Last week I quoted the views of Colonel Sibthorp, M.P. for Lincoln, on the Great Exhibition of 1851. And lo!, now I have come across him again, for Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp has a chapter entire to himself in the late John Michell’s splendid book Eccentric Lives And Peculiar Notions (1984).

“During his many years in the House of Commons, Colonel Sibthorp made his name as the most conservative Member of Parliament ever known, setting a standard of reaction, nationalism and xenophobia unrivalled in parliamentary history. He opposed every change and innovation, regarding even the mildest reform as a fundamental attack on his idol, the English Constitution of his youth.”

Prior to his election, asked if he would support reform, he replied:

“On no account would I sanction any attempts to subvert that glorious fabric, our matchless Constitution, which has reached its present perfection by the experience of ages, by any new-fangled schemes which interested or deluded individuals might bring forward, and those who expect any advantages from such notions will find their visions go like a vapour and vanish into nothing.”

“As his indignation flourished,” says Michell, “so did his powers of oratory. His emphatic speeches against anything new or foreign delighted the House of Commons and made him their popular favourite. The things he disapproved of were always ‘Humbugs’ , and his repetitions of this and other familiar terms of abuse were greeted with roars of parliamentary laughter. His dress was as old-fashioned as his opinions, usually consisting of a bottle-green frock-coat and wide white trousers hoisted high above his top-boots in the Regency manner. His wispy beard, tall white hat and antique quizzing glasses on a cord distinguished him from all other Members…

“Colonel Sibthorp was obviously very loyal to the Monarchy, but in his eyes Queen Victoria had committed one terrible blunder: she had married a foreigner. He always referred to such people as ‘hypocritical foreigners’, implying that they were not merely unfortunate but in some way sinister through having been born outside Britain. Prince Albert, he allowed, had some admirable qualities, but his character was permanently impaired by the fact of his foreign birth…

“The coming of the railways provided Colonel Sibthorp with the subject which grew obsessive during his later years. Beginning with the announcement that he had no intention of ever riding in the ‘steam humbug;, he opposed all railway bills in principle and detail. The new ‘degrading form of transport’, he foresaw, would bring all sorts of disasters to its patrons, from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. He kept an eye on the newspapers for reports of railway accidents, and accused the steam companies of playing down the gory details of crashes…

“Christopher Sykes, who has written affectionately about Sibthorp, says that Dostoievski used to read English parliamentary reports, and took Colonel Sibthorp as his model for Lebedev, the character in The Idiot who proclaimed that the network of railways spreading across holy Russia was the baleful ‘star called Wormwood’ prophesied in the Book of Revelation.”

Here is a further enlightening snippet from Hargrave Jennings’ Curious Things Of The Outside World, Last Fire (1861) :

“Amatus Lusitanus relates the case of a monk who fainted when he beheld a rose, and never quitted his cell while that flower was blooming. Orfila (a less questionable authority) gives the account of the painter Vincent, who was seized with violent vertigo, and swooned, when there were roses in the room. Voltaire gives the history of an officer who was thrown into convulsions and lost his senses by having pinks in his chamber. Orfila also relates the instance of a lady, of forty-six years of age, of a hale constitution, who could never be present when a decoction of linseed was preparing, being troubled in the course of a few minutes with a general swelling of the face, followed by fainting and a loss of the intellectual faculties, which symptoms continued for four-and-twenty hours. Montaigne remarks on this subject, that there were men who dreaded an apple more than a cannon-ball. Zimmerman tells us of a lady who could not endure the feeling of silk and satin, and shuddered when she touched the velvety skin of a peach : other ladies cannot bear the feel of fur. Boyle records the case of a man who experienced a natural abhorrence of honey ; a young man invariably fainted when a servant swept his room. Hippocrates mentions one Nicanor, who swooned whenever he heard a flute ; and Shakespeare has alluded to the strange effect of the bagpipe. Boyle fell into a syncope when he heard the splashing of water ; Scaliger turned pale on the sight of water-cresses ; Erasmus experienced febrile symptoms when smelling fish ; the Duke d’Epernon swooned on beholding a leveret, although a hare did not produce the same effect ; Tycho Brahe fainted at the sight of a fox, Henry III of France at that of a cat, and Marshal D’Albret at a pig. The horror that whole families entertain of cheese is well known.”

“The haddock… amongst marine animals, is supposed, throughout maritime Europe, to be a privileged fish : even in austere Scotland every child can point out the impression of St Peter’s thumb, by which, from age to age, it is distinguished from fishes having, otherwise, an external resemblance. All domesticated cattle, having the benefit of man’s guardianship and care, are believed, throughout England and Germany, to go down upon their knees at one particular moment on Christmas Eve, when the fields are covered in darkness, when no eye looks down but that of God, and when the exact anniversary hour revolves of the angelic song, once rolling over the fields and flocks of Palestine.”

