Egon Schiele: by Sue Purkiss

July 15, 2016, 6:00 pm

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With all that's happened in the interim, it seems like ages ago now; but in fact it's just a few weeks since I was gazing at this painting in the Leopold Museum in Vienna. It's a self-portrait of Egon Schiele, painted in 1910 when he was just twenty years old. His style is utterly distinctive; before visiting the museum I was only really familiar with one of his pictures - this one on the right - but I would have known instantly that this was by the same artist. You can sense the barely controlled energy with which his pen moves over the paper, creating a strong, continuous, but slightly jerky line. The eyes are large, brooding and intense: the eyebrows strongly marked, the hair thick and tousled, the expression serious and uncompromising.

Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln in Lower Austria. His father, a station master, died when Egon was 14, and an uncle thereafter helped his mother with the boy's education. An art teacher at his grammar school quickly recognised the boy's talent, and at 16, he passed the exam to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna; his uncle agreed to support him.

But Egon couldn't make things easy for himself or for other people. To the bewilderment of his family he rebelled against his conservative teachers, and was determined that he must go his own way. Fortunately at this point he met Gustav Klimt, a successful artist and a generous man, who immediately recognised Schiele's talent and took him under his wing, encouraging him and introducing him to important people in the art world.

However, in 1911 he grew restive and left Vienna to go to Krumau, his mother's birthplace. With him went his model, muse and lover, Wally Neuzil. His painting went well, but he was too much for Krumau. The townspeople were bewildered - perhaps understandably - by his erotic paintings of young girls. He and Wally moved to Neulengbach, a small town near Vienna, but something similar happened again: only this time, it was worse - he was accused of abusing a young girl and was imprisoned. The charge was thrown out, but he was convicted of making indecent drawings and - having already served 29 days, was sentenced to three days in prison. Wally was faithful and supportive, bringing him food and art materials. It was a harrowing experience, and for a time he withdrew into himself.

But his work was becoming known and being exhibited both in Austria and abroad, and in 1912 he moved to a new studio in Vienna. He was still with Wally: let's take a moment to meet her. Here she is, with her red hair, slim face, large, brilliantly blue eyes and penetrating, quizzical gaze.

Across the road from the studio lived a locksmith with his wife and two daughters. Wally became friendly with the girls and in 1914 introduced them to Egon - who decided it was time to embrace respectability and marry. He settled on Edith, and married her a year later. He wanted Wally to agree to take a holiday with him once a year, but she - hurrah! - refused. They never saw each other again.

Wally trained as a nurse, but sadly caught scarlet fever and died in 1917 while working in Dalmatia. Egon was called up, but was not sent to the front: he was posted to a POW camp, where he continued to draw and paint. In March 1918 he took part in a very successful exhibition in Vienna: all seemed set fair.

But then, in October of that year, he, Edith, and their unborn baby were caught up in the Spanish flu epidemic which scoured Europe after the war; Edith died first, followed three days later by Egon. He was 28.

I wonder what he was like? To me he sounds selfish, intense and driven; but did he have charm? His mentor Klimt certainly did - more of him another time, perhaps: but Schiele? Maybe not so much. But he clearly had an immense, burning talent: he produced so much utterly individual, beautiful and powerful work in such a short space of time.

But a life isn't to be valued just in terms of the work it produces. Little is known of Edith, but Wally seems to me a fascinating character, loyal, tough and resourceful. Here were three young lives, all of them cut tragically short: how could you measure the relative worth of each? That would be a nonsense - yet had it not been for Schiele's art, we wouldn't know anything about any of them.

---

LUCY FITCH PERKINS AND HER "TWINS" by Penny Dolan

July 16, 2016, 10:00 pm

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The second half of twentieth century brought a wealth of books into libraries, schools and into homes, led by technological developments, especially in colour printing. As a teacher, my class book-box was a bright treasury of inventiveness and pleasure.

However, the titles lodged in my childhood heart have dull covers. They were well-worn copies from the old-style public library shelves, read and re-read them randomly. The books were part of a series – not that I had heard that word then – known as The Twins books. I borrowed The Cave Twins and The Spartan Twins as often as I could, as well as any other Twins I found. The Dutch Twinsdidn’t quite fit the history category but they did live in a country nearby, a country in Europe.Ah, Europe, that currently painful word. 

The Dutch Twins were why, in a moment of EU-nostalgia and curiosity, I found and downloaded The Twins e-book bundle. There, thanks to the unexpected Preface, I discovered the author, Lucy Fitch Perkins, who was an American and her specific reason for writing these books.

Lucy's father and mother had been teachers. Her father was involved in the Civil War, which ended in 1865, the year Lucy was born. However, by 1873, increasing business problems made him send Lucy, her four younger sisters and their mother to the Fitch family home in Kalamazoo, Massachusetts, where she grew up.

Lucy always loved drawing and, at sixteen, had cartoons published in the Kalamazoo Gazette. Family contributions allowed Lucy to attend the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. Lucy, with her Congregational upbringing. did not favour dancing, drinking or card-playing, but she was nevertheless a popular and lively-spirited girl.

After graduating in 1886, Lucy worked as an illustrator for the Prang Educational Company until Walter Scott Perry, who was then setting up a Fine Arts Department within the new Pratt Institute for Manual Arts and Engineering, asked her to be his Assistant. (What a widely encompassing title for a college and what a glimpse into the practical American vision of the time!) Lucy’s life seems, to me, to be a useful mix of art, pragmatism, determination and social awareness.

Four years later, in 1891, she left to marry Dwight Perkins, a young architect she'd met while still a student although his Unitarian religion had originally been a barrier to their union. Perkins encouraged his wife by designing her a studio in their new home in Chicago. Unfortunately, as a result of the economic collapse of 1893, Perkins became seriously ill, which led to Lucy resuming her public career. For the next ten years, she worked for the educational publisher as well as teaching, illustrating and painting mural decorations for schoolrooms. 

Lucy wrote, but neither her book of children’s verses nor her fairy stories were a great success. However, when Edwin O. Grover, a publisher friend, saw her sketches of children, he persuaded her to write a series of “geography” reading books, using a boy and a girl as main characters. Her first title, in 1911, The Dutch Twins, was very popular and by the time her last book -  The Dutch Twins and Little Brother - was published (a year posthumously in 1938), Lucy Fitch Perkins had written over twenty-six “Twins” titles, many of which had been translated and sold across the world. For a time, Lucy Fitch Perkins was the publisher Houghton Mifflin’s most profitable author.  

Yet, although her biographical details are interesting, they are not the reason I chose her for this History Girls post. I chose Lucy Fitch Perkins because she wrote with a clear and valuable intention. Early in that new century, the term “melting pot” - the title of a 1908 play– was current, although the idea was not new. Immigration was a continual topic of discussion and Lucy wanted her Twins books to teach respect and understanding for the many peoples then gathering within the United States. 

Her research led her beyond literary sources and out to Ellis Island, where she was deeply affected by the plight of the depressed and oppressed people of all nations herded together. She also visited a Chicago school where children from twenty-seven different nationalities were gathered together in a room and taught by a few determined teachers, which somehow sounds quite a familiar description.

Additionally Lucy believed that only a story based on a real, individual experience would lead her young readers to understand all she was trying to tell them, so she “sought out and became intimately friendly with someone who had been a child in the place she wanted to write about,”according to one account. Children would never be moved to sympathy or empathy by the pedantic generalities of a text book.

Furthermore – and surely as result of all her work for an educational press – Lucy Fitch Perkins wrote her books to appeal to children. She wanted her stories to be both readable and enjoyable so she tried out her stories on a small group of children to make sure the story worked and that text was as fresh and lively as possible. 
 
She called her young critics “the poison squad”, which feels quite accurate, considering the sharp comments that children can make about one’s precious writing. Lucy believed in getting close to her young audience, and drew kneeling on the floor so that she saw things from the viewpoint of a young child. 

Once, when asked how to write for children, Lucy answered “Learn to draw!”I take this to mean not only the art of drawing but also the art of imagining the story in vivid scenes, not in a flurry of wonderful, adult words. The popularity of her books seems to suggest she got that right, and the author Beverly Cleary was a great fan. Lucy was not afraid of strong content either, and included the absentee landlords in Ireland, the Scottish estate clearances and the land ownership system in Mexico within her tales.

The full list of her books is not quite as historical as I remembered: only The Cave Twins, The Spartan Twins, the Puritan Twins, as well as some more specifically American pairs, such as the Twins of the Revolution, which may never have reached English libraries. The Geography series included Dutch, Japanese, Irish, Eskimo, Mexican, Belgian, French, Scotch, Italian and Swiss children, and more. Many of these Twins would have seemed quite “historic” by the time I read them which may be why the series seemed such an enigma - and that silent children’s library didn’t encourage questions.

Right now, when identity and immigration are topics of sadness and tension, I found the story of Lucy Fitch Perkins and her Twins books a positive and welcome delight, even if I have yet to re-read my kindle bundle. I am hoping that - discounting the era of the writing - my memory has not been deceiving me.

To conclude, here’s Lucy Fitch Perkins explaining in her own words:

So I wrote books giving pictures of child life in other countries, and then, for the benefit of American and foreign born children alike, I wrote books which gave some idea of what had been done for this country by those who had founded and developed it.

And, again, emphasing:

. . . the necessity for mutual respect and understanding between people of different nationalities if we are ever to live in peace on this planet. In particular I felt the necessity for this in this country where all the nations of the earth are represented in the population.

Hooray for Lucy Fitch Perkins!

Penny Dolan

Mirror City - Celia Rees

July 17, 2016, 4:30 pm

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1960s Guide to Ibiza

I recently found this guide book for Ibiza. It belonged to my aunt. She and my mother visited the island in the 1960s. The guide book is full of pictures of islanders in traditional costume and holiday makers having seaside fun. Not a club in sight.

Ibiza has changed a bit since then. 

Its reputation as the Party Island began with the hippies in the Sixties. It even gets a mention from Joni Mitchell.

So I bought me a ticket
I caught a plane to Spain
Went to a party down a red dirt road
There were lots of pretty people there
Reading Rolling Stone, reading Vogue
They said, "How long can you hang around?"
I said a week, maybe two
just until my skin turns brown...

Joni Mitchell, California

Joni must have been tripping down that red dirt road to some of the first open-air beach parties. The other 'pretty people there' being Mike Oldfield, Frank Zappa, Robert Plant, Terence Stamp and Pink Floyd. The islands boho reputation took root in the Fifties when it became a refuge for Americans trying to escape McCarthyism. By the '80s and '90s Ibiza the Hippy Island had changed to Ibiza the Clubbing Island but it is now showing signs of returning to its past.

I made my first visit to Ibiza in April this year. I was going on a Yoga Retreat and, as soon as I arrived I felt very much like the New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, when she visited the island in the Fifties. She immediately felt 'at peace within my own mind, as if I were on an unearthly shore'.

I discovered Janet Frame after seeing Jane Campion's film An Angel at My Table. The third volume of her autobiographical trilogy, The Envoy From Mirror City, describes her time on Ibiza. 

 'I came into the daylight of the hill where I looked down on the harbour and the buildings across the harbour, perfectly mirrored in the clear tideless ocean,' she wrote on her first morning. Each day, she explored the idea of the mirrored city further. 

