It's Always More Complicated

“Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” – the story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending: a seasonal account of a real-life quest:

This post is about finally finding a book from one’s youth forty years later – and after nearly thirty years of searching.
It is also a tale about goblins and Christmas decorations; about the perils of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence; and about the real value of librarians, cataloguers, indexers, and archivists – what should be called the Noble Professions.
And it is an account that ends with not one but two wonderful events.

***

Books that don't actually exist: A whimsical new exhibition assembles a range of books that don’t exist, from Byron’s destroyed memoirs to Shakespeare’s lost play. Includes real lost books, and books that appear in fiction.

***

This is, very who'd a thought it: because I really would not have predicted that this particular religious sect would have found a foothold there, but what do I know? The Bahá’í Faith in Greenland - admittedly the congregation is pretty tiny:

Beyond traditional Inuit shamanism and Christianity (including ‘sects’ like the Jehovah’s Witnesses), the oldest and largest religion in Greenland is the Bahá’í Faith, which was first brought to the island through a literature propagation campaign in 1946. The first Bahá’í to live in Greenland arrived in 1951, and there are now around 150 believers. The Bahá’í Faith is a monotheistic, messianic, quasi-Abrahamic tradition founded in Iran during the late nineteenth century. It has its roots in Bábism, another movement formed earlier in the nineteenth century by a figure known as the Báb, and it takes many of its structural and stylistic cues from Islam, although it has generally been proscribed by Islamic authorities due to its belief in continuing revelation (i.e., prophetic revelation after the Prophet Muhammad) and its opposition to hierarchical religious power structures.

***

Slightly less who'd a thought it, because things even from that distance in time turn up In The Archives: new info on the Chevalier d'Eon:

On 27 November 1776 a case came before Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, in which, the Morning Chronicle reported, proceedings were repeatedly interrupted by the ‘loud and hearty laughs’ of all in attendance. The cause of such mirth was the reading aloud of a set of letters written by the Chevalier d’Eon, a French spy and diplomat, and complainant in the case....
The letters were only recently discovered in the King’s Bench collections at the National Archives, enclosed in John Goy’s translations. These letters, and the legal records created as part of these cases, provide us with an invaluable insight into the enigmatic Chevalier d’Eon during this transitional period in his life.

Women in public spaces: Emotion and Space in the Mid-Victorian Women’s Suffrage Movement:

Sir Alexander Beresford Hope MP warned against ‘forcing [women] into the arena of political excitement, where they would be exposed to the animosities, the bickerings, and the resentments which are so unhappily inherent in the tough work of electioneering’.[3] Beresford Hope’s description of ‘the arena of political excitement’ was laden with vivid emotional language, through which he asserted that casting a vote would prove pernicious to feminine emotional virtues.

Moving scientific knowledge from the laboratory to the theatre: Humphry Davy's Lecture practice at the Royal Institution, 1801–1812. He was considerably dissed on for attracting a large number of women to his lectures (including demos of nitrous oxide). Jane Marcet was inspired by them to write her famous Conversations in Chemistry, and it does appear that children attended these lectures along with their mothers.

Spotted lately again, that irksome phrase about well-behaved women not making history.

Clio begs to differ: unless, of course, you define 'well-behaved' along the lines of a lady only appearing in the newspapers when she was born, married and died (? and when she produced offspring for her lord and master?).

But, honestly, there have been times when at the very least making like Marmee and keeping the anger down and turning a soft answer was the correct strategy -

- or just beavering away in less than ideal circs doing your crystallography until, you know, they ultimately had to give you the Nobel Prize, Dorothy Hodgkin -

- considering upon longer goals, as in the case of Emmeline Pankhurst, her very own self, when applied to by an anxious Letitia Fairfield, then a medical student, concerned that if being a militant did not get her chucked out of medical school, it would probably lead to the relative who was funding her cutting her off, and Mrs P was of the opinion that Letty's work for the Cause was getting her medical degree -

- and that being a rebel in one sphere may mean that you have to be extra-specially careful to demonstrate your conventional respectability -

- as evinced over a considerable length of time by ladies active in the birth control movement. While some of them could not evade/courted notoriety, others found it prudent to duck and dodge. I cite, prima, Alice Drysdale Vickery (Secularist, Malthusian, living in a free union with C R Drysdale and mother of his sons), who conceded to the London Medical School for Women that to avoid the extra scandal that would be accrued to an already suspect enterprise by any association with the Malthusian League, she (and two colleagues) would cease birth control activism until such time as they got their medical licenses.

