Monthly Archives: July 2010

A Couple Of Germans

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From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, Number 12, May 1851

“Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamics of Magnetism, &c., by Baron CHARLES VON REICHENBACH, translated from the German, by JOHN ASHBURNER, M.D., is a scientific treatise, showing the relations of magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemism to the vital forces of the human body. It is founded on an extensive series of experiments, which tend to bring the mysterious phenomena of Mesmerism within the domain of physics, and in fact to reduce the whole subject of physiology to a department of chemical science… The investigations, of which the results are here described, are of a singularly curious character, exhibiting the most astonishing developments, with a philosophical calmness that is rare even among German savants.”

“In the album presented to the King of Bavaria by the artists of Münich, is an admirable composition by Hübner. It is an expression of the feelings of a large portion of Upper Germany. It represents a female prostrate upon the ground, with the arms crossed, the face entirely hidden, in an attitude of the deepest despair. The long hair floats over the arms, and trails along the ground. The whole figure is a mixture of majesty and utter abandonment. The simple title of the piece is – Germania, 1850.”

A Cautionary Tale

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It gurgled, then it swept away. What it was I could not say. I saw it in a looking-glass, just after a mesmeric pass. The medium’s hands passed down my spine, moving in a plumb straight line. I glanced into the mirror then and counted slowly up to ten. The thing appeared atop my head. Its talons tore. It slashed. I bled. Then it gurgled and swept away. I’m going to sell it on eBay if I can find out where it went. The medium, by the way, is bent. Bent and crooked, a charlatan. He said he’d summon the Grunty Man. Instead this thing attacked and fled, leaving a gash upon my head. I must apply a poultice now, then turn the medium into a cow by casting a fiendish spell on him, a spell so fiendish and so grim that he’ll regret he messed with me. I am the Grunty Man, you see.

Sibthorp

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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.”

Dobson’s Abortive Pliny

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Here is the list of contents of the tenth book of Pliny The Elder’s Natural History (c. 77-79 AD):

“The nature of birds. (i-ii) The ostrich, the phoenix. (iii-vi) Eagles, their species; their nature; when adopted as regimental badges; self-immolation of eagle on maiden’s funeral pyre. (vii) The vulture. (viii) Lámmergeier, sea-eagle. (ix-xi) Hawks: the buzzard; use of hawks by fowlers where practised; the only bird that is killed by its own kind; what bird produces one egg at a time. (xii) Kites. (xiii) Classification of birds by species. (xiv-xvi) Birds of ill-omen; in what months crows are not a bad omen; ravens; the horned owl. (xvii) Extinct birds; birds no longer known. (xviii) Birds hatched tail first. (xix) Night-owls. (xx) Mars’s woodpecker. (xxi) Birds with hooked talons. (xxii-v) Birds with toes: peacocks; who first killed the peacock for food; who invented fattening peacocks; poultry – mode of castrating; a talking cock. (xxvi-xxxii) The goose who first introduced goose-liver (foie gras); Commagene goose; fox-goose, love-goose, heath-cock, bustard; cranes; storks; rest of reflexed-claw genus; swans. (xxxiii-v) Foreign migrant birds: quails, tongue-birds, ortolan, horned owl; native migrant birds and their destinations – swallows, thrushes, blackbirds, starlings; birds that moult in retirement: turtle-dove, ring-dove. (xxxvi) Non-migrant birds: half-yearly and quarter-yearly visitors: witwalls, hoopoes. (xxxvii-xl) Mernnon’s hens, Meleager’s sisters (guinea-hens), Seleucid hens, ibis. (xli) Where particular species not known. (xlii-v) Species that change colour and voice: the divination-bird class; nightingale, black-cap, robin, red-start, chat, golden oriole. (xlvi) The breeding season. (xlvii) Kingfishers: sign of fine weather for sailing. (xlviii) Remainder of aquatic class. (xlix-li) Craftsmanship of birds in nest-making; remarkable structures of swallows; sand-martins; thistle-finch; bee-eater; partridges. (lii f.) Pigeons – remarkable structures of, and prices paid for; (liv f.) Varieties of birds’ flight and walk; footless martins or swifts. (lvi) Food of birds. Goat-suckers, spoon-bill. (lvii) Intelligence of birds; gold-finch, bull-bittern, yellow wagtail. (lviii-lxl) Talking birds: parrots, acorn-pies; riot at Rome caused by talking crow. (lxi) Diomede’s birds. (lxii) What animals learn nothing. (lxiii) Birds, mode of drinking; the sultana hen. (lxiv) The long-legs. (lxv f.) Food of birds. Pelicans. (lxvii f.) Foreign birds: coots, pheasants, Numidian fowl, flamingos, heath-cock, bald crow or cormorant, Ted-beaked or Alpine crow, bare-footed crow or ptarmigan. (lxix) New species: small cranes. (lxx) Fabulous birds. (lxxi) Who invented fattening of chickens, and which consuls first prohibited? who first invented aviaries? Aesop’s stewpan. (lxxiii-lxxx) Reproduction of birds: oviparous creatures other than birds; kinds and properties of eggs; defective hatching and its cures; Augusta’s augury from eggs; what sort of hens the best? their diseases and remedies; kinds of small heron; nature of puff-eggs, addled eggs, wind-eggs; best way of preserving eggs. (lxxxi f.) The only species of bird that is viviparous and suckles its young. Oviparous species of land animals. Reproduction of snakes. (lxxxvi-vii) Reproduction of all land animals; posture of animals in the uterus; animal species whose mode of birth is still uncertain; salamanders; species not reproduced by generation; species whose generated offspring is unfertile; sexless species. (lxxxviii-xc) Senses of animals: all have sense of touch, also taste; species with exceptional sight, smell, hearing; moles; have oysters hearing? which fishes hear most clearly? which fishes have keenest sense of smell? (xci-iii) Difference of food in animals: which live on poisonous things? which on earth? which do not die of hunger of thirst? (xciv) Variety of drink. (xcv f.) Species mutually hostile; facts as to friendship and affection between animals; instances of affection between snakes. (xcvii f.) Sleep of animals; which species sleep?”

