineteenth century, these books became increasingly popular. Although they helped children develop artistic skills, creativity was not particularly prized. In The Young Artist’s Coloring Guide, a series published in the 1850s, a fully-colored version accompanied the uncolored image, ostensibly to imitate.
In Walter Crane’s Painting Book, originally published in 1880, there’s also color companions to copy, though one could argue in this case, they being from the hand of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest illustrators, such an approach made for a significantly more beautiful object and one likely enjoyed by adults as well as children.
Crane wasn’t the only noted illustrator of the time to lend his name to such a book. A year earlier came The “Little Folks” Painting Book, published by the McLoughlin Brothers, with illustrations by noted artist Kate Greenaway. With no accompanying colored example to copy it was a bit less didactic than Crane’s but it still cautioned children to use a “fitting choice of colours”, and there was a pre-colored frontispiece which would have acted as a guide of sorts to the color scheme.
Of course, in the case of these Victorian examples, and earlier offerings such as The Florist, the coloring-in is the very raison d’etre of the book. The early modern examples less so. Though that’s not to say a similar enjoyment was not taken by early modern readers wanting to colorize their wooducts or etchings, that same thrill of bringing color to what was once blank. It seems the therapeutic effects were not unnoticed at the time either. In his 1622 work The Compleat Gentleman Henry Peacham, in a chapter encouraging the practice of coloring-in printed maps, talks of how “the practise of the hand, doth speedily instruct the mind, and strongly confirme the memorie beyond any thing else.”2
As for the modern trend in adult coloring books, critics have charged marker-wielding grown-ups with being childish, and have alleged that the success of these books is a product of a dumbed-down culture. It may indeed be a fad, but it also has a longer history. So, the next time you buy an adult coloring book or get excited about Color Our Collections Week, know that you are not being childish. Rather, you are taking part in a long tradition of printed images that were meant to be colored.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 6, 2019

author: Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael


text:
Progress in Play
Board Games and the Meaning of History
By Alex Andriesse
February 20, 2019

Players moving pieces along a track to be first to reach a goal was the archetypal board game format of the 18th and 19th centuries. Alex Andriesse looks at one popular incarnation in which these pieces progress chronologically through history itself, usually with some not-so-subtle ideological, moral, or national ideal as the object of the game.

Ten thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period, before human beings began making pottery, we were playing games on flat stone boards drilled with two or more rows of holes.1 By the Early Dynastic Period in Ancient Egypt, three millennia later, board games were already represented in hieroglyphs. And on the wall of Nefertari’s tomb, built in the twelfth or thirteenth century BCE, someone painted the queen playing Senet, one of three Ancient Egyptian board games whose pieces have come down to us, along with Mehen and Hounds and Jackals.
The ancient Greeks, for their part, had Tabula, an ancestor of backgammon; the Romans added Latrones, an ancestor of chess. All across the ancient Near East, people played the Game of Twenty Squares, while in ancient China they played Liubo and in ancient India Moksha Patam, which was rechristened Snakes and Ladders when colonials imported it to Britain in the Victorian era. Wherever there has been civilization, strange to say, there have been games played on boards.
Until about the seventeenth century, these games tended to be traditional folk inventions that could not be traced back to a maker. Their boards were also relatively abstract, consisting of squares, triangles, spirals, or holes.2 With the advent of the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism, however, the board games of Europe — like so much else on the continent — began to change. By the end of the eighteenth century, games were being produced for the marketplace promoting everything from ferry rides to colonial conquest. To appeal to consumers (a category of persons that had not previously existed), these games were made to be played on boards printed with pictures that represented specific places, people, and things. The artists who designed them strove to attract the public eye and capture the public imagination, appealing to the modern craving for what Walter Benjamin would call “novelty and shock”.3
A great many of these new picture games were racing games, like Snakes and Ladders or the Game of Goose, in which two or more players move their pieces around a formalized track according to the number dictated by “some form of random generator”, such as a spinning top or dice.4 Each track has its unique combination of safe squares, penalty squares, hazards, and shortcuts; but the objective of all racing games is the same — to arrive at the final square and be the first to remove one’s piece or pieces from the board.