And, secunda, the dance of performative respectability the National Birth Control Association, later the Family Planning Association, was obliged to tango, in spite of the personal views and actual love-lives of many of its founders and leading figures.

I suppose I have been been meditating upon this partly through having had to revisit Alice Vickery for a project I was commissioned to, and partly because of this post in agonyaunt ('I’m also slightly worried, because it’s normal and healthy for kids his age to rebel': he's clearly rebelling against his family, or his mother's, idea of what constitutes fun. Or at least, this is the take of somebody who mostly would have rather sat at home and read.)

Recently came across a Twitter thread about the Awfulness of Marriage and how women go into it, still, without reckoning on what it's going to be like -

- and I am not linking to that because it's Too Damn Depressing -

- and at first I thought, you know, I was reading all these novels in the early to mid 60s about 'Marriage Is A Trap and not all it's cracked up to be' and have we not progressed since then, or is this the dread spiral of history and feminism and so forth and all coming around again -

- and then I thought, DAMMIT, Cicely Hamilton wrote Marriage As A Trade in the Edwardian era and it is a sorry thing to consider that in spite of the various advances since then (the suffrage, improved divorce arrangements, better contraception and access to abortion - causes in which Hamilton was active - improvements in women's education and career prospects), marriage is still a problem, and women still seem to be blithely sleepwalking into it and what is this thing that this thing is?

And else-Web somebody was commenting about a radio programme (I think) on the suffragists and the suffragettes, and the audience was polled and apparently the vast majority claimed that they would have been out there with the militants -

To which one thinks, actually not, ducky. Moreover, while all the drama and glamour clings around the Pankhursts and the WSPU, the work that was being done by the less upfront organisations and individuals was just as important in the long run; not to mention, they got just as stigmatised for being Those Awful Unwomanly Women.

So, thinking about poems and poetry -

Okay, this is maybe not One of the Great Poems of All Time, and I'm not even sure it's one of my as it were poetic touchstones, but I am fond of it for an entirely adventitious reason, which is that I first heard it when my father used to quote the opening lines -

- slightly wrong, i.e. 'Beyond the East the mountains, beyond the West the sea/And East and West the wanderlust that will not let me be'.

But anyway, I eventually found the actual poem in an anthology somewhere - I'm not sure if it was actually in any of the various anthologies we had about the house:

Wander-thirst by Gerald Gould
BEYOND the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea,
And East and West the wander-thirst that will not let me be;
It works in me like madness, dear, to bid me say good-bye;
For the seas call, and the stars call, and oh! the call of the sky!

I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are;
But a man can have the sun for a friend, and for his guide a star;
And there's no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard,
For the rivers call, and the roads call, and oh! the call of the bird!

Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day
The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away;
And come I may, but go I must, and, if men ask you why,
You may put the blame on the stars and the sun and the white road and the sky.

So I should - What that doesn't mention is that his wife was Barbars Ayrton Gould, the daughter of Hertha Ayrton!!!

It is perhaps ironic to be hymning wander-thirst when I've hardly been out for such ages and have no particular intentions of venturing forth in the very foreseeable future.

Lost in the Archives: Ayahs in Scotland:

British families travelling back and forth from India to Britain, often hired travelling ayahs or brought their family ayah on the long and occasionally treacherous sea voyage. Before the Suez Canal opened and the advent of steam powered liners, these journeys could take up to six months. The ayah on board had the sole responsibility of looking after children and their memsahib. Sadly on reaching Britain, some of these ayahs were discharged without pay. With no formal contract of employment, some with limited English, they were left destitute and homeless in a foreign country. Eventually, records show that the Ayahs Home in London was established, founded by Christian charities as a refuge for ayahs and amahs (Chinese nannies), until placements or return journeys were found. By the 1850s, an estimated 100-140 travelling ayahs visited Britain each year. By 1921, the Ayahs Home was recording up to 223 women per year, signifying the incidence of abandoned ayahs.

***

History Workshop Journal: Black British Histories Virtual Issue.

Free online access to articles from 1987-2019 (the earlier ones are only accessible as pdfs)

***

Another one of those historical phenomena which was not quite what we have been led to believe: There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever:

[M]erchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations.
....
All the outlandish stories of economic ruin, of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb, of chimney sweeps wading into the market in hopes of striking it rich—those come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day.

Charles Mackay in his popular 1841 work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. According to this narrative, everyone from the wealthiest merchants to the poorest chimney sweeps jumped into the tulip fray, buying bulbs at high prices and selling them for even more. Companies formed just to deal with the tulip trade, which reached a fever pitch in late 1636. But by February 1637, the bottom fell out of the market. More and more people defaulted on their agreement to buy the tulips at the prices they’d promised, and the traders who had already made their payments were left in debt or bankrupted.