Now, imagine the scene. It was shortly after breakfast time on a cold and storm-tossed morning in the 1950s at the home of the twentieth century’s most magnificent pamphleteer. Dobson had eaten his bloaters. Marigold Chew had something eggy. They were still sitting at their breakfast table. Outside, hailstones were pinging.

“Marigold, o my darling dear,” boomed Dobson, “I have devised a marvellous plan! Listen carefully. You often comment upon what you consider to be my breathtaking ignorance of the natural world. And though I usually swat away your charges, as a giant may swat away a dwarf, I have, this day, found within myself a reservoir of humility, and I must admit there is a certain truth in what you say.”

Marigold Chew interrupted here, to suggest she capture Dobson’s words upon a tape recorder for the settling of any future contretemps, but the pamphleteer pressed on.

“That being so,” he said, “My plan is to increase my knowledge in the best way possible, and what method could be more efficacious than to write a book about what I do not know? And not just any book. I shall take as my guide that great ancient encyclopaedia by Pliny The Elder, the Natural History, and rewrite it in its entirety! To ensure I cover the sweeping width and breadth of all natural phenomena, I  shall follow slavishly the chapter and section headings of the great work, but, subjoined to them, the texts shall be my own! Is that not a fantastic plan and a superb way to extend my knowledge of that which you claim me to be ignorant.. of, again, I think, if I am to be grammatically sound?”

“Are you sure you mean ‘subjoined’, Dobson?” asked Marigold Chew, who was in chucklesome mood.

“I am not one hundred percent certain, no, but let that pass, o my inamorata. The thing is, I have decided to begin the project this very day, not at the beginning, but plunging straight in to the tenth book of Pliny, which you will recall is the one in which he addresses matters ornithological. That is an area in which you suggest my ignorance is boundless and unfathomable, so it will be the perfect test bed. And no, I am not sure I mean ‘test bed’, but let that pass too, for the time being.”

“I am quite happy to do so,” said Marigold Chew, “For now my eggy breakfast is digested, I am going off and out to a beekeeping bonanza jamboree. Get thee to thy escritoire, and when I return I shall be happy to have you read to me the initial scribblings of your Natural History, a book I am sure will knock Pliny from his plinth.”

Dobson took this repartee in good part, scurried to his escritoire, sharpened a pencil, and flung open his dusty copy of Pliny at the tenth book. The nature of birds. (i-ii) The ostrich, the phoenix, he read. He closed his eyes and tried to summon a vision of an ostrich and a phoenix, first separately, then together. He was determined not to cheat by reading what Pliny The Elder had had to say on the subject nearly two thousand years ago. Then the pamphleteer shook his head, like a man waking from a jarring dream, opened his eyes, and began to scribble with his sharpened pencil on the first page of a brand new notepad.