The subject matter and aesthetics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racing games ranged widely. The Dutch Stoomboots Spel (Steamboats Game), for example, is hand colored and charmingly childish, its figures and landscapes reminiscent of those you see in American folk portraits by Joseph H. Davis or Joseph Warren Leavitt. Intended to sell tickets on the Rotterdam–Dordrecht steamboat line, the game’s objective is as straightforward as can be — to reach the port of Dordrecht without being waylaid by various hazards, which (this being a “promotional tool” after all)5 are for the most part pleasant distractions: a glass of jenever, a cup of coffee, a carriage ride. The Pesthuis, or plague house, is the only ominous presence on the board.
The New Game of Human Life, printed in London in 1790, is a far less convivial affair. Heavy on text — and even heavier on Protestant morality — the board is loosely modeled on the Game of Goose, which was well enough ensconced in the culture of late eighteenth-century Europe for Goethe to write that life itself was
like a Game of Goose: The further you go, The sooner you reach the end, Where no one wants to be.6

Sure enough, the objective of The New Game of Life is to be the first player to become an old man, or, as the board would have it, “The Immortal Man who has existed 84 years . . . a Model for the Close of Life, which can end only by Eternity.” This can only be accomplished after the player has maneuvered his piece through eighty-three squares representing the seven periods of life, from Infancy to Dotage, possibly while being treated to “a few moral and judicious observations” (as the instructions suggest) along the way. A player could at least be certain of encountering no distracting glasses of jenever here.
The concept of progress, in the general sense of forward motion, had long been central to board games, and countless games produced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe continued to revolve around simple contests to reach a finish line. That finish line might be as close to home as the port of Dordrecht in the Stoombots Spel or as exotic as the North Pole in the Austro-Hungarian game Neueste Nordpol-Expedition, commemorating the polar expedition led by Carl Weyprecht and Julius Payer.
Jules Verne’s international bestselling novel Around the World in Eighty Days, about Phileas Fogg — the headstrong English gentleman who, to win a bet, circumnavigates the globe in eighty days — lent itself very well to board-game adaptations. So did the American journalist Nellie Bly’s real-life attempt to beat the fictive Fogg at his own game, which she managed to do, traveling from New York to India and back in a mere seventy-three days.
The concept of progress in the political sense worked its way into board games soon after the start of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries, not unlike the moralists behind The New Game of Life, were suspicious of the frivolity of games and wasted no time changing them to suit their own purposes. Considering these revolutionaries renamed the days and months, reconfigured the calendar, and recalculated the measurement of minutes and hours, the fact that they also decreed the king in the chess set would “henceforth be called le drapeau [the flag]” and requisitioned the blank backs of playing cards for “cataloguing the confiscated libraries of aristocrats” should probably come as no surprise.7 Two enterprising citizens, named Jaume and Dugourc, went so far as to redesign the entire deck of playing cards, eliminating the offensive images of kings, queens, and valets (jacks or knaves in the English deck) and replacing them with images of the Law, the Spirit of Peace, and the Freedom of the Press.
The Jeu de la Révolution française, printed circa 1791 and, like The New Game of Life, modeled closely on the Game of Goose, propagandized for political progress, leading players through the major events of revolutionary history, starting with the storming of the Bastille and proceeding through the abolition of feudal rights, the de-Christianization of France, the September Massacres, and the killing of de Launy, Foulon, and Bertier, before coming to an end with the National Assembly at the Palladium of Liberty. If the game sounds a bit boring, it probably was — for all but the most ardent republicans. Play was enlivened by a few penalty squares, in which “idiot geese” (in the words of the board) wearing magistrates’ clothes and symbolizing the parliaments of the Old Regime, could delay the progress of a player’s piece just as surely as they could delay the progress of the French nation.
Political progress is also at the center of things in the suspiciously subtitled The Chronological Star of the World, An Entertaining Game, published by John Marshall of London in 1818. Here, in 109 numbered pictures, beautifully printed in a star-shaped pattern of crescents, medallions, and leaves, the history of the world is told, as the scholar Ernst Strouhal writes, “not as a hodgepodge of stories but as a goal-oriented pursuit of progress, with achievements that bring humanity step by step to Reason.”8 Beginning with the Garden of Eden, the game ends when the first player lands on the central circle, which depicts a martial female figure holding a Union Jack shield and a sheet of paper that reads: “To the Glory of Britain Slave Trade Abolished.”
Queen Victoria, who was born in 1819, a year after The Chronological Star of the World was published, conveniently filled the role of this figure in another, even more nationalist board game printed in London around 1860. In this case, the game takes the shape of a pyramid, ascending from the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel to the Roman invasion of Britain and the discovery of America — non sequitur mounting upon non sequitur until they reach their peak — the queen, surrounded by her family.