***

An eventful life...

Elsie Edith Bowerman:

Elsie founded a branch of the WSPU in Girton, inviting such speakers as Lady Constance Lytton to address the undergraduates, despite lack of co-operation from the college authorities... Having graduated Elsie Bowerman returned to St Leonards, as a paid organizer for the WSPU. On 15 April 1912, while travelling as first-class passengers to America for a holiday, she and her mother survived the sinking of the Titanic. In September 1916 Elsie Bowerman sailed to Russia as an orderly with the Scottish women's hospital unit, at the request of the Hon. Evelina Haverfield, a fellow suffragette whom she had known for several years. With this unit she travelled via Archangel, Moscow, and Odessa to serve the Serbian and Russian armies in Romania. The women arrived as the allies were defeated, and were soon forced to join the retreat northwards to the Russian frontier. While awaiting her passage home, in March 1917, Elsie witnessed the ‘February revolution’ in St Petersburg. A diary that she kept, recording her experiences with the hospital unit, is held by the Women's Library, London.
....
She joined the Middle Temple in 1921, read for the bar, and was called—one of the first women barristers—in 1924. She practised on the south-eastern circuit from 1928 until 1946, was involved with the Sussex sessions from 1928 until 1934, and wrote The Law of Child Protection (1933). In 1938, with Lady Reading, she founded the Women's Voluntary Service, and from 1938 to 1940 edited its Monthly Bulletin. During the Second World War she worked for the Ministry of Information (1940–41) and was liaison officer with the North American Service of the BBC (1941–5). After the war she spent a year in charge of the status-of-women section of the United Nations in New York.

And, just because, as it shows what remarkable and often unexpected things can be found in any given archive: Archive Treasures in Britten/Pears Arts. I'm particularly taken by the one that references the North Sea floods of 1953, as I once had to do a presentation to students one of whom was doing their dissertation on that subject - and lo and behold, actually managed to find something in our holdings on the subject! which I would not actually have guessed had I not been desperately trying to look something out.

'Why are there no women great artists?' - okay, we know, do we not, my dearios, that there are great women artists? - but there might be more. One of the reasons why there are not as many as there might be could be that they felt they had Other Priorities (not necessarily Being A Muse). I was already apprised of the not necessarily softer side of activists Barbara Bodichon and Sylvia Pankhurst, but I had no idea about Josephine Butler, though possibly one might categorise her as 'talented amateur water-colourist'.

***

I gave a groan of familiarity on reading this:

For Women’s History Month, it has become traditional to rifle through the great names of the past, pluck out a few that strike the imagination and have the appropriate gender marker, and dust them off for a new audience.

Stories of pioneering women in the “digging” sciences have been skewed toward those who were White, wealthy, and networked. The TrowelBlazers project aims to reset our imagination—and our future.

***

Women as mothers of invention: Seven female patent pioneers you should know:

[A] quick caveat. Earlier patents may exist for some of the inventions given in this list but the following women are widely considered the inventor of their ‘thing’ because it worked (earlier versions didn't in some cases), or it was popular, or it is recognisable to the form as it exists today, and so on. It is also worth saying that there are many other female innovators and inventors we could have mentioned. Not all acquired patents, some weren’t given credit, many were trapped by the conditions of their time.

***

I found it a little Point Thahr Misst in this piece about Virginia Woolf and her relevance to today, that the writer has not encountered, or perhaps not taken on board, Woolf's pertinent critical observation on the subjects that are deemed Important rather than Trivial Subjects for fiction to deal with (men on a battlefield vs women in a drawing room).

***

This Writer Is Tweeting Everything Sylvia Plath Ever Ate - apparently she was quite the foodie. Might we anticipate the Plath Cookery Book? (I'm sure there are other writers, quite apart from the obvious food writers like David, Fisher, Colwin, who resisted the narrative of birdlike appetite and disdain for the pleasures of the table - Lessing springs to mind.)

Augusta Fells Savage, a talented sculptor who had faced obstacles due to her sex and race at every turn:

[L]ittle of Savage's work survives today. Because she couldn't afford bronze, she often had to make her sculptures out of plaster; most of these have crumbled over time. Other works, like The Harp, were destroyed because they could not be moved or stored, while some of her work has simply disappeared. In 1988, the Schomburg Center in Harlem held a retrospective of her work, but could only locate 19 pieces. Throughout her career, Savage fought to help African American artists publicize their work. "She was keen on creating an infrastructure for black artists," says Wendy NE Ikemoto, curator at the New York Historical Society. "She put a lot of thought and energy into creating these intellectual spaces and networks for the work of black artists." In addition to the students she fostered during the Harlem Renaissance, Savage devoted much of her later life to teaching children and summer art camps, mostly in Saugerties, New York.