Hargrave Jennings, Curious Things Of The Outside World, Last Fire (1861)

Further to the critical responses to Ulysses and Infelicia, here are extracts from four contemporary reviews of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray:

“If Mr Wilde can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public’s morals.” – The Scots Observer

“This is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents – a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” – The Daily Chronicle

“The book is unmanly, sickening, vicious and tedious.” – The Athenaeum

“I would rather give my daughter a dose of prussic acid than allow her to read this book.” – ‘Paterfamilias’ in Uplift

ADDENDUM : Apropos Oscar Wilde, here is Gertrude Atherton explaining why, having seen his photograph, she declined an invitation to meet him : “His mouth covered half his face, the most lascivious, coarse, repulsive mouth I had ever seen. I might stand it in a large crowded drawing-room, but not in a parlour, eight by eight, lit by three tallow candles. I should feel as if I were under the sea, pursued by some bloated monster of the deep.”

“Following the approved practice, two large vases, containing ‘a representative sample of contemporary items’, were deposited in the pedestal [of Cleopatra’s Needle, on Thames Embankment]. ‘The mere list of these objects,’ declared the Saturday Review, ‘must provoke a smile.’ It was certainly well-calculated to have this effect, for, among them, were a Bible, a translation of the hieroglyphics on the column, a portrait of the Queen, a standard set of weights and measures, a Whitaker’s Almanack, a Bradshaw’s railway-guide, a Post Office directory, a ‘Mappin’s shilling razor’, an ‘Alexandra feeding-bottle, as used in the Royal nurseries’, and ‘photographs of twelve pretty Englishwomen’. Altogether, a mixed assortment.”

Horace Wyndham, This Was The News : An Anthology Of Victorian Affairs (1948)

Is all that stuff still there, entombed in vases beneath the Needle?

Many a moon ago, back in February 2004, I provided a couple of examples of the kind of invective to deploy when writing an unfavourable book review. The book in question was Ulysses by James Joyce – he invariably pronounced it “Oolissis”, by the way – and these were the passages I found so diverting:

“An immense mass of clotted nonsense” – Teachers’ World

“The maddest, muddiest, most loathsome book issued in our own or any other time… inartistic, incoherent, unquotably nasty … a book that one would have thought could only emanate from a criminal lunatic asylum.” – The Sphere

I can now recommend a couple more such tirades, though in this case the book is less well-known. Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868) was an actress, painter, poet, possible bigamist, and bareback circus equestrienne, and in the last year of her life she published a volume of poetry entitled Infelicia. In order to drum up sales, the rumour was spread, perhaps by Menken herself, that some, or all, of the poems were in fact written by her pal Algernon Charles Swinburne. However, all of them had previously appeared in various American magazines before she even met Swinburne. Infelicia‘s lack of success may have been due, at least partly, to reviews such as these:

“A wilderness of rubbish and affected agonies of yearnings after the unspeakable, which achieve the nonsensical.” – The Athenaeum

“A bleared panorama of deaths and sighs and blood and tears and fire and general gloom and watery ghastliness.” – The Saturday Review

Regarding the Great Exhibition of 1851 :  “A specially strong opponent… was Colonel Sibthorp, M.P. for Lincoln, ‘a man of limited intelligence and bigoted views’. He dubbed the scheme ‘an exhibition of the trumpery and trash of foreigners who had no business to be here at all; and he offered a heartfelt prayer that Providence would think fit to destroy the impious project by a visitation of lightning’… ‘He had,’ he solemnly declared, ‘never set foot in this so-called Crystal Palace; and he considered it his duty to his fellow-creatures not to go into the place on any pretext. The very thought of it positively sickened him’.”

Horace Wyndham, This Was The News : An Anthology Of Victorian Affairs (1948)

“Nearly every Roman indeed had qualified himself before he was fifty to be a candidate for the Travellers’ Club; and sometimes the fine gentleman, who declined taking an active part in public affairs, found himself unexpectedly a thousand miles from home, with an imperial rescript in his portmanteau enjoining him not to return to Rome without special leave.

“To such a compulsory journey was the poet Ovid condemned, apparently for his very particular attentions to the Princess Julia. His exile was a piece of ingenious cruelty. He was sent to Tomi, which was far beyond the range of all fashionable bathing-places. The climate was atrocious; the neighbourhood was worse; the wine was execrable and was often hard frozen, and eaten like a lozenge, and his only society was that of the barracks, or a few rich but unpolished corn-factors, who speculated in grain and deals on the shores of the Euxine. To write verses from morn to dewy eve was the unfortunate poet’s only solace; and he sent so many reams of elegies to Rome, that his friends came at last to vote him a bore, and he was reduced, for want of fitting audience, to learn the Getic language, and read his lacrymose couplets to circles of gaping barbarians.”

