I am reading A Double Life, Sarah Burton’s 2003 biography of Charles and Mary Lamb, and have been delighted by a couple of names mentioned therein.

One of the Lamb’s relatives lived in a Hertfordshire cottage called, splendidly, Button Snap. It is still there, a listed building, so I may have to go and violently drive out the current tenants or owners and move in myself.

Gone, however, is a pub at 17 Newgate Street in the City of London called The Salutation And Cat, where Charles Lamb used to get squiffy with his pal Samuel Taylor Coleridge. According to Walter Thornbury in Old And New London (1878), the pub was named after an “odd combination of two incongruous signs”. Over the road was another pub with the equally intriguing name of The Magpie And Stump.

Both Sarah Burton and Walter Thornbury remind us of Coleridge’s youthful folly in enlisting in the army. He did so under the pseudonym Silas Tompkin Comberbache. Some years ago I linked to a site (now vanished*) which contained this brief reference to his military service:

As a rider, his attempts ended frequently in disaster: “Within this week I have been thrown three times from my Horse, and run away with to no small perturbation of my nervous system.” He developed saddle sores, “dreadfully troublesome eruptions, which so grimly constellated my Posteriors.”

Button Snap

*ADDENDUM : Not so. There is a (revised) link to the site in the comments. Thanks to Dave Lull and others who pointed out my error.

On Friday afternoon the Coroner and a respectable Jury sat on the body of a Lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day. It appeared by the evidence adduced, that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case knife laying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room; on the eager calls of her helpless infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached her parent.

The child by her cries quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late – the dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling around the room.

For a few days prior to this the family had observed some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening, that her brother early the next morning went in quest of Dr Pitcairn – had that gentleman been met with, the fatal catastrophe had, in all probability, been prevented.

It seems the young Lady had been once before, in her earlier years, deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too much business. – As her carriage towards her mother was ever affectionate in the extreme, it is believed that to the increased attentiveness, which her parents’ infirmities called for by day and night, is to be attributed the present insanity of this ill-fated young woman.

The above unfortunate young person is a Miss Lamb, a mantua-maker, in Little Queen-Street, Lincoln’s-inn-fields. She has been, since, removed to Islington mad-house.

The Jury of course brought in their verdict, Lunacy.

Morning Chronicle, 26 September 1796, reproduced as the prologue to A Double Life : A Biography Of Charles And Mary Lamb by Sarah Burton (2003)

I was interested to note that the 2013 Man Booker International Prize was awarded to Lydia Davis. She is a writer who specialises in very, very short stories – so short they make Mr Key’s own effusions seem like mighty epics. Could it be that the hermetic and blinkered literary world is at last opening up to the odd and the unfamiliar?

I don’t know Lydia Davis’s work, other than a small selection of stories which appeared in the print edition of the Guardian at the weekend. But I am heartened by her success. It may prompt publishers to be just a tad more adventurous and – who knows? – I might not be told (as I have been, more than once) that I have “absolutely no commercial potential whatsoever”.

To that end, and also as a way of emerging from the influenza-racked hiatus that I know has had you lot mired in Hooting Yard-less misery for the past week or so, I thought I might have a bash at a few shorter-than-usual stories over the next few days. Clearly last year’s thousand-words-per-day scheme, interesting as it was (at least for me), did not quite capture the zeitgeist. All those hundreds of essays were far too long. Cut!

While I languish in my sickbed glugging Lemsip and generally feeling woebegone, there are a couple of items I ought to bring to your attention.

The first (courtesy of Jonathan Calder) is this startling headline from Kent Online. I suspect this is one of those occasions when real life collides with a paperback potboiler by Pebblehead.

The second is to inform you of a couple of books the existence of which I have recently learned. Recently and belatedly, given that both were published almost three hundred years ago. I am going to have to learn Dutch in order to read them:

Jacobus Hondius, Black Register Of A Thousand Sins (1724)

Anon,, The Finger Of God, or Holland And Zeeland In Great Need From This Hitherto Unheard Plague Of Worms (1731?)

I ought to illustrate this postage with images of badgers and worms and sin, but instead I am going to fall into an uneasy and fevered sleep.

I am currently reading blockbusting paperback bestseller Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It’s a page-turning thriller which I am much enjoying, in a blockbusting paperback bestseller page-turning thriller kind of way. But I reach page 260, and lo! there is a sudden and awful clunk! Until now, all the dialogue has been believable – you can imagine the characters speaking the words Ms Flynn puts in their mouths. But would anyone, in any circumstances, ever, say:

“I think that’s it. Yes, Amy is using a Madness song to give me a clue to my own freedom, if only I can decipher their wily, ska-infused codes.”

I shall be looking for opportunities to say this as often as possible in future.

A just war, according to Jean Racine, is occasioned when “a King’s puissance is ruin’d in the eyes of strangers”.

Spotted loitering in the British Museum yesterday . . .

Cheese was rarely consumed on an allegorical level in the seventeenth century.

E. de Jongh, cited in The Embarrassment Of Riches : An Interpretation Of Dutch Culture In The Golden Age (1987) by Simon Schama. Lucky for me that I did not live in that place at that time, as my own consumption of cheese is pursued almost exclusively on an allegorical level. I shall have more to say on this matter shortly.

There is a Dutch word . . . verongelijktheid, to be wronged, not by an individual so much as by the world at large. You often see it in the way the much-heralded national team plays soccer.