And perhaps a similar story about evanescence and the role of marginality and material culture: a woman author who wrote in a marginal genre in cheap magazines: 'the Reclusive Woman Who Became a Pioneer of Science Fiction'.

***

But these often fragile suffrage publications have been preserved and are now digitised: Women's Rights Collection at LSE.

***

Luke Hodgkin, 1938-2020: Son of Nobel laureate and radical historian who forged his own path as a mathematician and activist remembered - okay, I am entirely there that Mum, Dorothy Hodgkin, got mentioned first, but hello, he was a scion of a long dynasty of Quaker scientists and reformers (though not a direct descendant of Thomas Hodgkin of the disease and the Aborigines Protection Society) including the pioneer metereologist Luke Howard:

He also had plans for a book called Mathematics, Money, Drugs and War designed to “demonstrate how mathematics, with its claim to exact results, has become a central instrument of control” used, for example, not only to design drones for military purposes but to “prove that their workings are effective – and in particular to deny the existence of civilian casualties”.

And thinking about the Quaker connection and anti-slavery and ethical consumerism etc, this sounds like a fascinating book: Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition - short interview with the author.

***

The wife of a celebrated naval captain had been accused of seducing her formerly enslaved nineteen-year-old Black footman:

Though John initially testified against his mistress, Ann Inglefield, he later recanted this testimony. He had been terrified of his ‘master’, he now claimed, and had lied in court because Captain Inglefield had pressured him.

***

This strikes me as a quite amazingly obtuse failure to read the room: Johnson trying to set up charity that could fund Downing Street flat revamp: No 10 does not deny reports that scheme could cover costs of works by PM’s fiancee, Carrie Symonds.

What I read

Finished Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s, which was very good, given that not my period and somewhat outwith my usual academic disciplinary interests. The pdf format a bit irksome. Anyway, the notes alerted me to a biography of Charlotte Smith published by Palgrave which I was able to snap up before the end of their cybersale, as if I don't have a virtual tbr stack already...

Took a brief break part way through to re-read John D MacDonald, Darker than Amber (1966) - one of Travis McGee's bleaker outings, I thought.

Also off the non-fiction virtual tbr list, Wendy Moore, Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One's Most Remarkable Military Hospital (2020) - and at first I wasn't sure if I was going to stick with this, because unprecedented medical horrors and organisational incompetence in dealing with same (chapter one, pretty much) was not entirely what I felt in the mood for, but I did stick with it, and okay, the ending is pretty much a downer because: a) after running a really successful military hospital the flu epidemic came upon them with devastating effect and b) that whole thing of women having done amazing things that were acknowledged at the time and then completely forgotten about appallingly fast. But it is very good - immense kudos for the amount of material she found, personal accounts and so on (even if she does acknowledge the work of a preceding scholar in the field) and pulling it all together.

On the go

The references in Endell Street to their pioneering use of BIPP for wound infection reminded me that this was name-checked in AS Byatt's The Children's Book (2009), which I have been meaning to re-read. So that's in progress.

Still keeping up with Catherine Fox's Tales from Lindford.

Up Next

There's a new Jane Smiley forthcoming but not until the end of next week, I think. So dunno.

And continuing my theme of recent years which has been, wars more generally, and this is one of the longer ones -

- which really perhaps I should have noted last year, since there was, at least in my country, a significant battle finally won 100 years previous, except that it was also the bicentenary of Peterloo -

- I was wondering about March of the Women, but while a stirring song set to Ethel Smythe's music, I am not sure the words (by Cicely Hamilton) hold up entirely on their own -

- I give you instead the following, by my gay male suffragist and sex reformer boyfriend, Laurence Housman, Woman This and Woman That.

We observe that it riffs off Kipling's Tommy, which, if not precisely an anti-war poem, is vigorous about the way people turn away from their 'heroes' once the crisis is over... and yes, I was trying to think of poems about the War on Disease, and not coming up with much. Since for reasons I was lately looking up JBS Haldane I was reminded that he wrote a jaunty if somewhat creepy little piece of doggerel, Cancer's A Funny Thing. Maybe the War on Disease is more the province of prose fiction.

We went up to Saint Stephen's with petitions year by year;
'Get out!' the politicians cried, 'We want no women here!'
M.P.s behind the railings stood and laughed to see the fun,
And bold policemen knocked us down, because we would not run.