The practice of making games to promote clean living and political progress (with that progress always culminating in an image of the government currently in power) persisted all through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The Soviet Union made particularly good use of board games, though in contrast to the French revolutionaries, who were so keen to have citizens rehearse and internalize the events of the revolution, the Soviets were generally more concerned with making sure that the newly urbanized peasantry learned the basics of health and hygiene. In the 1910s and 1920s, the state approved the manufacture of games such as Tuberculosis: A Proletarian Disease, Look After Your Health! The New Hygiene Game, and The Abandoned, in which “players had to round up homeless children and bring them to an orphanage.”9
Healthy Living, published in Moscow in 1926, is a game intended to promote awareness of syphilis, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and of the dangers of consulting folk healers rather than doctors. The objective is to be the healthiest worker possible, though oddly enough the hazards and penalties the player encounters most resemble those of the fun-loving Dutch Stoomboots Spel. Instead of being distracted from your destination by a warm cup of coffee or a fiery glass of jenever, however, you are penalized for consulting a folk healer (which lands you in the cemetery), drinking a beer at lunch (which lands you in a homeless shelter), or consorting with a strange woman (which gives you syphilis). Squares inform the player of various statistics (“forty-six percent of murders and sixty-three percent of robberies occur under the influence of alcohol”) and attempt to dispel popular medical misconceptions (“tuberculosis is not cured by medicine but by fresh air, sun and food”).10 The board, through its clever design, emphasizes that the worker’s health is in his own hands, just as the worker pictured holds the list of rules in one hand and a lever controlling the flywheels (both printed with the slogans imploring workers to take responsibility for improving the quality of their own lives) in the other.
Though Healthy Living may look bizarre to many of us today, it can look no more bizarre than the American Game of Life or Monopoly, with their emphasis on the accumulation of capital, would have looked to a Russian proletarian. Games, like religion and song, have existed since before history began, and as with religion and song they are creations in which we cannot help but reveal our desires, prejudices, and fears. They may be overtly political, like the Jeu de la Révolution française, or they may unconsciously disclose cultural beliefs, like the obsession with speed evident in the Jules Verne and Nelly Bly games produced in nineteenth-century France, England, and America. But in every case they generate an alternate space in which people can play through the anxieties of their daily lives according to clearly established rules and, so long as there is no actual money on the line, without any fear of harm. “In a game,” writes Roberto Calasso, “one is aware of tension, yet the rite is still . . . detached from the world of fact, as if keeping itself two palm breadths above the ground.”11 It is little wonder that every variety of moral and political regime has put its stamp on a board game or two. There are few pursuits that so perfectly replicate our attempts to imagine the course of progress, which seems so sensible it ought to be inevitable but is nevertheless subject to chance.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 20, 2019

author: Alex Andriesse


text:
Free Speech and Bad Meats
The Domestic Labour of Reading in Milton’s Areopagitica
By Katie Kadue
September 27, 2023

Does a healthy intellectual culture resemble a battlefield or a kitchen? Revisiting Milton’s Areopagitica, a tract often championed by today’s free speech absolutists, Katie Kadue finds a debt to the work of early modern housewives. In their labours to preserve food and transform it into wholesome cuisine, Milton saw an analogue for how the reading public might digest books — good and bad alike — into nourishing ideas.

When free speech crusaders go looking for cultural authorities to bolster their arguments, John Milton is often at the top of the Google search results. Milton’s 1644 tract Areopagitica, written in response to a 1643 act authorizing prepublication censorship, was ignored by Parliament at the time but has gone on to exert an outsize influence on Western liberalism, particularly debates over whether bad ideas deserve a hearing. John Stuart Mill was a fan; Supreme Court opinions cite it; a line from it is emblazoned in gold on the wall of the New York Public Library. Milton’s text is often name-dropped in support of sweeping arguments for the freedom of speech: that in the battlefield of ideas, truth will win out; that the good will out-evolve the bad in a Darwinian struggle; that sunlight will disinfect ideas that, if left to molder in the dark soil, would spread insidiously underground.