'As I sat at my table typing, I looked each day at the city mirrored in the sea, and one day I walked around the habour road to the opposite shore where the real city lay that I knew only as the city in the sea, but I felt as if I were trying to walk behind a mirror and I knew that whatever the outward phenomenon of light, city, and sea, the real city lay within as the city of the imagination.'

The Envoy From Mirror City - Janet Frame

I had just started writing and I remember being transfixed by the Mirror City. The idea has stayed with me ever since. it is a perfect (and perfectly lyrical)  analogy for the magical allure, the obsessions and impossibilities of the writing life. We are always waiting for, wanting to be, the envoy from Mirror City. We know that the city is there, just beneath the surface of things, not quite real, not quite an illusion and not quite stable. It's the place we long to be but as soon as we get near, it begins to shimmer and change and disappear. All we can hope for is a visit from the envoy who calls on us from time to time to remind us of the city's proximity. 

Although the Mirror City had stayed with me, I'd completely forgotten that it was Ibiza until I found a reference to Janet Frame and a quotation from The Envoy From Mirror City in Stephen Armstrong's The White Island. I was going to visit a place which had become a part of the landscape of my imagination. It felt satisfyingly serendipitous and a propitious omen for the Yoga Retreat.

Yoga Floor  - Can Amonita

I was there for a week, living in a beautiful place, practicing yoga every day. It was a good time to renew my visa to the Mirror City. I felt very much at home on the island and wasn't surprised to learn that it was a place sacred to the Goddess. On Ibiza, she took the form of Tanit brought here by the Phoenicians. Related to the Moon Goddess, Astarte, Tanit was traduced by the Romans and by the Israelites as a receiver of child sacrifice, the legend seemingly re-enforced by evidence from large necropoli, called Tophet, found near Phoenician sites in what was the land of Canaan and at Carthage, which contained the cremated remains of infants, new born and still born children. This, however, is open to interpretation. Just like the Mirror City, if we look beneath the surface appearance, different pictures emerge. The children might well have died naturally and then been given to the Mother for Her protection.  That's what I prefer to think.

In the Archaeological museum in Ibiza Town, Tanit is depicted in different forms from this bust of a rather severe Carthaginian matron to these much more basic and more primitive figurines. 

Tanit - Ibiza Archaeological Museum

Goddess Figurines, Ibiza Archaeological Museum

 



She is often depicted not as a figure at all but as a symbol. Sometimes, She is reduced even further, to a circle above a triangle with vestigial outstretched arms - a version of the universal symbol for the Goddess found from different times and in different places all over the world.

Traces of her worship have been found all over Ibiza. Perhaps She is still there. Certainly, there's a magic about the island, a sense of mystery. it has a powerful attraction, whether spiritual or hedonistic, which calls people back over and over again.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

A Day Trip to Bath by Katherine Webb

July 18, 2016, 5:00 pm

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I was recently blindsided somewhat by a journalist who'd come over to the UK from Germany to interview me, I thought, about my latest release over there. It turned out that she was after a travel piece on Bath instead, and after floundering for a moment when she asked me to close me eyes and tell her 'What is Bath?', I was able to talk at length about this wonderful historic city, so full of its own character (and, my sister would remark, also full of itself).

I live about eight miles outside of Bath, in the countryside, but proximity to Bath was definitely a pull factor when moving to the area. And, within weeks of moving down here, I'd started a novel set in Bath in 1820 (The Misbegotten). I couldn't seem to help it - the atmosphere of all things Georgian and Regency was too powerful! So this month I thought I'd blog about Bath and some of its famous faces, and recommend it to anybody wanting a day trip this summer to a place that wears its history on its sleeve.

Well, I kind of have to start with this lady. Although Jane Austen only lived in Bath for a few years, she remains firmly associated with the place. Bath features as the setting of 'Persuasion', and gets a mention in other Austen books as well, and there's a Jane Austen museum and festival for fans here. It's just as interesting to visit The Assembly Rooms, however, at which Austen is known to have attended functions. Designed in 1769 by John Wood the Younger, the Assembly Rooms are now owned by the National Trust and you can go and have a wander around the grand tearoom, the octagon room where the men would have played cards, and the ballroom with its fantastic chandeliers - now electric, but in Austen's day holding hundreds of candles. The heat rising from all the thronging, dancing bodies below was often so great that the candles melted, and dribbled hot wax onto the party-goers. http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/bath-assembly-rooms

John Wood the Younger (1728-1782), and his father John Wood the Elder (1704-1754), were the architects who had the most influence on the building of Bath in the Georgian era. Between them the pair designed the most iconic of Bath's seven elegant crescents - The Royal Crescent - as well as The Circus, Queen Square, Gay Street, The Royal Mineral Water Hospital and Prior Park, private residence of Ralph Allen, about whom more shortly, and much more. The Woods' designs pioneered Bath's neo-classical, Palladian grandeur, still so much in evidence today. When it was built in 1775, The Royal Crescent was on the edge of the city, with no other buildings in front of it to spoil the view for the residents. The same cannot be said today, but I can report that Barton Fields, as shown above, have indeed never been built on.

The newly completed Circus in the late 1700s

Another person strongly linked to Bath's Georgian soul is Richard 'Beau' Nash (1674-1761), Master of Ceremonies from 1704 onwards. This was an unofficial title, but it put Beau Nash into a position of tremendous social influence, and helped make Bath the height of fashion in its heyday in the early 1700s. An early career in the army and then as a barrister clearly didn't suit the fun-loving Beau Nash, who had a gambling problem and lived with a string of mistresses. As MC of Bath, he would meet new arrivals, decide who was 'in' and who was not, broker marriages, arrange balls, keep a check on the worst gamblers, and accompany lone women to dances. He is also credited with encouraging a break down in the strict social boundaries between the upper and middle classes in Bath, although this might have backfired on him slightly as Bath fell out of fashion towards the end of the century, came to be seen as vulgar and old hat, the haunt of spinsters and invalids, and to be passed over by fashionistas in favour of Lyme Regis and other seaside resorts.

One more Georgian notable for you: Ralph Allen (1693-1764). Allen started out as a clerk in the Post Office at a young age, and by the age of 19, in 1712, became the postmaster of Bath. With a series of reforms and innovations, he increased the office's profits and reach to such an extent that he became a wealthy man. He bought up stone quarries in the local area, recognising the growing demand for the honey-coloured Bath stone in bringing the Woods' designs to life, and thus became a very wealthy man indeed. On a hill to the south east of Bath sits the Sham Castle, an elaborate folly built to give Allen something to look at from his townhouse in the city.

In 1742, Ralph Allen hired John Wood the Younger to build Prior Park, a Palladian mansion to the south of Bath, which he later moved in to. It is in a truly wonderful setting, with long reaching views of the city and a quintessential C18th garden, designed with the help of Capability Brown, which has one of only four Palladian bridges of its kind in the world. The house itself now houses a school, but the National Trust has the gardens, and they're lovely to visit. http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/prior-park-landscape-garden

The bridge has lots of interesting old graffiti, if you like that kind of thing (which I do) - showing that whilst standards of handwriting have declined over the years, standards of behaviour are much the same as they ever were!

There are so many Georgian wonders in Bath - don't miss the Florentine Pulteney Bridge, either, completed in 1774. Palladian again, this time designed by Robert Adam, the bridge has shops on along either side of its span across the River Avon - but its history goes back a lot further than that. The reason anybody came here in the first place was for the hot water springs, first settled by the Romans who named the city Aquae Sulis - meaning the waters of Sulis. Sulis was the native British goddess to whom the locals had built a shrine on the site. Britain's only hot water thermal springs, the waters were soon enclosed within a huge Roman bath and temple complex, now wonderfully excavated and fascinating to visit (incidentally, you can bathe in the hot spring water yourself, at nearby Thermae Spa - the rooftop pool has wonderful views of the city. You can drink it too, just like a Georgian invalid, in the Roman Baths visitor centre, although I don't think there's much to be gained by it - very eggy.).

The Roman Bath complex

Thanks to Georgian fashion and bombing in WWII, the medieval city of Bath is harder to spot. The Abbey, now in a late C15th form, sits on top of two older churches, and is very beautiful inside - fan vaulting galore. Sally Lunn's Historic Eating House is most famous for being the only place to get a Bath Bun - like a brioche, and very tasty - but for me the real treat in going there is to go down into the basement museum, which recreates kitchens of the past, and where you can see open excavations going down through the centuries, proving that there has been a house on that spot for over a thousand years. The medieval city walls and gates have sadly gone, but many houses in the area to the south of and immediately around the abbey are in fact medieval buildings, hunkered down behind tacked-on Georgian fronts.

I've got this far and not mentioned the Kennet and Avon canal, or Sydney Gardens, or William Herschel, or the Pump Rooms, or any one of a hundred other historical things to see in Bath. It is truly a unique city with a remarkable history, and an absolute must-see for anybody interested in our Roman or Georgian history.

A Victorian Scandal: The Failure of the City of Glasgow Bank - Ann Swinfen

July 19, 2016, 4:30 pm

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The near total collapse of the UK banking system in 2008 had repercussions which are still very much with us today.  But in case we should delude ourselves into thinking that it was a unique near disaster, spare a thought for the shareholders of the City of GlasgowBank in 1878.  When their Bank collapsed, no-one was there to bail them out with government money.  Apparently unprotected by limited liability legislation, the great majority of them faced bankruptcy and destitution. True – the directors and officers faced trial on charges of fraud, but the remarkably lenient sentences handed down can have been poor compensation for the real victims of the affair.

The failure of the City of Glasgow Bank with estimated debts of £10 million, announced in the press on 2^ndOctober, 1878, seems to have caught almost everyone by surprise. According to the Irish Freeman’s Journal, ‘The failure of the Glasgow City Bank for ten millions is a disaster as unequalled in magnitude as it was wholly unexpected.’ The Journal went on to point out that according to the previous week’s edition of the Investor’s Monthly Manual, all the signs were that the bank was in a healthy state.  Its stock was given as £1 million, the share price stood at £237 per £100, and it paid dividends of 12%.  But now that the disastrous news had broken, there was general concern to avoid a widespread panic.  While the other Scottish banks were unwilling to come to the Bank’s assistance, they did announce they would accept its notes in current circulation.  The Scotsman hastened to assure its readers that ‘the circumstances of the suspended bank were entirely exceptional, and that its status was not comparable with that of the other Scotch banks’. How the unhealthy state of its affairs had been kept secret until now was difficult to explain, but the paper assumed that it ‘was not before the minds of the shareholders, and can hardly have been known to the directors’.

The City of GlasgowBank had been established in 1839, with 779 subscribers and a capital of £656,250. It was its regular practice to publish the annual balance sheet for shareholders in June each year, and the accounts for 1878 showed healthy deposits of £8,000,000 and the existence of 133 branches around the country.  Capital, reserves, and undistributed profits totalled £1,600,000, and a dividend of 12% would be paid to shareholders.  The announcement less than four months later that the directors had decided to close the bank naturally sent shock waves throughout not just the city of Glasgow, but across Scotland and beyond.  It is estimated that hundreds of businesses were brought down by the bank failure, and the 1200 shareholders and their families were made destitute. At a meeting of the liquidators held at the beginning of January, 1879, it was decided to pay a dividend of a mere five shillings (later raised to 6/8d) in the pound. At the same time all six of the Bank’s directors were served with indictments, and the trial date set for the 20^th January.