For it's 'woman this', and 'woman that', and 'Woman, go away!'
But it's 'Share and share alike, ma'am!' when the taxes are to pay;
When the taxes are to pay, my friends, the taxes are to pay,
O it's 'Please to pay up promptly!' when the taxes are to pay.

We went before a magistrate, who would not hear us speak,
To a drunken brute who beat his wife he only gave a week,
But we were sent to Holloway a calendar month or more
Because we dared, against his will, to knock at Asquith's door.

For it's 'woman this', and 'woman that', and 'Woman, wait outside!'
But it's 'Listen to the ladies!' when it suits your party's side;
When it suits your party's side, my friends, with M.P.s on the stump
And shaking in their shoes at how the cat is going to jump!

When women go to work for them the government engage
To give them lots of contract jobs at a low starvation wage,
But when it's men that they employ they always add a note -
'Fair wages must be paid' -- because the men have got the vote.

For it's 'woman this', and 'woman that', and 'Woman, learn your place!'
But it's 'Help us, of your charity!' when trouble looms apace;
When trouble comes apace, my friends, when trouble comes apace,
Then it's 'O, for woman's charity!' to help and save the race!

You dress yourselves in uniforms to guard your native shores,
But those who make the uniforms do work as good as yours;
For the soldier bears the rifle, but the woman bears the race -
And that you' d find no trifle if you had to take her place!

O it's 'woman this', and 'woman that', and 'Woman cannot fight!'
But it's' Ministering Angel!' when the wounded come in sight;
When the wounded come in sight, my friends, the wounded come in sight,
It's a 'ministering angel' then who nurses day and night!

We are only human beings who have wants much like your own,
And if sometimes our conduct isn't all your fancy paints
It wasn't man's example could have turned us into saints!

For it's 'woman here', and 'woman there', and 'Woman on the streets!'
And it's how they look at women with most men that one meets,
With most men that one meets, my friends, with most men that one meets -
It's the way they look at women that keeps women on the streets!

You talk of sanitation, and temperance, and schools,
And you send your male inspectors to impose your man-made rules;
'The woman's sphere's the home,' you say, then prove it to our face:
'Give us the vote that we may make the home a happier place!'

For it's 'woman this', and 'woman that', and Woman, say your say!'
But it's 'What's the woman up to?' when she tries to show the way;
When she tries to show the way, my friends, when she tries to show the way -
And the woman means to show it -- that is why she's out today!

What I read

Finished The Raven Tower - very, very good, and I did not see where all that was going.

Also finally got to the end of Memories of the Future and registering a muted meh - much too spun-out for what it was, I thought. Maybe there were a lot of jokes that were funny back in the day? - there is actually a brief riff on changing senses of the humorous.

2 BJ Oliphants (yes, Sheri Tepper under a pseudonym), which I read in the wrong order - The Unexpected Corpse #2 (1990) and Dead in the Scrub #1 (1990). I thought #1 was a bit better than #2 but that may be because they would be more advisedly read in the right order. I am not sure I want to read through these in a wild gulp - I think Shirley McClintock, refreshing though it is to have an opinionated competent middleaged woman sleuth, might get just a leetle annoying in larger doses...

Desmond Cory, The Strange Attractor (1992). I don't think I've ever come across anyone else who's read any Desmond Cory. Sometimes I feel he is having a quiet laugh up his sleeve at genre conventions and riffing with them, and not taking the whole thing terribly seriously. Unfortunately this one, while it pulls off an interesting twist (of a kind which I'm not sure you could do any more?) goes into v dodgy stereotype territory at the end. Also, while points for going against some standard gender tropes, possibly it goes into the hapless male/competent female one with the central budding romantic relationship?

I noticed last week that Anthony Price had died. So I found the first of the Audley novels, The Labyrinth Makers (1970) conveniently close to the top of a pile, and read that. David Audley is one of your more cerebral intelligence types, not a man of action, an academic. I am not quite sure what to make of the various mentions of the small size of the mammary development of the love interest (she survives and it looks like the relationship will progress) - maybe this is srs book, perish the thort that the laydeez involved should have vulgarly large gazongas? - she also wears glasses and teaches physics. It was 1970, after all? I really wanted to read the series, if at all, in order, but this will require a certain amount of delving.

On the go

Just started, Patricia Fara, A Lab of One's Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War (2018) - very readable, though so far it's not really telling me much I didn't already know, background stuff on women's position, education, the suffrage movement etc - I'm there for (I hope) more on specific women scientists. I'd dissent a little from her passage on Stopes, and there is a blooper where she confuses Hedda Gabler with Nora of the Doll's House (oops).

Up next

No idea.