Milton, most famous for writing an epic poem with a cosmic battle between good and evil at its heart, shares with our contemporary free speech rhetoricians a taste for the heroic: he thought that truth, in our fallen world, can only emerge through blood and tears, dust and heat. But as many scholars have pointed out, it requires some selective reading of Areopagitica — a sort of censorship, even — to make Milton into an unproblematic mouthpiece for free speech. For one thing, he had no problem with taking books off the market if they proved to be harmful post-publication, after their trial by readers.1 He also had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to “Popery”, because Catholicism “extirpats all religions and civill supremacies” and therefore “it self should be extirpat”, if other means of winning over “the weak and the misled” from Catholic clutches should fail.
A less-discussed complication to free speech absolutists’ embrace of Milton is that the images he uses to describe the struggle between good and bad ideas are much stranger than the clichés we rely on today, and that this struggle’s protagonist is not so much truth itself but a community of readers who must, working both individually and collectively, strive to restore truth’s scattered body to the unbroken form it took before humanity’s fall into sinful ignorance. The paradise of unfallen knowledge, once enjoyed in Eden only to be lost through a fatal error in judgment, needs to be regained through hard cognitive work, in ways that can sound more tedious than triumphant. Milton’s metaphors often take us not to an epic battlefield but to humble domestic workspaces.
Readers who turn to Areopagitica for fighting words might be disappointed to find that its overarching virtue is not the courage to enter into the flames of discourse but the much lamer — and tamer-sounding — virtue of temperance. “How great a vertue is temperance”, Milton exclaims, “how much of moment through the whole life of man?” Not, for most readers, his most inspired words. When it comes to reading, though, temperance is about being promiscuous instead of puritanical. It refers not to simple abstinence or restraint but rather to the active collection, from life experience as well as books, of “usefull drugs and materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong med’cins, which mans life cannot want.” This tempering, the mixing of diverse impressions, ideas, affects, and materials, is the recipe every Christian subject should follow, and it’s all part of God’s plan: “Wherefore did he creat passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly temper’d are the very ingredients of vertu?”
Some of this metaphor’s strangeness arises from its affinity with a central activity of early modern housewives, who were tasked with mixing animal, vegetable, and mineral ingredients together to concoct home remedies in their kitchens — not the expected stomping grounds for anti-censorship warriors, then or now. The metaphor also calls to mind, blurring production and consumption, those combined ingredients’ digestion, which in early modern English shared a term with cooking: “concoction”. These ingredients may include bad books, which contain mild intoxicants; their false or harmful elements can train the reader’s immune response, like an inoculation, or work as a stimulant, prompting increased brain activity. The digestive metaphor explains why the publication of bad books should be nothing to worry about:
To the pure, all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil’d. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evill substance; and yet God in that unapocryphall vision, said without exception, Rise Peter, kill and eat, leaving the choice to each mans discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomack differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evill. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.
Preventing the publication of bad books is pointless because what matters isn’t the book, but the reader: just as someone with a weak stomach won’t be able to break down even the most healthful foods into nourishment, a bad person will get nothing out of even the best books. But here Milton’s metaphor itself breaks down, his polemical tract converted into a self-consuming digestive tract. “To the pure, all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge”. This implies that a strong stomach and a strong virtue alike can process any inputs that come their way, however polluted, much like, as Milton would later write in Paradise Lost, angels can alchemize coarse human food into ethereal substance. And yet, he’s forced to concede that even the healthiest constitution can’t do much with “bad meats”. (Milton’s eventual blindness was caused, he speculated, by vapors rising up from his stomach and clouding his eyes.) Still, he gamely continues, good people can do a lot with bad books, because of their capacity to convert these low-dose poisons into bioavailable material, making productive use of them “to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.” Books are like food, except when they’re not. The half-baked analogy is typical of Milton’s didacticism, which requires a judicious reader to exercise judgment rather than swallow a rhetorical morsel whole.
The careful selection and tempering that virtuous reading requires adds up to a lot of labor; like a woman’s work, the task of distinguishing good from evil is never done. In another famous passage, the virtue of the Christian reader is rendered as a brave (feminine) soldier confronting evil in combat, but virtue’s ordeal is equally described as the tedious and pointless sorting of wheat, barley, poppy seeds, peas, lentils, and beans into separate piles, the impracticable but rather unherculean task to which Venus puts her prospective daughter-in-law in Greco-Roman myth:
Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary.