Proud of their superior skills, their multicultural makeup, the almost mocking manner of their free-flowing play, maddening the players of more prosaic teams, like Germany, the stars of Dutch soccer usually start their games with all the swagger of swinging Amsterdam. In their playful individualism, their progressive daringness, they know they are the best. And sometimes they are. But when things go against them and the plodding Germans, or the bloody-minded Italians, or the cussed English, go up a goal or two, the heads slump, the bickering starts, and the game is lost in a sour mood of verongelijktheid. Why did this have to happen to us? What did we do to deserve this? Aren’t we the best? Well, fuck you!

Ian Buruma, Murder In Amsterdam : The Death Of Theo Van Gogh And The Limits Of Tolerance (2006)

Fossicking in the archives to find the text of What’s On In Mustard Parva (see below), I noticed that the day before I had posted an extract from the magnificently-titled Withered Leaves From Memory’s Garland by Abigail Stanley Hanna (1857):

Next to Rosa Whittier sat Julia Balcolm, with saddened expression of countenance and large deep blue eyes that gazed upon you with a deeper expression of melancholy in their glances than is usual to the merry age of childhood, and elicited your sympathy ere you knew her history. Julia was a cripple. She was drawn to school by an older sister with rosy cheeks, bright flashing black eyes, and a sprightly animated countenance, and carried into the school-room in the arms of her teacher, or some of the older scholars. And so she came, year after year, mingling with the merry group. But where is she now? Yon little mound of heaped up earth covers her remains, and a narrow marble slab tells the place of her repose, and we can but hope she who was denied the privilege of walking on earth may now soar on angel’s wings. This dear child was obliged to crawl from place to place after her more favoured companions, dragging her useless perished limbs behind her. But He who careth for us knew what was best for her, and we cannot doubt His infinite wisdom.

Would that Edward Gorey were with us still, to illustrate this tear-stained yet uplifting tale!

Close to the ruins of Eynsford Castle, Philip [Heseltine / Peter Warlock] shared the small main-street cottage with his composer friend, E. J. Moeran, together with a collection of cats and a Maori housekeeper-cum-factotum, Hal Collins (Te Akau) (d. 1929). Collins had previously been a barman at a London drinking club. [Cecil] Gray gave this intriguing description of him:

“In contra-distinction to this more or less floating population of cats and women, a permanent member of the establishment was a strange character called Hal Collins . . . whose Maori grandmother had been a cannibal and used, within his memory, to lament the passing of the good old days when she could feast upon her kind. Besides being a graphic artist of considerable talent, particularly in woodcut, he was one of those people who, without ever having learned a note of music or received a lesson in piano playing, have an inborn technical dexterity and a quite remarkable gift for improvisation. He used to compose systematically, also, but without being able to write it down; I remember him once playing to me a whole act of an opera he had conceived on the subject of Tristram Shandy . . . He subsisted chiefly on stout, of which he consumed gargantuan quantities, and when elated would perform Maori war dances with quite terrifying realism. On spirits, however, he would run completely amok, in true native fashion, and on one occasion almost succeeded in massacring the entire household.”

Another snippet from Peter Warlock : The Life Of Philip Heseltine by Barry Smith (1994)

[W. B. Yeats’ reluctance to have his poetry set to music] was born of his horror at being invited by a certain composer to hear a setting of his Lake Isle Of Innisfree – a poem which voices a solitary man’s desire for still greater solitude – sung by a choir of a thousand Boy Scouts.

Peter Warlock, ‘Mr Yeats And A Musical Censorship’, Musical Times, February 1922

When Berlioz was found wandering about the mountains, note-book in hand, sketching his Overture to King Lear, he was arrested as a spy, and his protests that he was not making notes in a secret cipher were received with ridicule by the police. “It is well known”, they said, “that music cannot be composed without a pianoforte.” Berlioz we know could not play the pianoforte. But his case provides no rule and the fact remains that a great deal of music, especially at the present time, is either extemporized at the keyboard or else built up of fragments discovered, more or less fortuitously at the pianoforte and afterwards unskillfully glued together.

Peter Warlock, ‘A Note On The Mind’s Ear’, Musical Times, February 1922

Both quotations appear in Peter Warlock : The Life Of Philip Heseltine by Barry Smith (1994)

The composer Peter Warlock (1894-1930) – real name Philip Heseltine – was declared unfit for military service during the First World War on account of general neurasthenia and “an inability to micturate when mentally excited, and especially in the presence of other people, with the consequence that he has had occasional prolonged retention”, according to a Harley Street doctor’s report.

As a seemingly fit young man swanning about London, he was subjected to insults from “officious patriots”. His common retort to such persons was to declaim one of his favourite quotations, from Samuel Butler’s poem Psalm Of Montreal:

O brother-in-law to Mr. Spurgeon’s haberdasher,
Who seasonest also the skins of Canadian owls,
Thou callest trousers ‘pants,’ whereas I call them ‘trousers’,
Therefore thou art in hell-fire, and may the Lord pity thee!

Like so many of Isaac’s attempts to apply his imaginative vision to life, this orgone box was compromised by his poverty and his many interests. It was too obviously a homemade, bargain-basement orgone box. It looked more like a cardboard closet or stage telephone booth than it did a scientific apparatus by which to recover the sexual energy one had lost to “culture”. Isaac’s orgone box stood up in the midst of an enormous confusion of bed clothes, review copies, manuscripts, children, and the many people who went in and out of the room as if it were the bathroom. Belligerently sitting inside his orgone box, daring philistines to laugh, Isaac nevertheless looked lost, as if he were waiting in his telephone booth for a call that was not coming through.

Alfred Kazin on Isaac Rosenfeld, quoted in Adventures In The Orgasmatron : Wilhelm Reich And The Invention Of Sex by Christopher Turner (2011)