Both the ostrich and the phoenix, he wrote, are birds, the one real, the other mythical. On the front of the head of the real bird, there is a beak. And, lo!, what do we find on the front of the head of the bird of myth? It too has a beak! And this is not the only feature they have in common, for the bodies of both birds bear plumage in the form of feathers.

Dobson looked upon what he had done, and saw that it was good. No doubt there would be more to say about both the ostrich and the phoenix, but he felt he had, at the very least, cracked the method he planned to employ. Pliny would be his guide, but only his guide. The grand sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose would be Dobson’s alone. He went to take a post-breakfast nap.

When he awoke, the pamphleteer’s brain was befuddled after a series of dreams, the details of which, so vivid in sleep, vanished pfft! the instant his head rose from the pillow. He opened a can of revivifying Squelcho! and poured it into a tumbler, then sat again at his escritoire to consult his Pliny. Eagles… vultures… hawks… owls… woodpeckers… it was a long, long list of things with beaks and feathers! Dobson threw his pencil across the room, donned his greatcoat and his Belgian Post Office Inspector’s boots, and went out in the teeth of the hailstorm to trudge along the towpath of the filthy old canal to clear his head. He saw a number of birds while on his trudge, not one of which was either an ostrich or a phoenix. He threw a pebble at a swan. He stopped in at Old Ma Purgative’s Canalside Lobster Hatchery ‘n’ Winter Sports Togs Bazaar, and browsed among the lobsters and the winter sports togs, but in spite of the Old Ma offering bargains galore in a special ‘hailstorm sale’, Dobson, enmired in penury as ever, bought nothing. Eventually he trudged back home, passing the puddle in which the pebble he had thrown at the swan had somehow fetched up, as pebbles do. And as pamphleteers do, he returned to his escritoire, sharpened another pencil, and, jaw set in determination, cast his eye over the Pliny. Peacocks… bustards… swans… hoopoes… partridges… goat-suckers… this last reminded Dobson that he had a goat-milk popsicle in the refrigerator, and he was about to go and fetch it, for a midmorning snack, when, towards the end of the contents of Pliny’s tenth book, he read instances of affection between snakes and a bomb exploded inside his brain.

Suddenly Dobson recalled the dream from which he had awoken befuddled after his nap. He remembered it in every last detail, for it was his recurring dream, the one that flickered in his sleeping cranium on so many, many nights, and in so many, many daytime naps, and had done since infancy. He turned to a fresh page of his notepad, and began scribbling.

When I was a tot, he wrote, I had a favourite bedtime story which I implored my ma or pa to read to me before I fell asleep. I drank my bedtime beaker of milk of magnesia and settled my little head on my little pillow, and listened, night after night, to the tale which, ever since, has haunted my dreams, and about which it is incomprehensible that I have not written a pamphlet until today. Well, thanks to Pliny The Elder, now I can address that omission. The story began as follows:

Once upon a time there was a boa constrictor named Dagobert. He was loitering on a verdant slope when he happened to spot a passing vole. Dagobert uncoiled himself, pounced, sank his fangs into the tiny vole, and gulped it down in one fangsome mouthful. But before his digestive juices could begin to reduce the paralysed but yet living vole into nourishing pulp, along came a viper named Clothgard.

“My oh my!” thought Dagobert, “What a lovely viper she is. I feel a great pang of affection for her.”

Clothgard herself was a sore vexed viper, for she had not eaten for many days.

“O boa constrictor loitering on the verdant slope, canst thee help a sore vexed viper who has not eaten for many days? My name is Clothgard,” hissed Clothgard.

So mighty were the pangs of affection felt by Dagobert that he immediately regurgitated the vole and offered it to the famished viper.

“Why thank you,” she hissed, “You are quite the most charming boa constrictor it has ever been my pleasure to meet.”

There was more to the story, much more, but it was always around this point that, as a tot, I fell into my golden slumbers, and ma or pa placed the storybook gently by my pillow and tiptoed away.

This you will recognise, I expect, as the opening of Dobson’s important pamphlet The Significance, In My Long-Ago Infancy, Of An Undigested Vole (out of print). He was still scribbling away furiously, possessed by a pamphleteer’s demons, when Marigold Chew arrived home. Thinking he was at work on his revision of Pliny, she did not interrupt him, but went straight into the back garden with the new bees she had brought back from the bonanza jamboree. Not until a few days later, when she asked Dobson if he had yet written his chapter on the nature of puff-eggs, addled eggs, and wind-eggs, did she learn that the pamphleteer had abandoned his Pliny.