The martial rhetoric celebrating a singular soldier sits uncomfortably with the menial, unglamorous work of careful inventory, which can take a village. (In the myth, Psyche is only able to complete her task because an ant feels sorry for her and recruits the whole colony to help.) Even the recovery of prelapsarian Truth is figured as a specifically feminized and ultimately collective enterprise, modeled after “the carefull search of Isis”, the Egyptian goddess, “for the mangl’d body of Osiris”:
Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after Him were laid asleep, then strait arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the Ægyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter’d them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second comming; he shall bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an immortall feature of lovelines and perfection. Suffer not these licencing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyr’d Saint.
What had previously been figured as a private and interior practice of gathering ingredients from the world and converting them into individual virtue is now a public and collective effort. The “sad friends of Truth” can only work together to put “her lovely form” (she is personified as an allegorical woman as well as a male god) back together again if they are free to scour every corner of the earth, including the pages of books that Parliament’s censorious licensers would prevent from publication. The images Milton draws together here are themselves surprisingly promiscuous, crossing gender as well as confessional lines: the virtuous truth-seeker is to imitate not Christ but a pagan goddess; the Protestant reader is to fetishize Truth’s body parts as a Catholic might worship a collection of relics.
The bloody martyrs don’t stop there. In perhaps the pamphlet’s most well-known passage, from which the New York Public Library quotation was gleaned, Milton invokes a space that sounds a bit like a mausoleum, haunted by the souls of great men. Again we’re bombarded with dramatic and grandiose imagery:
For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. . . . A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life. . . . We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather then a life.
Milton conjures a picture of books as both imbued with mystical powers and vulnerable to the all-too-human impulse for violent destruction. Master spirits living their best “life beyond life” lie in danger of homicide; ethereal quintessence, reason itself, and immortality are all, somehow, at grave risk of death. To defend the right of books to be published without prior licensing is to stand strong against the angry mob that would carelessly spill this precious life-blood and destroy this spiritual wealth.
These stirring notes are somewhat dampened, however, by a stubborn strain of ordinariness in Milton’s stock of images: these “not absolutely dead things” are “preserve[d] as in a violl”; “life-blood” is “imbalm’d and treasur’d up”, “season’d”, “preserv’d and stor’d up”. The repetitive references to preservation evoke the domestic rhythms of putting up preserves. Books are imagined as potent spirits, but the emphasis on storage solutions might locate them more comfortably in a home medicine cabinet, the domestic mingling with the epic as if both metaphorical registers were jostling together in the same glass vial. Or, put differently, the hyperbolic images of divine power and mass violence are repeatedly taken down to size, reduced into small-scale containers.
The exemplary “good Booke” flickers in and out between the magical and the practical, between the alchemical and the merely medicinal. This kind of oscillation also appears in seventeenth-century descriptions of women’s pharmacopeia, such as this one in Ralph Knevet’s 1631 play Rhodon and Iris: “With limbecks, viols, pots, her Closet’s fill’d / Full of strange liquors by rare art distill’d”.2 Of course, what strikes this outside observer as “strange” or “rare” is perfectly perfunctory for anyone who knows her way around such a “closet”; the art of rarefying substances into simple waters or aquae compositae, where several ingredients were distilled and combined, was quite common. As the sixteenth-century advice author Thomas Tusser reminds his readers, every housewife should make sure she is fully stocked with a liquid library to stave off sickness:
Good huswiues prouide, ere an sicknes do come,of sundry good things, in her house to haue some.Good Aqua composita, Vineger tart,Rose water & Treacle, to comfort the hart. . . .Conserue of the Barbery, Quinces & such,with Sirops that easeth, the sickly so much.3
In the context of domestic preservation, the tension in Milton’s metaphors starts to make more sense: the “life beyond life” that the spirits contained in books enjoy is secured not by a guarantee of immortality but by a contingent life support system. Their animation is suspended; their shelf life depends on the continued preservative labors of readers. It’s a bit like how, in his first published poem in 1630, Milton eulogizes Shakespeare by locating his tomb not in a bunch of “pilèd stones” but in the hearts and minds of readers who have kept his legacy alive: “Thou in our wonder and astonishment / Hast built thy self a live-long Monument”, the length of the monument’s life dependent on the lives of readers.4
Milton thus translates what we might be tempted to read as a total transubstantiation (flesh to word) into a physical and approximate process, “the living labours of publick men” clinging to a vegetative existence as “not absolutely dead” books. Books are different from living things in degree rather than in kind, so that immortality is tempered into longevity, the forbidden fruit of idolatry refigured as the quince conserve of early modern domestic pharmacopoeia. Readers, too, will have to manage their expectations about what books can do for their souls. Reading, as much as writing, is in practice — and it really is about practice — closer to the everyday, merely life-prolonging concoction of medicines, home remedies, and human digestion than immortality-seeking experiments in alchemy.