Before the trial could take place, sympathisers with the shareholders met to discuss ways of providing some financial relief for those affected. These schemes included a controversial plan for a lottery, designed to raise a total of £6 million, of which £3 million would go to the shareholders. They and their supporters saw this as the only way to solve their problems. At a meeting of ‘influential men’ in Glasgow, Sir James Watson referred to the bank failure as ‘a national calamity, so ruinous to its innocent shareholders and their families, and so disastrous in its effects on the community at large, that it demands and justifies exceptional modes of relief’.  Others saw it differently, and the plan was roundly condemned in the pulpits and the press of the day.  ‘Many people, we are sure,’ asserted an editorial in the Leeds Mercury, ‘must have been inclined to regard the first announcement of the proposed lottery in aid of the shareholders in the Glasgow City Bank as an ill-timed hoax.  The suggestion of such a scheme was, indeed, so outrageous that it is astonishing that anyone could be found to discuss it seriously.  Yet we now know that the proposal has been received with extraordinary favour in Scotland.’ The writer was reassured, however, by the intervention of the Law Officers, from whom the promoters had received a discreet hint that what they were planning might well fall foul of the relevant legislation, and it is a fact that the scheme was shortly to be abandoned.

In the meantime the directors and manager of the City Bank had been removed from where they were lodged in Glasgow Prison, and conveyed with elaborate secrecy to Edinburgh, and the Calton Jail. The succeeding trial was to last for eleven days, in the course of which the incompetence or worse of the manager, Stronach, and his fellow directors was shown in high relief.

The trial was presided over by the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Moncreiff, but his contribution to the eventual outcome was greater than that of a mere chairman of the proceedings.  The issue of whether the directors, or some of them, were guilty of an actual crime, or merely of professional incompetence, lay at the heart of the affair.  There was also a question as to whether they might in fact succeed in getting off scot-free on a technicality.  Two days before the trial was due to open, the Graphic advised its readers of a rumour ‘unfounded we hope, that the directors of the Glasgow City Bank are likely to be acquitted in consequence of a flaw in the indictment’.

Indeed before the trial proper, one entire session was taken up by legal argument challenging the ‘relevancy and non-specification’ of the charges in the indictment.  The following day, to a Court which ‘was again crowded, but not inconveniently’, Moncreiff returned to give his and his colleagues’ decision on the issues raised by counsel for the defence.  He explained to the court that the question they had had to decide was whether the indictment contained facts sufficiently relevant to go to proof before a jury. While many of the questions raised by counsel for the defence involved ‘considerations of very great weight’, these should most properly be dealt with when they came to investigate the facts of the case.

The real issue, however, was that of criminality, in particular in relation to the first charge in the indictment. This charge – of issuing false statements and balance sheets – had been withdrawn by the Lord Advocate, and it was now argued that the charge of misrepresentation of the assets and liabilities was in a similar position, and ought to be deleted.  The Court held, however, that ‘the charges respecting the assets and liabilities were matters of proof, and not of relevancy, but there was no doubt that it would be necessary when the facts of the case came to be proved, to add to the illegality of the accounts charged, some element of bad faith, or guilty knowledge, or of some fraudulent intent. This was an elementary principle, and was essential to establish the crime itself.’

It would not have been enough to base the charge simply on the obligation of directors not to allow overdrafts without security – ‘unless there had appeared in the charge something alleging breach of faith’. Evidently the indictment itself was less than explicit on this matter of bad faith or criminal intent, and Moncreiff remarked that ‘he could have wished that the charge had been more specifically expressed…..but on further consideration he found words in the indictment which might be taken to override all the facts alleged, and to raise the elements of bad faith throughout the whole of these transactions…..the charge was clear that the prisoners had made use of their character as directors to obtain advances in regard to moneys entrusted to them’, and this was sufficient to justify an investigation by a jury’. Without this conclusion, the case against the directors would almost certainly have collapsed before it came to trial.

And so the case got under way, the prosecution being conducted by the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor-General for Scotland, with 14 ‘legal gentlemen’ appearing for the defence.  The defendants faced a total of 17 charges, including misrepresentation of assets and liabilities, overdrawing private accounts, and purloining of funds belonging to depositors. The directors had all made declarations before the Sheriff of Lanarkshire denying the charges, though the terms of their statements cannot have impressed their customers with their attention to the affairs of the bank.

Mr Potter, who was to be sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment, claimed to have been deceived by the manager, Stronach. Robert Salmond claimed to have been absent when the last balance sheet was prepared, but signed it in the belief that it was a true representation of the position of the bank.  Robert Taylor denied all misrepresentation or concealment.  He attended all weekly meetings of the directors, and ‘considered that by doing so he discharged his duty without himself examining the books’. Henry Inglis had been absent from board meetings through illness, but had complete faith in the bank officials. John Innes Wright, whose firm had received very large advances from the Bank, alleged that although he was a member of the board, he did not take an active part in the management but relied on the experience of his fellow directors. Robert Stronach, the manager, wisely declined to make any statement with regard to the charge of theft.

Upwards of 150 witnesses were to be called, but of these the most damning from the point of view of the defence were Dr Macgregor, an independent accountant called in by the directors to advise on the preparation of the balance sheet shortly before the stoppage, and one William Morrison, formerly a clerk at the bank, but since 1871 its chief accountant. It was one of Morrison’s responsibilities to prepare the draft annual balance sheet for submission to the manager.  In his evidence he claimed that for the June 1878 document, he had prepared the draft in accordance with the books of the bank, but then altered it under instructions from Stronach and Mr Potter. As a result, the amount of deposits declared in the public balance sheet of 1878 was given as £8,102,000, misrepresented to the tune of £740,000.  The bank notes in circulation were incorrectly stated to the amount of £89,000. The outstanding drafts were falsely stated to the extent of £410,000.

‘These understatements were made by the direction of Mr Stronach, the manager, and were marked on the abstract by red ink.’  And so it went on. The credit accounts were falsely stated to the amount of £3 million; the cash in hand overstated by £200,000.  False balance sheets had been prepared not only for 1878, but also for the two previous years of 1876 and ’77. The only small glimmer of light relief was afforded by Morrison’s near namesake, William Morris, whose monthly task it was to prepare statements of credits given to one of the bank’s largest customers, Smith, Fleming and Co. Sometimes these statements were accompanied by securities, sometimes not. In one case the security of an advance to the company had been six live elephants in Rangoon!

Dr Macgregor, as an outside consultant, had no need for concealment. He spoke of his meeting with the directors, at which the general affairs of the bank were discussed – a discussion in which Stronach took very little part, seeming to be ‘entirely overcome’. Having carried out his investigation Macgregor concluded that several of the directors and some of the firms with whom they did business had largely overdrawn their accounts.  In his opinion the bank was now hopelessly insolvent – the deficit according to his calculations being of the order of six and a half million.

And so the trial ground its way on for several more days.  The Court heard from shareholders and depositors, from the prosecution and the defence. For his part the Lord Advocate announced on the 27^th that he had withdrawn the charges of theft and embezzlement. On January 30^th, the Dean of the Faculty rose to speak on behalf of the defence – a speech of great power, and one which had a greater effect on the jury than any other. According to the Glasgow Herald, the speech was ‘courageous and skilful, and had the verdict been given immediately on the conclusion of his speech, the impression was that every one of the panels [defendants] would have been set free.’ The Dean was able to exploit weaknesses in William Morrison’s evidence, upon which the prosecution had largely relied. ‘As the case stands’, the paper concluded, ‘a great deal depends on the summing up of the Judge.  It is freely said that a powerful charge made either in one direction or another would, as matters stand at present, take the jury along with it to a verdict either of “all guilty” or of all “not guilty”, or at least “not proven”.’

Moncreiff’s address to the jury received widespread praise from the press. The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent described it as ‘an able and exhaustive summing up of the whole case’. The address lasted for four hours, and began with an admonition to the jury to put out of their minds the ‘excited comments out of doors’ occasioned by the fact that the failure of the bank had reduced hundreds of shareholders from affluence to poverty, and concentrate wholly on the facts given in evidence. Despite the length of the address, it succeeded in reducing the complexity of the case to a few simple propositions. According to him, the only charge now preferred against the prisoners was that they had falsified the balance sheets of the bank from 1876 to 1878, and that they had done so with a fraudulent intent to deceive the shareholders.

For the jury to come to a decision on this issue, he put to them three simple questions – first, whether the balance sheets were false; second, whether the prisoners, or any of them, knew that they were false; and third, whether the circulation and publication of the balance sheets had been done with fraudulent intent. He further reduced the burden on the jury by suggesting that they concentrate on just two of the amounts in the balance sheets which were alleged to be false. He made some criticism of Morrison’s evidence, which had sometimes been confused and contradictory, but if his evidence was to be believed, then the accounts had been altered with intent to deceive.  Evidently the summing up succeeded in enabling the jury to come to a speedy decision. After retiring for just two hours, they returned with a verdict. ‘We unanimously find Lewis Potter and Robert Summers Stronach guilty of all the charges as libelled; and John Stewart, Robert Salmond, John Innes Wright, Henry Inglis, and William Taylor guilty of using and uttering false balance-sheets or statements of the state of the City of Glasgow Bank.’

Potter and Stronach were each sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment.  The punishment would have been much more severe, if the jury had found that the crimes they had committed had been carried out for personal gain, rather than, as had been argued on their behalf, for the benefit of the bank. The remaining directors, who had been convicted of uttering false balance sheets, but not actually of fabricating them, each received eight months. Even to some contemporaries, these sentences seemed over lenient.  The Economist, for one, thought them to be inadequate, even taking into account the three months the directors had already served before the start of the trial. The Statist agreed. ‘So far as the sentence goes, it would appear to be a safer thing to make away with six or seven millions of money, and thereby to filch from thousands of affluent families everything they possess in the world, than to pick a pocket of a few pence.’ It would have been interesting to know what a Dundee mill girl, whom Moncreiff had sentenced to eight years in prison back in 1870 for stealing a silver watch and some clothing from her landlady, might have thought of this outcome.

***

For this and other Victorian legal scandals see:

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Maps by Imogen Robertson

July 20, 2016, 4:30 pm

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In a fit of post-Brexit, 'let's try and do something useful' at the end of last month, my husband and I repainted the living room. It was at least distracting. It also involved moving round great piles of books which lead to all sorts of rediscoveries. We live in a small flat which means book space is at a premium, so I felt slightly guilty when I rediscovered this.

Not that you can tell from the picture, but it's a big beast of a coffee table book, heavily illustrated, thick glossy pages - you know the sort of thing.

I was trying to be brutal and set aside as many books as possible for the charity shop, but I couldn't bear to part with it. It has no real research value, I've read it, I wouldn't use it in teaching and it wasn't written by a friend so it should have gone, but there is just something particularly inspiring about maps.

There are all sorts of maps in our house. I have an old print of the county map of Durham above my desk, just in case I suddenly forget where I am from. I have notebooks printed with early 20th century maps on the cover to scribble in, we have two atlases in the living room (one historical, one just geographical), and then I have the ones I've used for my research. I must have spent hours hunched over Rocque's 1745 map of London writing the Crowther & Westerman series.