“Oh that,” he said, over breakfast, “It’s just one bird after another. I can’t be doing with it.”

The Soutane-Attired Nemesis Of Sea Monsters

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Father Ninian Tonguelash, the Jesuit priest and self-styled “Soutane-Attired Nemesis of Sea Monsters” who appeared in my dream yesterday, was, I would have you know, a real historical figure. He is often thought to be fictional, probably because the only reliable biography we have of him, by Pebblehead père, was published in the form of a series of short episodes between the covers of pulp magazines such as Mildly Alarming Stories!, Yarns That Might Raise Your Blood Pressure Just A Tad, and Vaguely Disquieting Tales. That the various scattered pieces were never brought together as a proper book is one of literature’s, indeed life’s, great tragedies, and the blame must lie squarely with Pebblehead père himself. For all his learning and wisdom and panache as a biographer, he was a very bewildering person. Even just walking down the street, he left a swathe of boggle-eyed bewilderment in his wake, and the captains of ships were ever reluctant to have him aboard their pleasure steamers.

Bewildering, too, is his treatment of the life of Father Tonguelash, quite apart from its being broken up into bits and published in magazines designed for a readership of the semi-literate and the timid and the nerve-bejangled. Although what research has been done seems to confirm that Pebblehead père‘s accounts are historically accurate, indeed devastatingly so, each episode as written is almost identical. The general schema is as follows:

1. Father Ninian Tonguelash has just finished saying Mass when an urchin sprints panting into the vestry to announce that a sea monster has been sighted. Either a ship or a boat or a coastal hamlet is imperilled.

2. Without stopping to ask any questions – even something as basic as in which direction he should speed – Father Tonguelash grabs a harpoon and a crucifix and charges out into the wild and windy shoreland. It is invariably wild and windy.

3. After a little while of harum scarum scampering, the priest stops, as Christ stopped at Eboli, and, all windswept and resolute, takes from his pocket a volume of poems by his friend and colleague Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. He opens the book at random and declaims a poem, shouting into the wind. Declaiming done, he returns the book to his pocket, makes the sign of the cross, and scampers onward. The panting urchin who brought the message of sea monster peril has now had time to catch up with the priest, and sticks close to his heels.

4. Father Ninian arrives at the scene of imperilment and confronts the sea monster. He is absolutely fearless. “I am attired in the soutane of a Jesuit, and I am your Nemesis!” he cries. At this point the sea monster usually makes a gurgling sound we are led to interpret as a plea for God’s ineffable mercy. But Father Ninian shows none. He hands the crucifix to the panting urchin, telling the lad to brandish it at the sea monster. Then he launches the harpoon, with unerring accuracy, felling the sea monster instantly.

5. It is an interesting point that all of the sea monsters harpooned by the Jesuit were of the kind that, when struck, shrivel up and vanish in a puff of cloudy gaseous green vapour.

6. Father Tonguelash reels in his harpoon, pats the panting urchin on the head, retrieves his crucifix, and acknowledges the grovelling gratitude of those whose imperilment he has quashed, be they the crew of a ship or a boat or the peasant inhabitants of a coastal hamlet.

7. As the priest wends his way back to his vestry, Pebblehead père does three things. He makes note, based upon what sources he never reveals, of all the types of birds in the sky and perched upon branches which the Jesuit, were he looking, would see upon his journey. He makes some attempt, not always successfully, to elucidate various sea monster references hidden in the text of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem declaimed by Father Tonguelash earlier in the episode. Lastly, and characteristically, he ends each piece with a flourish of distinctively bewildering prose.

As a tot, Pebblehead fils, the bestselling paperbackist, was taught this “seven-point plan of literary composition”, as his père dubbed it. Careful readers will still find traces of the technique in some of the potboilers that pour out of the “chalet o’ prose” day after day. Consider, for example, even so recent a blockbuster as The Jesuit And The Sea Serpent which follows the pattern almost exactly, despite being over a thousand pages fat, with a gold-embossed cover making it suitable for airport book kiosks.