William Bodham Donne, Old Roads And New Roads (1852)

This is the first in our important series “Breakfasts Of Kings” in which we cast a beady eye on the breakfast preferences of various monarchs throughout history.

King Leopold II of Belgium ate six poached eggs, an enormous number of slices of toast, and an entire jar of marmalade for his breakfast each day.

Leopold spoke French, rather than Flemish, so he did not refer to his breakfast as “het ontbijt”, as Mr Key does, usually.

ADDENDUM : It concerns not just breakfast but every daily meal, and it is not a king writing, but this quotation from the journals of Roger Casement is worth noting: “Chicken, chicken, custard, custard… every day… Goddam”. Casement’s meals at the time (1903) were prepared by a cook known only as “Hairy Bill”.

“In the mediaeval imagination, this was a region of uttermost dread… where the heavens fling down liquid sheets of flame and the waters boil… where serpent rocks and ogre islands lie in wait for the mariner, where the giant hand of Satan reaches up from the fathomless depths to seize him, where he will turn black in face and body as a mark of God’s vengeance for the insolence of his prying into this forbidden mystery. And even if he should be able to survive all these ghastly perils and sail on through, he would then arrive in the Sea of Obscurity and be lost forever in the vapours and slime at the edge of the world.”

Peter Forbath, The River Congo : The Discovery, Exploration And Exploitation Of The World’s Most Dramatic River (1977)

“‘Everything found on land is found in the sea.’…

“Another day I was looking for somewhere to live and went in a north-westerly direction. From some dingy agent in the vicinity I got the key of a house to let. Wandering along the streets I came to a row of peeling stucco houses with cat-walks in front, and mouldering urns, which could hold nothing, surmounting their plastered gate-posts.

“My key fitted the front door of one of these houses; I went in and up the stairs to the first floor. I entered a large room with three windows looking out upon the road; folding doors connected it with the room behind. These I pushed open and found myself in another room exactly like the first; I went over to the central one of its three windows and looked out. Instead of the characterless gardens and hinder facade of a parallel block, I saw a sloping strip of ground overgrown with brambles, then a pebbly shore, and beyond, the crash and smother of Atlantic waves, breaking ceaselessly and without tide. This ocean stretched away to the horizon where it met a misty sky, but did not merge with it – the heaving water set up a melancholy distinction out there; and here within, a briney exultant smell penetrated the panes, cutting through the mustiness of a house long closed.

“What extraordinary growths, I wondered, flowered in those wasteful depths? There must be a submerged garden whose silken green held curiosities far surpassing those I had come upon before. Idiots often describe such places and describe what they see; making idiots is one of the sea’s favourite games. But when it tires from this from time to time, it casts up instead a supernatural being on an unwelcoming strand, who ever afterwards, spends his nights asleep at the bottom of some vast watery gulf.”

Ithell Colquhoun, Goose Of Hermogenes (1961)

“Six thousand years have passed since we were set to till the ground, from which we were taken. How much of it is tilled? How much of that which is, wisely or well? In the very centre and chief garden of Europe – where the two forms of parent Christianity have had their fortresses – where the noble Catholics of the Forest Cantons, and the noble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys, have maintained, for dateless ages, their faiths and liberties – there the unchecked Alpine rivers yet run wild in devastation ; and the marshes, which a few hundred men could redeem with a year’s labour, still blast their helpless inhabitants into fevered idiotism.”

John Ruskin, The Mystery Of Life And Its Arts (1868)

Reader Mike Jennings, usually in exile in a pompous land, is sojourning in Dublin, from where he sends this splendid holiday snap. There is something infinitely pleasing about a sign lit by neon gas advertising that most toothsome of delicacies… gruel!

“Ordnance Survey Map 104 : Leeds and Bradford… It’s a riot of names that could be nowhere else but Yorkshire: villages such as Luddendon Foot, Mytholmroyd, Farsley Beck Bottom, Wibsey, Odsal, Idle, Owlet, Harden, Greetland, Rastrick, Ossett, Soothill, Scarcroft, Wike, Kirkby Overblow, Spofforth, Scriven, Blubberhouses, Stainburn, Birstwith, Thwaites Brow, Cringles, Glusburn and Goose Eye – a list that sounds more like entries in a dictionary of Dickensian ailments.”

Mike Parker, Map Addict (2009)

A marked lack of activity in the Key cranium these past few days, I’m afraid, though there is some prose in progress. Meanwhile, here is something I learned that I think worthy of further attention.

In Voodoo Histories : The Role Of The Conspiracy Theory In Shaping Modern History (2009), David Aaronovitch mentions in passing “an incident in the small town of Mosinee, Wisconsin, where in 1950 veterans from the American Legion disguised as Russian soldiers took over the town, arrested the mayor, imprisoned the clergy, nationalised businesses and allowed only potato soup to be served in the cafes, before allowing everyone to be liberated from communism at dusk.”