Then I have a folder filled with plans of Paris showing the expanding waters of the 1910 floods, and Edwardian tourist maps of the city showing approved restaurants and hotels. There are hundreds more filed away in the computer, some with character routes drawn on, or set in folders with photographs or drawings that show particular buildings or corners.

The Maritime Maps, like the atlas are in the inspiration category, nothing stimulates the imagination more, I think, than reading unfamiliar place names and travelling across the oceans with your fingertips. The research materials I found vital to give me a real sense of knowing a place. They organised my materials, stimulated my memory when I had managed to get to the places concerned for the research, and, I hope gave me the confidence and authority to convince readers that I knew these places, and could navigate them like a native of the time and place.

Then there are the imaginary maps. I have one in Circle of Shadows showing my fictional 18th century statelet of Maulberg in the Holy Roman Empire. Looking at it now, it reminds me of the treasure maps I used to make as a child, a mixture of the real and the imaged - here is the campsite (real), here is the edge of the wood (real), here is the fairy ring with the treasure buried under the turf in the centre (who knows?)

I was talking to a friend who has just begun to write their first novel last week. They sent me an opening scene, and though the writing was pretty good, there was something a bit fuzzy about it and the village they were describing. 'Have you drawn a map?' I asked. The answer was something like 'I want to be a writer not a cartographer', but I realised almost as I was speaking how important that putative map was.

To write convincingly you need to know the world of your characters, you need to know their place in the world, in their community and that's true even if that community is entirely fictional. To draw a map of the village in question, my writer friend needed to make all sorts of decisions or discoveries about how the place and people were organised. Was the church in the middle of the village, or on the outskirts for the convenience of the local lord? Where were the good houses and the bad, the pub and the market place. Was it surrounded by woods or arable land? What did the characters see when they looked out of their windows? Who lives next door to your character? Is there a school? Where does the road lead to? Where do they get their water?

My friend began to latch on to the idea, and I could almost hear the village appearing in their mind as they spoke about where things might be. They began placing scenes and characters within it, and I realised they were doing imaginatively what I often do with my research, feeling out the edges and opportunities of their fictional world and inhabiting it as a writer.

The next draft read like clear water. Fuzziness gone and characters real and alive.

I feel less guilty about keeping the map book now.

www.imogenrobertson.com

Powder and Paint: Make-Up and the Medieval Woman by Catherine Hokin

July 22, 2016, 1:00 am

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"A woman without paint is like food without salt."

You might think that quote is taken from a particularly literary edition of Femail magazine's never-ending 'name and shame celebrities caught without make-up' feature but it was actually coined by the Roman philosopher Plautus around 254 BC. I offer it as an illustration of both our ongoing fascination with cosmetics (now a $170 billion a year global business) and the attitudes and social connotations that affect its wearing.

Roman face cream with visible finger-marks

Although they did not match the colourful heights of the Egyptians whose practices they copied, the Roman women Plautus associated with wore a lot of make-up. Their heavily-blackened eyebrows would not look out of place in a twenty-first century city centre, although they would have been framing faces whitened with a chalk and vinegar paste rather than apparently darkened with builders' tea. Cheeks and lips were highlighted in pink or red, thick eyeliner was essential and it was common for wealthy women to employ a cosmetic artist (a cosmatae) a la the Kardashians. 

Not only was make-up heavily used (pun intended), in both ancient Rome and ancient Greece, sporting a visibly painted face appears to have been acceptable across the social ranks. For medieval British women, however, whose lives were increasingly governed by the complex and judgemental rules of the Church, the picture was far more complex. 

Visible cheek and lip paint

Whatever the current debate gracing the pages of the Huffington Post about the politics of wearing/not wearing cosmetics, it is a truth surely universally acknowleged that wearers use them to look healthier/more rested/more 'attractive'. I have yet to meet anyone who puts their slap on to look worse. It is no surprise, therefore, that the male clerics of the medieval church would instantly equate paint and powder with harlotry: if a woman is temptation enough, goodness knows what madness an enhanced woman could unleash. Based on this logic, cosmetics were banned for quite some time outside brothels. Ordinary women, however, continued to use make-up as is clear from the statuary, paintings and writings of the time. 'Ladies red powder' (made from dried and ground safflowers or angelica leaves or brazilwood chips soaked in rosewater) is mentioned in a number of sources including a twelfth-century poem which complains that statues are going undecorated because the women have used up all the paint. 

Now I know my fiction revolves around rediscovering hidden women's voices but even I cannot pretend the women of medieval England were strutting round plastered in full war-paint in open revolt against the Church and just no one thought to mention it, so what was going on? The answer: very clever rule-bending. Marriage, and avoiding the sin of adultery, was key to maintaining an ordered society: if allowing a wife to make herself attractive to her husband (particularly if she had been afflicted by a disfiguring illness) maintained this, even the clerics could see they had created a problem by condemning cosmetics quite so harshly. So they began to make exceptions to the rules, and women began to bend them: the 'natural look' was born.

The Natural Look

Unlike the earlier intentionally visible cosmetic fashions, medieval faces can look surprisingly colourless - there were none of the bright pigments that characterised ancient Egyptian make-up and eye-shadow does not appear to have been worn. This look was all about hiding (both the flaws and the fact you were doing it) and enhancing, in this case not just your looks but your status. A pale face signified you did not work outside, a clear one showed you had not been marked by disease. Rather like a modern serum, skin preparation could start with a strawberry juice wash to remove redness or a wet amethyst crystal rubbed against spots, before the all-important paling (a lightening as opposed to the more extreme whitening seen in later periods) could begin. Twelfth century recipes include ground lily roots to whiten the skin but the favourite method used wheaten flour: this would be soaked in water for 15 days, then strained and crystallized to give a white powder that was mixed to a foundation-like paste using rosewater and patted on with a cloth. By the end of the medieval period, the whitening powder had become lead-based and highly toxic to the wearer - in the case of the renaissance Aqua Toffana it had become arsenic-based and far more dangerous to the husbands invited to kiss it but that's another story.

The medieval make-up artist

Mouths and cheeks would be tackled next with wine or adaptations of the ubiquitous red powder added to lip balms made from beeswax or suet. Apparently a common beauty trick was also to rub a cut lemon across your lips to make them redder. Weirdly this works (I tried it) and the tingle was quite fun but it may not be the most practical thing to keep in your make-up bag! 

It must have been a time-consuming beauty routine. All the preparations seem to have a long drying time and all the tweezing required to maintain the high hairline and thin brows must have taken hours and goes some way to explain why some women resorted to quicklime powders to remove hair. Please do not try this one at home: the whitening effect is created by revealing bone. 

Perhaps there was a subversive element to some of the painting and powdering, I hope there was and at least one of my medieval characters will be wielding her face-brush with as much defiance as her sword. What I love, however, is the one thing that really hasn't changed over the centuries: achieving the 'natural look' still takes forever. As the playwrite Tracy Letts put it so neatly in August: Osage County: "The only woman who was pretty enough to go without make-up was Elizabeth Taylor, and she wore a ton."

Woman healers of the Seventeenth Century, by Leslie Wilson

July 22, 2016, 4:30 pm

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A Young Lady called Henrietta Boyle, Christian Friedrich Zincke, Wikimedia

If you think about women in medicine in the past, the chances are you'd think first of all of midwives, and yet, four hundred years or so ago, women were playing an active role in medical care. The philosopher Hobbes said he much preferred 'an experienced old woman' to the 'most learned and inexperienced physician.' Nowadays, people speak perjoratively of 'old wives' tales,' and yet medical research often confirms views that doctors used to dismiss (like getting a cold if your feet get wet).

Far from being amateurs, the women had access to medicines handed down from generation to generation, with proven efficacy. Sir Ralph Verney, writing to his wife in 1647, advised her to give her child 'n phisick but such as midwives and old women, with the doctors approbation, doe prescribe; for assure yourselfe they by experience know better than any phisition how to treat such infants.' Women cured lame legs, brought down swollen arms, worked as oculists.

spearmint, once used to cure watering eyes

Some of these were paid, but others, notably aristocratic ladies, did the work for no pay. One of these was Madam Springett, the mother-in-law, from her first marriage, of the early Quaker Mary Pennington, and I can't do better than to quote from what her daughter-in-law wrote about her in later life.

'She kept several poor women employed in summer, simpling (gathering herbs) for her; and in winter procuring for her such things as she wanted in surgery, physic, and sore eyes. She had excellent judgment in all these, and admirable success; which made her famous, and sought unto out of several counties, by persons of the first rank, as well as those of other classes. She daily employed her servants in making oils, salves, balsams, drawing of spirits, distilling of waters, making syrups and conserves, lozenges and pills.

melissa officinalis, calming herb and good for digestion

She was so famous for taking off spots and cataracts from the eyes, that Stephens, the great oculist, sent many to her, when the case was difficult.. She cured.. many desperate burns, and cuts, and dangerous sores that came by them.. One very remarkable cure of a burn I shall mention. A child's head was so burnt, that its skull was like a coal: she brought it to have skin and hair, and invented a thin pan of beaten silver, covered with bladder, to preserve the head in case of a knock or fall.'

People came hundreds of miles to consult Madam Springett, and stayed in the area while she dealt with their case, sometimes for months. She could have twenty patients to see in a morning.

Being a lady of substance, she never took a penny for these services, though she did make wealthy patients buy the ingredients for the medicines.

What is clear from the above account is that Madam Springett relied on the expert knowledge of her female herb-gatherers, and also must have trained the servants who made up the medicines. I wonder if some of them subsequently set up as healers on their own account? I would also love to have the details of her cures for cataracts.

eye-bright, for eye problems!

Doubtless some of the illnesses went away of their own accord, and the placebo factor may also have been involved. But dermatological conditions, for example, are notably tricky to treat. I have found myself, through trial and error, that witch hazel is better for the inflammation I get from some mosquito bites than any steroid creams or anti-histamines, and many herbal 'house remedies' remain unattested simply because the big pharma companies aren't interested in testing or developing them.

In those days, you had the choice between a woman who had spent years observing illness and the effects of various herbal substances on them, or a doctor who had trained in what was largely a theoretical discipline, based on 'humours', and eager to let pints of blood from already weakened patients, literally bleeding some of them to death. The women healers were arguably the more scientific of the two.

The doctor's visit, Jan Steen, (Google Art Project)

Women (particularly aristocratic women) also functioned as bone-setters, so when one of the villagers in my novel 'Malefice' broke his leg, Alice Slade, the local 'cunning woman' was called in to set it, because the lady of the manor was in childbed.

However, even in Henry VIII's reign, legislation was being passed to restrict women's work in this respect. As with midwifery, the male doctors formed professional associations and excluded women, though of course household and herbal remedies continued to be practised, but this was more and more confined to the women's own families and friends.

In addition, as the eighteenth century progressed, more and more villages were removed from proximity from the great houses. Blenheim and Nuneham Courtney spring to mind. The lady of the manor must have been similarly cut off. She might still sally out to visit the poor, but only to dole out broths and advice. In Capability Brown's centenary year, it's worth considering how his landscape gardening quarantined the gentry from their 'inferiors.' If you want to see how it used to be, before Brown, Kent et al started holding their noses at the whiff of a cottage, go to Chastleton House in Oxfordshire. It's almost shocking to see how cheek-by-jowel the village is with the great house. Madam Springett's local patients, in such a set-up, would have found it an easy walk to the doctor.