Dobson In Dreamland

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According to Hargrave Jennings, in Curious Things Of The Outside World : Last Fire (1861), “There are moments in the history of the busiest man when his life seems a masquerade. There are periods in the story of the most engrossed and most worldly-minded man, when this strong fear will come, like a cloud, over him; when this conviction will start, athwart his horizon, like a flash from out a cloud. He will look up to the sunshine, some day, and in the midst of the business-clatter by which he may be surrounded, a man will, in a moment’s glance, seem to see the whole jostle of human interests and city bustle, or any stir, as so much empty show. Like the sick person, he will sometimes raise his head, and out of the midst of his distractions, and out of the grasp which that thing, ‘business’, always has of him, he will ask himself the question, What does all this mean? Is the whole world awake, and am I asleep and dreaming a dream? Or is it that the whole world is the dream, and that I, in this single moment, have alone awakened?”

That great twentieth-century pamphleteer, Dobson, woke up in this state of mind every single morning of his adult life. And that was not the end of his confusion, for Dobson was a great one for naps, he took a nap daily, very often more than one, plural naps, as it were, and each time he woke from his naps he likewise asked himself the questions posed by Hargrave Jennings, as he had already done on the morning of the day, when first he awoke.

“Do you have the slightest idea,” asked Marigold Chew, one blustery blizzardy Monday in the late 1950s, “How tiresome it is to have you lumbering about the place like a dippy person, asking the kinds of questions most sensible people stop posing when they outgrow their years of teendom?”

Dobson’s reply to this perfectly reasonable query was most annoying.

“Are you really speaking, Marigold, or am I just imagining this conversation within the wispy mysterious mists of mystery?”

Marigold Chew was holding a handful of pebbles, and proceeded to throw one at the pamphleteer. No, that’s not right. Marigold Chew was holding a Pebblehead paperback, and it was this she threw across the room. The book was Pebblehead’s latest bestselling potboiler, The Interpretation Of Breams, a guide to foretelling the future using a combination of fish and recordings of lute music. Luckily, the book missed Dobson’s head by an inch.

“I am going to go about my business in the real, palpable world, Dobson,” announced Marigold Chew, “If you choose to waft about the place in a moonstruck daze, that is up to you. But it won’t get any pamphlets written!” and she swept out of the house into the blizzard, bent upon her real and palpable business, whatever it might have been that day.

Dobson picked up the Pebblehead paperback from the floor and leafed through it, distractedly. He read a few lines here and there, and decided to go out to the fishmonger’s and the record shop. But he got no further than the chair on which he sat to don and to lace up his Canadian Snowplough Mechanic’s boots, for, yet enmired in his dreamy daze, he wondered if the chair, the laces, the boots were but figments. “Figments” made him think of figs, and then of Fig Newtons, a type of biscuit of which, at this period, he was inordinately fond, and, with his right foot encased in a boot the laces of which were not yet tied and his left foot merely ensocked, he rose from the chair and made for the cupboard wherein the biscuits, and similar snack items, were stored. When he stood, he was, in boot and sock, necessarily lopsided, and this being so, Dobson lost what balance he had, and toppled, bashing his bonce on the wainscot.

He was unconscious for some minutes, during which time he really did dream, of the glove of Ib and of his weak Bomba, whatever that might mean.

And of course, when he woke, sprawled on the floor, the pamphleteer’s swimming brain was yet again prompted to ask the Hargrave Jennings questions. Round and round we go, in an endless cycle, akin to the orbit of the planets around the sun.

Marigold Chew was still out and about, so Dobson was alone in his daze. Now wide awake, but still unable to gain a foothold in the real, palpable world, he mooched about the house as a person might blunder about in a thick fog, what they used to call a “pea-souper” because of the supposed similarity of the cloudy density of the air to the consistency of soup made from peas, not to be confused with pease pudding, which is, as its name suggests, a pudding, not a soup. Dobson was thinking neither of soup, nor of the Fig Newtons, which he had utterly forgotten. He was doing things such as tapping the walls with his fingertips, peering carefully at curtains, opening and then closing doors, or in some cases leaving them ajar, as he tried to grasp what was real and what was not. Stumbling past an airing cupboard into the bathroom, he was astonished, in a bleary way, to come face to face with a monster of the deep, wallowing in the tub. It was bloated, lascivious, coarse, and repulsive, rather like Gertrude Atherton’s vision of Oscar Wilde, except that it had fins and hideous trailing tendrils, like those of a jellyfish. One such tendril now lashed out and struck Dobson across the face, leaving, not just a vivid crimson stripe, but droplets of an unbelievably aggressive toxin which seeped in seconds through his pores and began ravaging his innards. The pamphleteer toppled once again to the floor, this time of his bathroom rather than of his kitchen, still wearing one boot, but now he was convulsed by fits, as if he were Voltaire’s officer with pinks in his chamber alluded to in another passage from Hargrave Jennings’ very sensible book, and, like the officer, Dobson lost his senses.