The necessary but undignified work of refining useful material from dross, so that it could be made accessible and then preserved, was at the heart of early modern intellectual life, in the daily labors of scholars, editors, anthologists, and commentators who, like so many mythic ants, sorted choice seeds out of dusty manuscripts. The Dutch scholar Erasmus compared this work to digging for gold in a dunghill. Many compilers of early modern printed commonplace books and florilegia — collections of “flowers” of wisdom and rhetoric gathered from a variety of books — understood their work to be both vital to intellectual life and deadening in its banality. Theodor Zwinger, a physician and botanist as well as a compiler, made the analogy between bad books and bad plants clear: “There is no herb so vile that it does not contain something useful.” But he also called the work of compilation “Sisyphean” and “improbus”, the word Virgil famously uses to describe the unrelenting labor that conquers all in his Georgics.5 Anthologies were not meant to be retentive once and for all: their techniques of holding diverse pieces of textual material in variously organized suspensions, as if in vials, aimed to inspire rather than obviate similar repetitive labors in their readers. Their goal was to model and thus reproduce their own reproductive labor, to preserve material only so that it can be preserved again.
The tempering activity of continuously reforming and reformulating language and material may indeed result, eventually, in the restoration of truth in all (or at least, until the Second Coming, a good portion of) her glory, but truth can’t survive her day in the sun on her own. The free speech warriors of today who repeat the cliché that bad ideas must be uprooted and exposed to the purifying light of the sun could take some lessons in metaphor from Milton. The dark soil where, in this cliché, bad ideas have been driven underground to fester might be better understood as the laboratory for truth; like subterranean microorganisms, readers break down ideas from books, composting them into loam that’s both individually beneficial and collectively productive, so that truth — like a plant sprouting from that teeming, now nutrient-rich soil — may flourish. In this way, Milton’s conception of free speech in the 1640s anticipates the varied style, some twenty years later, of Paradise Lost. The critic Christopher Ricks notes that most modern critics have emphasized the power, the grandiosity, and the sublimity of Milton’s poetic style, but in Ricks’ account, that style is most notable for its delicacy, or perhaps, its power comes from its delicacy. As Ricks puts it, “the balance of Milton’s Grand Style” is “the result of a strength manifesting itself in innumerable tiny, significant, internal movements”.6 In the terms of Areopagitica, the strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers. A healthy intellectual culture might look more like a gut microbiome than a battlefield.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 27, 2023

author: Katie Kadue


text:
“Spontaneous Revolutions”
Darwin’s Diagrams of Plant Movement
By Natalie Lawrence
October 26, 2022

After weeks of watching young tendrils slowly corkscrew their way toward the sun, Charles Darwin set about inventing a system for making botanic motion visible to the naked eye. Natalie Lawrence delves into a lesser-known chapter of the naturalist’s research, discovering revelations about the vegetal world that remain neglected to this day.

One day in 1863, during a long, hot summer, Charles Darwin wrote a letter to his close friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker. He related: “I am getting very much amused by my tendrils— it is just the sort of niggling work that suits me”.1 Darwin had spent the preceding weeks confined to bed at his home in Down House, laid low by an unpleasant bout of eczema. His usual fervent energy for research and correspondence had been frustrated by incapacity. He found solace in turning attention to the inhabitants of his bedchamber: houseplants. Darwin spent hours each day simply watching the young cucumber plants grow from the pots on his windowsills, observing how they explored the world around them seeking for things to climb up. It happened to be a very rewarding pastime. In his normal state of constant activity, Darwin would not have had the time to watch plants at plant pace. But, forced to slow down and exist at a different speed, he had become entranced.