References:
The Working Life of Seventeenth Century Women, by Alice Clark
Experiences in the life of Mary Pennington (written by herself) with preface by Gil Skidmore,  Friends Historical Society.
Malefice, by Leslie Wilson, reissued on Kindle May 2016

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WILD HUNTING: The life story of my first novel by Elizabeth Chadwick

July 23, 2016, 4:30 pm

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The gorgeous refresh cover of my first novel

Actually the title is a misnomer.  THE WILD HUNT wasn't my first novel at all, it was my eighth.  However it was my first published novel.  The other seven unpublished test pieces, written over the course of fifteen years are still in ring binders in my cupboard and without a serious overhaul that's where they are staying!

I discovered novel writing when I was fifteen years old.  I had told myself stories verbally from first having language - my first memory is of making up a tale about fairies printed on a cotton handkerchief when I had just turned three.  I never wrote any of my stories down, although I spent many happy hours kneeling in front of illustrations from books and magazines making up tales about the people, animals and objects within those visuals. I would enter the pictures and use my imagination to invent all kinds of new adventures and scenarios over their horizons.  Sometimes I'd tell the same story but change direction - bring in a new character, alter the weather, meander along different footpaths until I discovered other roads.  Basically I was teaching myself the art of story telling and exploring its constructs just by doing it.

I finally got around to writing down my verbal tales when I was fifteen, and fell in love with a handsome dark-haired man on a historical children's TV programme titled Desert Crusader. It was a drama put on by the BBC and dubbed from the French original Thibaud Ou les Croisades.  You can buy the DVD's in the original French from Amazon France.  I was inspired to begin writing my own historical  romantic swashbuckler set in the Holy Land. When it started out it was fan fiction but it rapidly developed a life of its own.  I called it 'Tiger's Eye after the stones in the hero's sword hilt (not sure that such a thing is authentic these days, but it felt right at the time). I wanted my story to feel as real as possible to me, so it was off to the library to swot up on my subject.  I admit to doing this with a lot more diligence than I applied to my school homework, but that's the different having a passion makes! 

 The more I researched the medieval period the more interested and fascinated I became and the more I wanted to write about it.  Researching was a revelation to the teenage me. All that guff about enormous swords I'd seen on TV and read in novels?  Absolute rot.  Ewart Oakeshott's  works on the medieval sword informed me that a 12th century sword weighed no more than 4lbs and was supremely balanced and suited to its function. An accomplished man could wield it with the skill of say a professional tennis play wielding a Tennis racket   at  Wimbledon.  Here was information not in the mainstream and the 'real thing.' The more I read, the more I wanted to know and the more I immersed myself in the period, its culture  and personalities.

 I also realised that I wanted to write historical fiction for a living.  Full stop, no ifs or buts.   I asked for a typewriter for my 18th birthday present (no computers then) and I went to nightschool to learn to touch type.  Back in the 1970's creative writing degrees did not exist. I was even put off going to university to do history or English by the head of year who told me I wouldn't get the necessary grades and there was too much competition in my chosen subject.  As it happened I did get the grades but by then my course was set elsewhere and I entered the job market as a management trainee for Debenhams Department Stores.  It wasn't what I really wanted to do and really just a means to an end in that it paid a wage - although from that time I do have a higher qualification in distributive and managerial principles!  Eventually I married, gave up the career job and went to work at Asda filling shelves part time so that I could have the rest of the day to write.  That's how much it meant.  I didn't care that I was doing a dead end job just for the money, because my sights were set elsewhere.

My unpublished novels!  It always gives me a wry smile when authors say they're fed up because publishers and agents won't look at their first or second novel.  As Treebeard says to the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings: 'Don't be too hasty.'!  Sometimes there's a good reason!

This was the pattern of my twenties.  I took time out to have children and went back to work on the night shift filling shelves, and in my spare moments I wrote - on an Amstrad Green Screen by now.  Fortunately I have always had the ability to multi task and switch the writing on and off like a tap. I'd sit at the kitchen table, watching the dinner cook, keeping an eye on the children playing, and I'd write. My husband would come in, we'd eat, and then I'd be off to fill shelves while he took over the child care.  Throughout that decade of my life, I continued to hone my craft.  Novels were sent off to agents and publishers and came back with rejection slips but it never bothered me because it was part of who I was. Even if I was never published, I wasn't going to give up because it was too much fun.  However, gradually I started to win prizes.  I won £15.00 in a local competition.  I was honourably mentioned in a national magazine short story contest, and then I won another £150 in another county-wide competition. These were markers along the way that showed me I was improving.  

And then came THE WILD HUNT.  I began writing this when I was on a B&B break in 1988 with my husband and two sons aged five and two. THE WILD HUNT was a romantic/adventure/historical set on the Welsh borders at the close of the 11th century.  My imaginary hero and and heroine were pushed into a political marriage, neither of them very keen at the outset, and it's the tale of how they came to a much better understanding while at the same time having to deal with personal rivalries, warfare and political skulduggery.  I  chose to set the novel on the Welsh borders because of its frontier nature and fluid alliances, and I gave my hero Norman, Welsh and English ancestry just to add a bit more nuance and difficulty to his problems.  It took around a year to write, and then it was ready to go off to an agent.  

I wrote in longhand on our holiday break and that first chapter ended up being discarded.  It wasn't the right place to start, but it had to be written for me to know it was wrong and it did tell me a lot about my hero that I wouldn't otherwise have known and enabled me to really get going when we arrived home.  In the normal way of things I would have discarded the rough work, but I put it down somewhere, lost it, then rediscovered it several years later, rather tatty and clipped together with a clothes peg.  It has since, like my 7 test pieces, become an 'heirloom'!

The prologue of The Wild Hunt that was never included in the novel

Back to the main story:  I trawled the Writers and Artists Yearbook and the Writers' Handbook and plumped for the Blake Friedmann literary Film and TV Agency.  Their brief told me that they dealt with commercial fiction and that they belonged to the Association of Author's Agents - members of whom agreed to abide by certain codes of conduct.  I sent off a letter, a synopsis and the first three chapters of the novel and then settled down to wait because I'd read up enough to know that it could take a couple of months for a reply.  About six weeks later a brown envelope landed on the doormat and I thought, as per usual, it was the return of my manuscript sample.  But when I picked it up, it felt far too light. On opening it, I discovered a letter from agent Carole Blake saying that she had loved what she had read, she would love to represent me and could I send the rest of the manuscript.  Also enclosed was some information about the agency and an acceptance form - should I wish to sign it.  SHOULD I?   Once I'd recovered from the euphoria and shock, I went scrabbling for a pen to sign on the dotted line, and sped off to parcel up the rest of the novel.

The letter Carole Blake sent to me in March 1989 offering to represent me.

Three months later, Carole rang me ( again I was on holiday) to tell me that four publishers were in a bidding war for THE WILD HUNT and it just remained to be seen who won out with the best package.  I arrived home to the news that Michael Joseph, part of the Penguin group were going to publish me in hardcover and that Sphere would publish the paperback.  They'd offered me a two book contract and a deal that meant I could put down my pricing gun and hand in my notice at the Co-op.  Seventeen years after writing my first book and deciding that this was what I wanted to do for a living, I was finally on my way and my 8th novel was about to become my first published one.

While my new agent was busy selling THE WILD HUNT into various different languages, news came through that the novel had won a Betty Trask Award.  These awards, administered by the Society of Authors are for young authors under the age of 35 for a first novel of a romantic or traditional nature.  The reception to present the awards that year was to be held in the banqueting suite at Whitehall and the prizes were to be presented by HRH the Prince of Wales.  It was a somewhat surreal experience to go from filling supermarket shelves with tins of petfood to being presented with a cheque for several thousand pounds by the heir to the throne!

The UK first edition hardcover.  Michael Joseph.

I won't say I have never looked back since then because every career has its ups and down. In the mid 1990's historical fiction hit the doldrums and for a short time  THE WILD HUNT and its associated novels went out of print, However, in the early 2000's, a massive upsurge in the popularity of historical fiction led by the charge of Philippa Gregory's THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, led to renewed interest in my early work and my then editor decided that THE WILD HUNT must be reissued.  I was delighted of course, but insisted that I be allowed to re-edit it with a fresh eye first.  I had many more 'flying hours' under my belt by now and I have always been of the opinion that if one gets the chance to overhaul one's work, then one should.   It's a brilliant opportunity.

The first UK hardcover published by Sphere

THE WILD HUNT has just turned 26 years old, although it seems only yesterday I was writing it while keeping an eye on the dinner and two small children!  It's still in print and still selling steadily. Together with THE RUNNING VIXEN and THE LEOPARD UNLEASHED, its two companions novels,  it's about to celebrate a terrific cover refresh.  A friend looked at the re-jackets and said 'They're gorgeous.  Just like fireworks!' I agree and I do adore the colours.

The Ballantine American paperback

So, I am raising a toast to my first published novel, and extending a huge thank you to the readers who have brought, read and loved my work down the years - keeping me in a job along the way!  I'm also raising a glass to any new readers and hope you enjoy!

The wrong order in the graphic. The Wild Hunt comes first followed by The running Vixen and then The Leopard Unleashed THE WILD HUNT, THE RUNNING VIXEN and THE LEOPARD UNLEASHED are being reiussed with their  wonderful new covers on the 26th of August 2016.

Triplets by Miranda Miller

July 25, 2016, 12:02 am

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   I’ve just become the grandmother of Adam, Felix and Laurence. Twins run in our family but these are the first triplets. It’s still rare - only two hundred a year are born in the UK - and in ancient times it must have seemed miraculous.

   In Greek mythology the three Oneroi, often represented as triplets, were immortals born by parthenogenisis (so much less bother). These three dark winged spirits (daimones) flew out each night like bats from their cave in Erebos, the land of eternal darkness beyond the rising sun. A nightmare was melas oneiros (black dream). As with all myths there are many versions but in most stories Morpheus was their leader, who appeared in the dreams of kings in the guise of a man bearing messages from the gods. Icelos, or Phobetor, was the god of nightmares, generally about animals or monsters, and Phantasos, who appeared in dreams as a woman, was the god of fantastical or prophetic dreams.

   

According to Roman legend, the Horatii, seen here in a painting by David, were triplets who defended Rome against Alba Longa , a rival city in the Alban hills. The two cities decided to settle their dispute with a duel : the Horatii triplets fought against the triplets from Alba Longa, the Curiatii. After two of the Horatii were killed the third brother, Publius Horatius, pretended to flee. When the Curiatii pursued him Horatius turned and attacked them, killing all three.

    Horatius's  sister, Horatia, was overcome with grief because she had been engaged to one of the Curiatii, and she wept when she realised her brother had killed her beloved. At this point the legend becomes decidedly unsympathetic: seeing her tears, Horatius stabbed her, declaiming: "So
perish any Roman woman who mourns the enemy." Horatius was sentenced to die for murdering his sister but successfully appealed to the people to spare his life. Some classicists believe that this story was invented to explain the origin of the Roman tradition by which condemned prisoners could appeal to the public to avoid a death sentence.