In the tub, the sea monster now began to gurgle, and to splash about. Suddenly, through the bathroom window crashed Father Ninian Tonguelash, the Jesuit priest and self-styled “Soutane-Attired Nemesis Of Sea Monsters”, clutching in one gloved hand a harpoon and in the other a crucifix. Then…

Then…

Then… I awoke, and I realised that all I have just written was a dream. Of course it was! Dobson did not become the titanic pamphleteer he was by faffing about the place all muddleheaded. When he woke up, every day of his adult life, he knew exactly where he was, and if perchance there was a smidgen of doubt in the matter, he would in any case plunge his head into a bucket of icy water, just to be on the safe side. How foolish of me to confuse the hallucinations of my sleeping, pea-sized brain with the iron truth!

Swoons, Shudders, Convulsions & Dread

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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.”

A Snippet About Haddock & Cows

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“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)

Mephitic Odours & Perverted Telegraph Boys

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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.”

Time Capsule

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“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?

A Wilderness Of Rubbish

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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

menken

The Eighth Dwarf

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Over the years, there has been a great deal of discussion about the exact identity of the so-called “fifth Beatle”, as there has been regarding which pinniped deserves the title “the seventh seal”. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the “eighth dwarf” in that old yarn about Snow White. Most people are now aware, I think, that following a rebranding exercise the original seven dwarves were renamed Wretched, Spiteful, Incontinent, Wistful, Lippy, Rancorous, and Preening.

But who, oh who, was the eighth dwarf,  of whose presence one is made disturbingly aware in the interstices of the story, glimpsed, as it were, with peripheral vision, if at all? This is the dwarf we recall, if we recall him, chewing on brazil nuts, moaning, stuffing the pockets of his tunic with genetically modified seeds, stinking of vinegar, and hot to trot, daddy-o. He threatens, always, to undermine the trajectory of the story, almost as if he were some kind of postmodernist dwarf, heaven forbid.

It is for this reason that certain intellectuals have tried, long-windedly, to claim that his name is Roland Barthes, or Julia Kristeva, but this will not do, it will not do at all. I am not going to bother explaining why it will not do, because to do so would only lend credence to these harebrained swathes of inanity. If we are to remain sound of mind and with our feet planted firmly upon the ground of Reason, then we must withhold credence from these blathermouths, must we not?

So successfully does the eighth dwarf hide in the margins of the tale that many readers, and viewers of the film adaptation, do not notice him at all. No doubt that is why there has been so much less agonising over him than over the fifth Beatle and the seventh seal. To give an example, probably unnecessarily, but I will give it anyway, because that is the kind of chap I am, today in any case, a while ago I was at a function, it is not important what the nature of the function was, and I approached a gent who was sporting the kind of decisive cravat I admire, and, after introducing myself, I asked him point blank if he had any pet theory regarding the identity of the eighth dwarf. His eyes boggled, and he muttered something I could not quite hear, and then he turned away, pointedly, pointedly. A graceless git, to be sure, but later I learned he was discomfited by my query because, and this is the nub, he had no idea what I was talking about.

One of the fundamental objections to the idea that the eighth dwarf might be called Roland Barthes or Julia Kristeva is, of course, that both these dubbings comprise a first, or given name, what in more civilised times was called a Christian name, and a surname, whereas dwarves, at least the seven fellows in the story, have only a single word for their name, and that, be it noted, a descriptive one. This holds true both before and after the rebranding exercise.

It is unlikely that we are going to learn the identity of the eighth dwarf any time soon, but several lines of inquiry are being followed up by different scholars. Some of these will, I am sure, prove to be dead ends, but others might, just might, bear fruit. Nixon, for example, (not the ex-President, by the way, though I trust that is obvious) is in the jungles of Borneo, hacking at foliage with a machete and swatting flies with a fly-swatter, trying to track down something small and wearing gloves, last reported seen in 1974. It may not be a dwarf at all, of course. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Parpington is combing through every single volume on the shelves of the Library Of Diminutive Beings in Shoeburyness, hoping to light upon something factual, definitive, and unswerving. There are only six books in the Library, so it shouldn’t take him too long.

I will, of course, keep you fully informed of developments. Well, I say “of course”, but I might forget all about it for a few years, I can be like that sometimes, forgetful, of both important and unimportant things, of important dwarves and unimportant… what?… sultanas, raisins, prunes?