The genesis of this interest in tendrils occurred when Darwin read a short paper in 1862 by Asa Gray, a botanist at Harvard. His “Note on the coiling of tendrils” in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences described the sensitivity of growing plant tendrils to touch.2 With his imagination captured by this prospect, Darwin wrote to Gray saying “I should like to try a few experiments on your Tendrils; I wonder what would be good & easy plant to raise in pot”.3 Gray sent him seeds of two climbing plants: the bur cucumber (Sicyos angulatus) and wild mock cucumber (Echinocystis lobata), which Darwin could plant in the spring to begin his observations. Gray did warn, however, that whilst the mock cucumber was “genteel”, the bur cucumber was “as nasty and troublesome” as any plant he knew, so Darwin would have to watch it closely.4
Though the “troublesome” bur cucumbers failed to germinate, the mock cucumbers did well, becoming Darwin’s companions and silent interlocutors by his sick bed. They proved surprisingly charismatic. He reported back to Gray that: “I am observing the plant in another respect, namely the incessant rotatory movement of the leading shoots, which bring the tendrils into contact with any body within a circle of a foot or 20 inches in diameter”.5 The circling movement was a surprise to Darwin: these tendrils were more than just sensitive. They seemed to have a mysterious method by which to explore the world around them and find ways to climb up to the light. He called the “spontaneous revolutions” that the plants made “circumnutation” (from the Latin circum, “round”, and nutare, “to nod”). Darwin thought he had discovered something new — a phenomenon he’d never seen described in detail.
In his letters, Darwin asked Hooker for more exotic species to observe as he healed and recovered his strength and ordinarily boundless energy. He carefully tended the plants that Hooker sent, adding them to the potted cucumbers and clematis vines that were strung along his indoor windows. They grew to weave a green tapestry in front of the panes, thrusting their leaves out to bathe in the incoming light. After four months captivated indoors with and by the tendrils, Darwin had his chair moved outside. He sat in fields of hops for hours, watching their shoots seek out supports and climb them. He began to play with the growth of the plants that he watched. By attaching small weights to them to test their movements, or marking their bodies, Darwin could monitor what they were doing, even when he wasn’t constantly watching.
Much of botany in Britain at this time was focused on taxonomy. Yet Darwin wanted to do more than name and classify plants. He wanted to find new ways of looking at plants, to see them on their terms. And what he found was remarkable.6 Some of his plants genuinely surprised him. For example, to understand how parasitic dodder plants, Cuscuta pentagona, looked for supports, he placed upright poles nearby for them to find. The shoots would perform slow circling sweeps as they grew. When encountering a stick, a plant “slowly and gradually slid up the stick, so as to become more and more highly inclined”. But, after a time, “the shoot suddenly bounded from the stick and fell over to the opposite side” before returning to the support and sliding up it.7 These plants were doing something complex, and sometimes rather fast. Darwin was delighted with what he observed, waxing lyrical to his son William: “My hobby-horse at present is Tendrils; they are more sensitive to a touch than your finger; & wonderfully crafty & sagacious”.8
It was only when Darwin reported back to Gray about the circling movements that he realised he had rather put the cart before the horse. Gray brought him roughly down to Earth, making it clear that what Darwin saw was rather common knowledge to some researchers. The rotating movements of climbing plants like cucumbers had been described in the published literature several times. Darwin, in his enthusiasm and bedridden summer frenzy, neglected to do his background reading. When he did, pointed in the right direction by Gray, the naturalist realised that “the cream” of his observations had already been published by others, chastening him considerably.9 He wrote in a later publication: “My observations were more than half completed before I became aware that the surprising phenomenon of the spontaneous revolutions of the stems and tendrils of climbing plants had been long ago observed”.10
Darwin was no ordinary naturalist. He saw that, though circumnutation was not a new observation, scientists lacked any kind of understanding about how it happened, or what the plant was actually doing with this movement. He wanted to delve deeper. The tendrils might be “crafty and sagacious”, but just how crafty and sagacious they were — that was the fascinating question. Keen-eyed Darwin could spend all day watching plants grow, but there was the unavoidable fact that he had an animal sensory system that was not geared to observe plant growth precisely. How could he record and understand these movements in a way which might reveal what was going on? Nobody else had solved this problem, and the naturalist came up with an ingenious method.
Darwin developed a way of recording the movements of individual parts of plants as they grew and rotated through space. He placed a plant between a sheet of paper and a glass plate and marked a reference point on the paper, attaching a thin wire to a particular part of the plant, such as a leaf or bud. He made recordings at regular intervals by lining up the end of this filament with the fixed reference point, and then marking its position on the glass plate. Seeing Darwin’s strange, angular drawings without any context, it would be easy to think that they might be the tracks of a small animal — a woodlouse, beetle, or perhaps a mouse with a short attention span. They seem like the staccato perambulations of a creature that does not have a clear purpose, rambling across the paper. But that is because these are static, two-dimensional renderings of movements that occurred in three dimensions.