   The Yoruba people in Nigeria have the highest rate of twins in the world (three sets of twins in every nineteen births). They attribute this to their consumption of a particular type of yam. In Yoruba religion it is thought that, about two generations after death, every human soul has a chance to return to earth in the body of a newborn, usually within the same family. Twins and triplets have always been considered magical and, in ancient times, the Yoruba used to reject and even sacrifice them but nowadays their birth is celebrated by the whole community and they are brought up less strictly than other children. These triplets are wearing traditional Yoruba clothes.

    In the Yoruba Oyo kingdom there was a tradition that when a couple had triplets, the Oba, or ruler of the town, had to give the newborn babies everything he was adorned with when he was told of their birth. According to the Nigerian Tribune Newspaper Company, in June 2009 the wife of the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi III, gave birth to triplets. Her husband gave her a new car and twelve cows, ten bags of yam flour, twenty-five bags of rice, chickens and fish were lavished on the triplets’ christening feast.

   There’s a very successful Spanish series of children’s books, later adapted as TV cartoons, called The Triplets (Les tres bessones), by Roser Capdevila, whose own triplets were born in 1969. Whenever the three sisters annoy the Bored Witch, the fat 700-year-old witch who is their babysitter, she punishes them by sending them off to have adventures in various famous stories, including Frankenstein and The Phantom of the Opera, but always returns them safely to their own world.

   Lots of scope for bedtime stories there, not to mention the Three Graces, Furies, Mothers, Fates, Bears, Billy Goats Gruff, Little Pigs, Stooges, Musketeers....

Favourite hideaways of mine in Ireland, by Carol Drinkwater

July 25, 2016, 4:01 pm

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 I have just returned from a memorable trip to Ireland - my semi-adopted homeland because I was actually born in London. My recently-departed mother and all her family were born and bred in County Laios, set in the Midlands of Ireland. The farm her parents spent their hardworking lives running is still in the family and belongs now to two of my cousins. They were a struggling, hardworking Catholic family.
Until 1922, when the Irish Free State came into existence and British rule over Ireland was drawing to its bitter close, Laois was known as Queen's County (a nod to British monarchy).
My mother used to recount to me many stories of local Protestants helping the Catholics and vice-versa (lending one another tractors, or a gallon or two of petrol when rationing during the WWII badly hit their agricultural way of life even though Ireland had chosen a neutral position). She told me that the families of the two faiths lived alongside one another in peace. Of course, this wasn't always the case.

Like most counties in Ireland, Laois has its fair share of grand Georgian or Regency properties built by the Protestant British when they were the landlords of the island while the tenants or farm workers were the less privileged Catholics. 

Ballyfin, considered the most lavish Regency house in Ireland, is an example. It was built in the 1820s on the site of previous luxury manor houses, by Sir Charles Coote and his wife Carolyn. It stayed in the Coote family until the 1920s when it was bought by the Patrician Brothers, a Roman Catholic teaching order. At this stage, Ireland was taking back its independence from the British and the brothers ran Ballyfin as a school right through to the twentieth-first century. In 2002, a decline in vocations, less brothers to run the school, forced them to sell the estate on.

Today, after nine years of restoration by its present owners, a couple from Chicago with Irish connections, it has been transformed into a sumptuous five-star hotel, Ballyfin Demesne, set in some 600 acres of manicured gardens. 

If your budget can run to even a cup of tea there - room rates start from around 850 euros a night - it is worth visiting just to get a sense of its splendour and to imbibe the stories and ghosts from its past. If I were to covet any of it with Big House envy, it would be its magnificent conservatory.

                                                           Ballyfin Regency Manor House

The history of Laois reaches back at least 8,000 years, to pre-Neolithic times when tribes of hunters roamed the forests in search of nuts and berries to supplement their diets. There are several sites and monuments that bear witness to the history of this region from Neolithic times to modern days, and it is claimed that Christianity came to Laois even before Saint Patrick arrived there.

I spent two or three days in the neighbourhood paying tribute to my mother, leaving a lock of her hair at my  grandparents' grave to reunite her with her family and the place of her birth.

We stayed in Offaly at Gloster House, a Georgian mansion built for the Lloyd family in the 1720s.

This house, with a 1960s convent stuck onto its rear, was sold to its present owners, Tom and Mary Alexander in 2001. It was a purchase of love, no doubt about it. The nuns who had run the place as a rest home for rich elderly women and a school in the convent addition at the back had, through lack of funds, allowed the property to fall into a very sorry state of disrepair. I know this first hand because my mother and I took the gate lodge in 2005 as a rental and over the years we became friends with the present owners. We have witnessed the painstaking renovations undertaken. Today, Gloster is both a stunning private residence and can be booked for wedding and birthday events. If you are looking for a location for a very special occasion, I cannot recommend Gloster highly enough. 

                                           Gloster House - Photo taken last week by my husband, Michel Noll

Here is a piece I wrote for my website earlier this year. 

http://www.caroldrinkwater.com/introducing-gloster-house-county-offaly-ireland

           A view of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in Laois where I spent many blissful childhood days 

From Laois and Offaly, we turned southwest to the coast, to Bantry Bay, a picturesque stop along the Wild Atlantic Way.

As I write, this year's West Cork Literary Festival is drawing to its close. I was the first event of the 2016 festival. It was held in the library of magnificent Bantry House overlooking Bantry Bay in West Cork, and I am thrilled to say it was a sold-out event. On Tuesday morning I did a smaller event in the tea rooms at Bantry House. Bantry is also a country house I know quite well. My first stay there was, again with my mother, for my first visit to the West Cork Lit Fest. It rained - 'lashed', as we say in Ireland - from the moment we drove into the fishing town till our departure. Again, my event was at the great house. On that occasion we were also staying in the elegant annexe area the Shelswell-White family use for bed and breakfasts. Mrs Brigitte Shelswell-White was so welcoming, lending us two of her Burberry raincoats (bought in charity shops, she assured us) and wellies, showing us into the private areas of the house, that I have been marked by this place, that visit ever since.

Here is a 'snapshot' history of this property: http://www.bantryhouse.com/bantryhouse/visit-2/history/

Egerton-Shelswell-White, Brigitte's late husband, a much-loved patron of the arts in West Cork, was the eight generation of his family to reside at Bantry. Since his death in 2013, one of his children, of which there are six, Sophie, has taken over the responsibility of management of the estate. No mean feat.

The family continues to host events for both the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and the West Cork Literary festival.

Eimear O'Herlihy, Festival Director, (standing) introducing me. To my left (right as you look at the pic) is Elizabeth Rose Murray who hosted my first event. Elizabeth is also a writer and was appearing at the festival later in the week for her own events.

Here is the jacket of THE HUNGER, a historical novel I wrote for adolescents. It is set in Ireland during the 1845-1849 Irish Potato Famine, published by Scholastic Books

My latest, THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER (the novel I was in Bantry to read from and talk about), is a Summer Special on Kindle e-books. A GREAT deal at £1.99

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-Summer-Carol-Drinkwater-ebook/dp/B016JKY3IE/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_img_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CDB7DDQ00XQWABZ4R68R

Or if you prefer to wait, THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER will be published in paperback on 8th September in UK. In Ireland it was published last week

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Textures & textiles of Scottish Artists by Janie Hampton

July 26, 2016, 4:05 pm

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Queen Victoria was brought up reading the novels of Walter Scott and after her first trip to Scotland in 1842, she became besotted with this part of her kingdom, promoting Highland cattle, tartans and bagpipes. On show at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, is a selection of Scottish paintings from the royal collection. I skidded past the misty landscapes that could have been in my great aunt's spare room. The paintings that caught my eye were those dominated by clothes.

The full length portrait of George III (1738-1820) by Alan Ramsay (1713-1784) is a superb example of textile and texture. You can see, and almost feel, the gold brocade jacket and breeches, shiny shoes and smooth white silk stockings of the king's coronation costume. You want to stroke the soft ermine lining the voluminous cloak draped around his shoulders. (How many hundreds of winter stoats (mustela erminea) died to make it?) The 23 year-old king is standing, tall and imposing, on a fabulous Persian carpet, beside soft velvet curtains with golden tassels. His legs appear rather long for his small head, but the point of the portrait was to impress with the sumptuousness of his clothes and textiles. Ramsay made 150 copies of this painting at 80 guineas each (about £150,000 in today's money) for sovereigns, ambassadors and courtiers. He was the first Scot to be made 'King's Painter' and given the title 'Principal Painter in Ordinary'.

Hanging next to him is George's wife, Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) with her two oldest sons. She is depicted as the young, adoring mother of Prince Frederick, later Duke of York, who is sitting on her lap, and Prince George, later George IV, standing at her side. The Duke of York wears a delicious cream silk frock and lace cap. Boys wore 'coats' then until they were 'breeched' at five years old. (Even my uncle, born in 1909, wore frocks until he was five.) Prince George, then about two and half years old, may be in pale blue lace with frills and a satin sash, but he holds a bow to show how manly and fearsome he will become as a king. When she was just seventeen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was chosen as a suitable wife for the king. It took two weeks to travel from her home in Germany to London, and they were married just six hours after their first meeting. Over the next 20 years she had 15 children. But of the 13 who survived to adulthood, only three produced offspring. Their descendants include all the current European royalty, and, illegitimately, the recent British Prime Minister David Cameron. Charlotte founded orphanages, and was patron of 'Queen Charlotte's Lying-in- Hospital' the first ever maternity hospital. She supported the education of women, including her seven daughters. Ramsay’s talent is shown in the elegance, subtlety and exquisite colouring of this painting, in which he combines the grandeur of a royal portrait with the intimacy of a domestic scene.

In the gallery next door, the full length portrait of  Bonnie Prince Charlie Entering the Ballroom at Holyroodhouse, made me yelp with delight. The painting was executed by John Pettie (1834-93) over a hundred years after the prince's death it was exhibited at London's Royal Academy in 1892. It depicts a moment in 1745 just before Prince Charles (1720-88) marched south unsuccessfully to claim the English throne.

The prince emerges from the shadows into the bright light of the ballroom, with silk ribbons and flowers scattered at his feet. In fact the ball at at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, was invented by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Waverley. My yelp was caused not by his elegant legs clothed in striped socks, nor by the exquisite silk waistcoat which reminded me of the mayor's waistcoat in Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester.

Mayor of Gloucester's waistcoat, embroidered by mice.

 It was his kilt that startled me. My family once had a connection with this kilt.  In 1880 my great grandmother, Janie Bruce, died aged 42, leaving 11 children. The six youngest children, including my grandfather Rosslyn, were sent to live in Edinburgh with their great uncle, a bachelor aged 71, called William Forbes Skene. William's father, James Skene, had been Walter Scott's best friend, and William was the first person to write a history of Scotland from the Scots point of view: The Highlanders of Scotland, their Origin, History and Antiquities (1837). Shortly after the arrival of his great nieces and nephews, he was made the Historiographer Royal of Scotland. One day the children were bored and labelled the drawers of an old chest with the names of their dolls. Inside was some old tartan cloth, out of which they made tiny kilts for their dolls, one of whom was a sailor-doll called Gerald. The chest had belonged to Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the old cloth was his kilt. John Pettie and William Skene lived in Edinburgh at the same time and probably knew each other. Did Pettie ever see the real kilt, either before or after its re-cycling?

Prince Charles Edward Stuart tartan, All tartan was banned after the 1745 rebellion and only reinstated in Scotland in 1822,

The paintings in this exhibition were collected between 1750 and 1900 and reflect the distinctive tastes of Georges III, IV and V, and Queen Victoria. All the artists were born in Scotland and the romantic episodes they painted contributed to strengthening Scottish identity.

ScottishArtists 1750-1900.

The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London.

Until Sunday, 9 Oct 2016

www.janiehampton.co.uk

The True Cost of War by Julie Summers

July 27, 2016, 4:30 pm

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I am working on a glorious project about the secret life of houses during the Second World War. It is a fascinating topic and there are some glorious details emerging. However, I do have to remind myself that the war was terrible, destructive, murderous. So today I thought I would concentrate on a question I have spent a great deal of time working on: the true cost of war. I do not mean in the sense of how much it cost the British government to prosecute the Second World War – that figure is recorded as somewhere in the region of £10,000,000 a day. No, I’m interested in the cost of the war in human terms. Not numbers of killed or wounded but the impact it had on their families.

Etaples Military Cemetery, France

Last month I visited Etaples Military Cemetery and was reminded that 10,816 men and women are buried there. It was the cemetery for nearly 20 First World War hospitals. Each of those buried would have had parents and possibly siblings. Some would have been married with children, so the number of people mourning the dead buried at Etaples would be in the tens of thousands. Next year the Commonwealth War Graves Commission will be 100 years old. This remarkable organisation commemorates over 1.7 million men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died in the two world wars. It was set up in May 1917 in response to the outpouring of grief over the slaughter on the battlefields of France, Belgium and further afield on Gallipoli and in Palestine and Greece. Bodies could not be repatriated. That only started in the late 1960s, so men had to be buried where they fell and the Commission’s job over the next decades was oversee the construction of cemeteries and memorials. It now has a presence in 154 countries worldwide. It is through their remarkable determination to remember the war dead and to commemorate them in perpetuity, that has shaped our remembrance services of today. But for the men and women whose sons, daughters, lovers, husbands, brothers, uncles were sucked up into the Forces in 1939 commemoration was the last thing anybody wanted to be thinking about. Every hope was for the safe return of a loved family member or friend.

Clara Milburn, 1940

One of the cruellest notifications a family could receive, short of killed, was Missing in Action. In Jambusters I told the story of diarist Clara Milburn whose son, Alan, was posted as ‘missing’ after Dunkirk. Her diary entries over the summer of 1940 make haunting reading. In June she wrote: ‘How curious this life is. A sort of deep stillness comes over everything from time to time. There is not much traffic on the roads during the week and the village seems empty in the evenings. One misses the young life everywhere, particularly Alan coming in in the early evening.’ A month later there was still no news of her son: ‘Always one is thinking of him, wondering whether he still lives and if so, whether he is well, where he is, what he does all day, what discomforts he is suffering. If… if... And so the days go by.’ At the end of July she heard that he was a prisoner of war and hugged her husband ‘for sheer joy at the good news’. It was not until October that she received a letter from him, a full nine months after she had last spoken to him over the phone. Alan Milburn returned safely but a very changed man.

Dame Barbara Cartland, c. 1941

For Barbara Cartland the news from France was the same as for Clara Milburn. Both her brothers, Ronald and Tony, were fighting with the British Expeditionary Force. Ronald wrote to his mother just before he went into action: ‘This is just to send you my love and bless you always. Don’t be anxious if there is a long silence from me – the fog of war is pretty impenetrable. We shall win in the end, but there’s horror and tribulation ahead of all of us. We can’t avoid it. What a waste it all is, but after months of desolation we shall gain and retain what you and I have always understood the meaning of – freedom.’ Barbara’s mother, Polly, had lost her husband in 1918 and knew full well the horror of the telegram. It came twice over that hot, dry summer of 1940. Both her sons were ‘missing’. In January 1941 came the terrible news that Ronald had been killed in action on 30 May 1940, hit in the head by a German bullet. Barbara wrote: ‘We had gradually been losing hope of hearing that he was alive – now we knew the truth. My mother was wonderful. “Missing” is the cruellest uncertainty of all, as she well knew, for my father had been missing in 1918; and that ghastly waiting, watching, hoping and praying was hers all over again – not twice, but three times, for Tony was still “missing”.’ Tony Cartland had been killed the day before his brother, hit by a shell. For Polly and Barbara Cartland there was no happy ending to their story.

My grandmother, Alex Toosey, with her 3 children 1945

Ronald Cartland described ‘the fog of war’ meaning there was confusion and chaos as indeed there was. And the pressure on families was immense. My grandfather was taken prisoner on Singapore on 15 February 1942 and the first official notice my grandmother received that her husband was alive but a POW was on Christmas Eve of that year, almost 11 months after he had been captured. For her the fog of war was exceptionally thick. Twenty seven per cent of the prisoners of the Japanese died in the camps all over South East Asia. My grandfather came home ‘safely’ in November 1945. He was a changed man as were others who came back from that oft forgotten theatre of war. The families of these men were still counting the cost of war decades later as the emotional fall-out left scars on minds, hearts and bodies. A sombre thought but one worth thinking I feel.

Crime as Entertainment in the 19th century by Anna Mazzola

July 28, 2016, 4:01 pm

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Photo credit: Lou Abercrombie

Our July guest is Anna Mazzola.

Anna lives in Camberwell, London, not far from where the murder at the heart of The Unseeing took place. The Unseeing is Anna's first novel. She is currently working on her second historical crime novel, which is about a collector of folk tales and fairy lore on the Isle of Skye in 1857 who realises that girls are going missing.

Anna studied English at Pembroke College, Oxford, before becoming a criminal justice solicitor. She divides her time between writing, reading, lawyering, and child-wrangling. 
http://annamazzola.com
 
A Dark and Dreadful Interest: Crime as Entertainment in the 19th century

We often think of the Victorians as a moralistic and upright bunch, and of the 19th century as a time when things became more civilized. After all, over the course of the century, violent sports were mostly outlawed, the Bloody Code was dismantled, and capital punishment was hidden from public view. Yet it was also the era in which crime reporting and murder as entertainment flourished. While researching for my début novel, The Unseeing, I discovered that our current fixation with true crime is nothing compared with what Dickens referred to as the Victorians’ ‘dark and dreadful interest’ in murderers and their punishment.

The Making of Murderers

Since the late 17th century, the Ordinaries of Newgate prison had been making a tidy profit from publishing the ‘confessions’ of condemned prisoners. However, the Ordinaries lost their monopoly when, in 1773, the keeper of Newgate began publishing the Newgate Calendar: ‘interesting memoirs of the most notorious characters who have been convicted of outrages on the laws.’

Sales, however, were still fairly small. It was with the expansion of the press in the early 19th century (aided by increasing literacy and the lowering and later abolition of stamp duty) that things really kicked off. As Judith Flanders explains in ‘The Invention of Murder’, several early cases were key in establishing the whole industry of death. John Thurtell, who in 1823 bludgeoned William Weare to death, became the subject of the first ‘trial by newspaper’. William Catnatch printed 500,000 copies of an account of the trial, the story was the lead item in the London Chronicle, Times, Morning Herald and Observer, two melodramas were written for London theatres (one before the case had even been tried), tourists arrived in droves for a tour of the murder scene, and balladeers made a killing selling songs based on the crime. 40,000 people turned out to see Thurtell executed, and the marketing of his story continued long after his death, as did his influence on the press.

The same grisly pattern was followed in the later cases of Maria Marten and the Red Barn (where Marten was murdered by William Corder), Burke and Hare (who sold the corpses of their 16 victims to an Edinburgh doctor for his anatomy lectures), and the Edgware Road murder: the crime for which James Greenacre and Sarah Gale were convicted, and the case on which The Unseeing is based.
Crime news was now prime news.

Broadsides and Penny Bloods

More affordable than newspapers were murder broadsides – printed sheets with an account of the crime, a woodcut illustration of the murder or execution, and often a lamentation. At the 1849 execution of Maria and Frederick Manning for the murder of her lover, 2.5 million broadsides were sold. However, sales for James Greenacre broadsides were slower. A street seller explained to Henry Mayhew that this was because Greenacre’s execution came close after Pegsworth’s (who had murdered a draper) and ‘that took the beauty off him. Two murderers together is no good to nobody'.

Cheap weekly papers were also being established and there was a booming industry in ‘Penny Bloods’ that originally concentrated on highwaymen and evil aristocrats, but later on true crimes, especially murders. And if there were no decent real-life crimes to draw upon, the penny bloods invented them. The most successful of all was a penny blood entitled The String of Pearls, which began publication in 1846. We know it now as Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber.

 

The Blood-Stained Stage

It was not just the printing presses that ran on blood. Theatres (in particular, The Surrey and the Coburg) thrived on crime-based melodramas, to the extent that a commentator in 1840 noted of a Stepney theatre that, ‘the Newgate calendar and tales of terror stand in the same place as Homer did to the ancient dramatists.’

As Rosalind Crone explains in ‘Violent Victorians’, a host of bloody entertainments and representations saturated Victorian culture from the 1820s to the 1870s, including deeply violent Punch and Judy shows, and murderous peepshows: people would peer through the viewing-hole of a small box to see a painted murder scene in which the characters were pulled up and down by strings. The story of Maria Marten became a touring staple.

And then there was the greatest show of all: the gallows. Until 1868, felons were hanged outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol and outside the debtor’s door at Newgate prison, attracting enormous and excitable crowds of men, women and children. A huge number came to the hanging of James Greenacre, over a thousand waiting overnight outside Newgate to secure a place in the morning. Pie-men made their way through the throng selling Greenacre tarts while ballad-singers hawked the confession of the murderer: a fun day out for the whole family.

Scaffold Culture

If you couldn’t make it to the gallows, you could visit a moving waxworks display, many of which included relics of murderers or victims collected at the scenes of crime. Such shows ranged from the ‘respectable’ Madame Tussaud’s and her Separate Room (later the Chamber of Horrors) to itinerant waxworks displays, which travelled about between fairs.

You might also be able to purchase a memento: a splinter of wood from the Red Barn where William Corder killed Maria Marten, or perhaps a piece of the hedge through which her body had been dragged. Staffordshire pottery figurines of murderers and their victims were also available. Murderer John Thurtell’s face was crafted onto the side of mugs; the Red Barn murder was immortalised in figurines of Marten, Corder and also quaint models of the barn itself.

Also extremely popular were tours of the scene of the crime. After the murder of Hannah Brown, James Greenacre’s landlord gave guided tours of his house in Camberwell. These proved so popular that the police had to be brought in to stop visitors removing relics of the crime – tables, chairs, even the door.

The Common Attribute of Every Age

No such tours operate today, of course, but numerous guided walks continue to celebrate the most famous of Victorian murderers: Jack the Ripper. Our continuing fascination for violence and murder manifests itself in different ways: in the success of shows such as Serial, The Jinx and Making a Murderer, and in the prominence given to murders by the media. Rightly or wrongly, we continue to be enthralled by human tragedy – by what drives people to commit dreadful crimes, by what happens to the victims. ‘This appetite of the mind for particulars of great crimes and criminals has been stigmatized as vulgar,’ said the Daily Telegraph in 1881. ‘It is only vulgar in so far as it is universal, the common attribute of every age, people and clime.’