After many hours during which multiple points were recorded, Darwin could then trace the plant’s movement over time by connecting the dots on the plate in order. In this way, he made the movement visible to the naked eye. Darwin could even magnify movements by varying the distance between the plate and the plant. By moving it further away, he increased the angle at which the points aligned to his eye, thus stretching small movements across larger distances on the plate. In the days before time-lapse photography and cinematography, this was an incredibly creative way of capturing plant movement to make it meaningful for humans.
Plants look static to the naked eye, but all of their parts move in swaying circles: from tendrils and roots to blooms and leaves. With his new method, Darwin was able to accurately trace the movements of hundreds of plants and their individual parts, detailing their circular explorations with staggered lines. He pioneered an understanding of plant “habits”. Unlike the taxonomists concerned with what categories to put different species in, Darwin saw that when plants made changes in their physical positions, or grew into different shapes, what they were doing was really behaviour, not unlike that of animals. The difference was, animals moved rapidly, and from place to place. Plants grew slowly and moved primarily by growing.11
It was not long before Darwin compiled his observations, including those using the glass plate method, into a substantial 118-page monograph. He presented it to the Linnaean Society in 1865, publishing under the title On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants. In the text, Darwin linked plant movement to his evolutionary theory: plants were sensitive to their environments and used this sensitivity to guide their growth in order to survive and reproduce more successfully:
Plants become climbers, in order, it may be presumed, to reach the light, and to expose a large surface of leaves to its action and to that of the free air. This is effected by climbers with wonderfully little expenditure of organized matter, in comparison with trees, which have to support a load of heavy branches by a massive trunk. Hence, no doubt, it arises that there are in all quarters of the world so many climbing plants belonging to so many different orders.12
Many different lineages of plants had developed this method of cheating the system, from plants like cucumbers that wound tendrils around supports, to others such as clematis, that “hooked” on objects. Both were techniques that allowed plants with wisp-like stems to hitch-hike up towards the sun without investing in a trunk or rigid stem.13
Darwin’s work went down a storm. Benjamin Dann Walsh, a prominent entomologist in the Linnaean Society, for example, wrote that “this discovery of their sweeping circles & groping in the dark for support, like a blind Cyclops, is very astonishing”.14 Even non-scientists such as the Queen’s chaplain, Charles Kingsley, enthused: “Ah that I could begin to study Nature anew, now that you have made it to me a live thing; not a dead collection of names”.15 Additional material was sent in from naturalists further afield who read the monograph, prompting Darwin to work on a second, expanded edition, which he published in 1875.
He didn’t stop there. Assisted by his son Francis, Darwin carried out extensive further experiments on the movements of plants. One of his key insights was that “all the more important great classes of movements are due to the modification of a kind of movement common to all parts of all plants from their earliest youth”.16 The nascent movements of adult plants could be seen right from their seedling stages, from sensitivity to light and other external stimuli, to their “sleep” behaviours, which revealed a kind of circadian rhythm. Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants in 1880 with much effort. It had grown into a weighty manuscript, which he found a “horrid bore” to revise for publication.17 It was, however, the culmination of his life’s work on plants and the penultimate book that Darwin published. It was followed only by The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms a year later.
Darwin’s observations became the basis of how we now understand the physiology and behaviour of climbing plants. Beyond the climbers, Darwin laid the foundations for the study of plant behaviour and intelligence. Even today, this remains an idea that is uncomfortable for some people. Though we now have time-lapse cameras and blue-chip nature documentaries that exhibit plant lives as vibrantly and dramatically as any footage of fauna, it’s hard to break out of our animal-focused view of the world. Darwin’s work showed that the centuries-old presumption “that animals moved & plants did not” was entirely wrong, a matter of perception that could be overcome.18 Yet this awareness is still not nearly as widespread as it should be.
Why is this? Some plants, such as mimosa or Venus fly traps, have very specific, seemingly responsive movements that are hard for animal senses to ignore. But most plant behaviour, which may even betray an intelligence that we are only just starting to investigate, goes totally unnoticed. What Darwin really did was see plants in a new way: to look from their perspective and observe how their movement and behaviour benefitted them. It was a project which he never quite put down.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 26, 2022

author: Natalie Lawrence