Anna Mazzola’s debut novel, The Unseeing, set in London in 1837, is now out from Tinder Press (Headline).

http://annamazzola.com/the-unseeing/

https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

https://www.facebook.com/AnnaMazzolaWriter/

https://www.instagram.com/annamazzolawriter/

Cabinet of Curiosities by Katherine Webb

July 29, 2016, 4:30 pm

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My first ever offering to the Cabinet of Curiosities are these very plain, rather dented pewter jugs:

The largest stands at 10cm tall, the smallest at a mere 6cm; or, more importantly, stamped onto the handles are the volumes they hold: 1 deciliter, 1/2 deciliter and 2 centiliter. Any guesses as to what they were for?

I bought these jugs in Italy while I was there researching The Night Falling a few years ago, from an old lady in the town of Gioia del Colle in the far south of the country. I had just been to look around a wonderful private museum called the Museo Della Civilta' Contadina - or Museum of Rural Life. This vast, private collection has been put together and is run by a man called Vito Santoiemma, and fills several huge warehouses in what used to be the family's sawmill in the town. It holds an astonishing array of objects related to every aspect of rural life in that part of Italy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I got lost in it for hours.

Inside the museum. The jars on the floor with the wooden lids are called prisor, and are what most families would have had as their only toilet. It had to be carried out and emptied daily, into a slops barrel which was then dragged out of town and used to fertilise the fields. Disease, unsurprisingly, was rife.

At the end of my visit, I asked if there was any small thing I could buy to take back with me, and was told that an old lady (I never did get her name!) might have something to sell. These jugs appeared, and I was asked how much I was willing to pay for them - always a tricky question when you have absolutely no idea of an item's worth - both materially and to the person selling it! She seemed both delighted and bemused by my offer of Euro20, and so I had a piece of history to bring home with me.

The smallest jug, with 2 centiliter stamped onto the handle.

I've written before about the shocking living conditions experienced by the vast majority of people in Southern Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. A few wealthy, often absent, landlords owned all the land and all the housing, and the peasants - some 80% of the rest of the population - had no means to live but to pay for the rent on tiny, inadequate apartments by selling their labour in the fields for a daily rate. They were exhausted, hungry, angry, and powerless, and when they rose up in 1921 and 1922, in a broadly socialist movement, they were crushed again by the rise of fascism.

The milkman's bicycle in Vito Santoiemma's museum, and other dairy-related items.

My jugs date from the years immediately after this, after Mussolini came to power in 1922. These jugs were given out as part of a new system of rationing intended to alleviate the problem of the poor simply starving to death in years of drought and bad harvest - and also to conserve produce that was desperately scarce all over Italy after the First World War. It seems impossible to imagine Italy being short of olive oil, but that is what the jugs were for - the rationing of olive oil. How many calories does the 2 centiliter jug represent? I estimate maybe about 100. I don't know how many people that was supposed to feed, but I do know that this was a weekly ration, not a daily one. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of women selling their bodies to corrupt officials for an increase in the ration for their family.

So perhaps my piece of portable history is a bit dark in nature, and links directly back to dire times for one particular family. But there is always something so emotive and powerful about actually holding an object from a time that has now passed out of reach, and I kept the jugs on the shelf by my desk as I wrote my novel.

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July competition

July 30, 2016, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: Will's Last Testament by Mary Hoffman

≪ Previous: Cabinet of Curiosities by Katherine Webb

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 A slightly different competition this month!


Anna Mazzola's post on 29th July lists different kinds of crime souvenir that Victorians collected (mugs, figurines, pieces of the hangman's rope). Tweet or Facebook message her a picture of another piece of historical murderabilia to be in with a chance of winning a copy of The Unseeing.

@anna_mazz
https://www.facebook.com/AnnaMazzolaWriter
 

Closing date 7th August

Our competitions are open to UK Followers only

Will's Last Testament by Mary Hoffman

July 31, 2016, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: History belongs in all fiction (Canberra's history, part one) by Gillian Polack

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When I heard that Shakespeare's will was going to be on display in Stratford-upon-Avon - less than an hour's drive from where I live - I felt I had to go and see it. Containing three of Shakespeare's known signatures (of which more below) and the bequest to his wife of his "second-best bed," this must surely be one of the most famous last testaments in the literary world.

It is normally housed in the National Archives, where fascinating restoration work has been undertaken, but was on display earlier this year in London and now, briefly, in a special exhibition yards away from where the poet is believed to have been born, at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford.

This is what one page of the will looked like before restoration:

New research at the National archives has established that page two remains from an earlier draft and that pages one and three are the ones drafted in January and amended and dated March 25th 1616, about a month before Shakespeare's death.

Just to recap and remind readers, in 1613 Shakespeare bought the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London and by 1616 was a substantial man of property. At the time of his death, he was living in New Place, bought in 1597 (around the time he was writing Henry lV, part two) and moved into in 1610 (when perhaps Cymbeline was written).

The plot sits on the corner of Chapel Street and Church Street:

At the time he bought it, it was the second-largest house in town and had been built about a hundred years earlier by Hugh Clopton. It had two gardens and two orchards and was also known locally as The Great House. Here is a sketch of it made in the 18th century, with the front door opening on to Chapel Street:

In his will, Shakespeare left this and other property to his first child, Susanna, who married Dr John Hall, eight years older than her, in 1607. Their only child, Elizabeth Hall, married Thomas Nash, whose house was next to her grandfather's property:

That house still stand but, alas, New Place does not. Although Elizabeth Hall inherited New Place, by that time her first husband was dead and she had re-married and never lived there. In the 18th century it belonged to an irascible-sounding vicar, The Reverend Francis Gastrell, who was so incensed by sightseers and Bardolaters trespassing in his gardens that he first cut down the mulberry tree Shakespeare was believed to have planted and finally, in 1759, demolished the house itself!

Back to Will's will. Susanna wasn't his only child: there were the twins Judith and Hamnet, born in 1585 and probably named after a couple of friends, surnamed Sadler (Hamnet Sadler, a witness, is left money in the will to buy a memorial ring). The Sadlers might have been the twins' Godparents and if so, must have shared in the parents' grief when eleven-year-old Hamnet died in 1586, the year before the purchase of New Place.

But Judith survived and married Thomas Quiney not long before her father's death. It was discovered that Quiney had made another woman pregnant, which perhaps made him a less favoured son-in-law than reliable John Hall. At any rate, Judith's bequest was £300, the second half dependent on her husband settling on her land of the same value.

The will was drawn up by Francis Collins, a local lawyer, and uses typical legal language of the time. (Collins was left £13.6s.8d). Shakespeare left his sword to Thomas Combe and money to other male friends to buy rings, including Hemynges and Condell, who published the First Folio of the plays in 1623, and Richard Burbage, who bodied forth so many of poet's great characters.

The will is signed on every page. Here are the three signatures in order:

I am no handwriting expert and it may be fanciful to detect a wobble in the writing and a firmer effort for the final, legitimising autograph. Not that I could see it so clearly on the actual exhibited will. They are spelled respectively William Shakspere, Willm Shakspere and William Shakspeare, none of the versions the one we use today. But the standard version is how his signature was printed in editions of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece in his lifetime.

I've been a regular visitor to Stratford since we moved here fifteen years ago but this was only the second time when we were not there to see a play. So we decided to see some of the other sites and went to the Birthplace Trust.

Creative Commons

I had been rather snooty in advance about the so-called birthplace, expecting a Disneyfied sort of Ye Olde Englishe approximation.  But I was pleasantly surprised. Although only "probably" where Shakespeare was born, in the house owned by John Shakespeare, alderman and glover, it looks convincing enough:

The Birthplace as seen from the garden

The entrance is actually through the cottage of Joan Hart, Shakespeare's sister, whose will allows her to remain in that house at a nominal rent, during her lifetime.

On the ground floor of the house, with a window on to Henley Street, is the workshop where John Shakespeare made his gloves. Upstairs, there is a bedroom where all eight Shakespeare children, four boys and four girls, are supposed to have been born. William was the third child and first son. Both his older sisters died before his birth in 1564.

The Birthplace Trust has a very good bookshop, where I was pleased to find Shakespeare's Ghost. I knew they liked it and were going to stock it but it was still good to see it there.

Nash's House, next to New Place, also contains a bookshop and will house an exhibition but sadly New Place was still behind builders' hoardings. It should have opened on 1st July but torrential rain has held up the work. We'll just have to go back again as tourists rather than playgoers.

Signatures: Creative Commons
Will: The National Archives
All other photos the author's own

History belongs in all fiction (Canberra's history, part one) by Gillian Polack

August 1, 2016, 7:29 pm

≫ Next: The beauty of Bunyan, by Vanora Bennett

≪ Previous: Will's Last Testament by Mary Hoffman

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This month I asked readers what they’d like me to write about. I was given half a dozen good suggestions, and a couple of silly ones. 

The suggestion that stuck with me was to write about the history of where I live, which is Canberra, Australia. When I was catching a bus last week I saw my local lake from the bus and realised that I’d seen that view in the Canberra Museum and Canberra. I’ve seen a nineteenth century painting of it (with sheep, for it was a sheep station at that moment in its long life) and a twentieth century painting (also with sheep) and any number of photographs (with cars and a highway replacing the sheep). I’ve not seen any pictures of it that show it before European settlement. 

Picture courtesy NLA

I’ve had this thought before: it’s the view that got me thinking about how we brought European culture to this region and laid it over an existing landscape, which was what I explored in The Time of the Ghosts. We replaced some of the kangaroos with sheep and pretended we were part of Europe. History slips into all novels, one way or another, and in the case of The Time of the Ghosts it did a lot more than slip in. 

The changes European settlers made to the landscape inspired me to think about the way we interpret landscape and live on the land. The psychic tensions in that novel reflect the very real unhappiness we’ve carried with us to this country. Fears have to be faced, not just carried like baggage. The sheep help explain that, too, for their sharp hooves are tough on the fragile local ecosystem.

St Andrews, Canberra 1934, picture courtesy St Andrews

I didn’t tell myself “I’m writing about the history of the city I live in” because I didn’t see it that way. Not even when I added the local story about the bushranger’s hoard. History is with us in our novels, however, whether we realise it or not. Historical fiction admits this directly. 

My fiction only sometimes says directly “This has history in it.” It always contains history, however. Every single piece of fiction I’ve ever written contains history in one way or another. 

History always informs our fiction, whether we want it to or not. Some novelists deny having pasts, but those pasts are always there. History informs mine more than most, because when I’m not a writer and analysing various things, I’m a historian. I can’t imagine the world without history. I can’t imagine stories without history. This means, of course, that I can’t imagine where I live without having many thoughts and views about its history.

My forthcoming novel (The Wizardry of Jewish Women) is the last of the series with such strong Canberra links and you can see recent history a little more clearly because of this and because it’s written from an outside vantage point, being set mostly in Sydney. It traces a year (or thereabouts) in the life of a family. I used real events for a great deal of it. Those events ranged from bushfires to meetings inside Parliament House. I was using real events with intent. History in this novel is a grounding factor. It’s the firm foundation from which the reader can enjoy the magic and the special powers that some of the characters possess. Because the bushfire actually occurred and really did burn down a whole region of our city, seeing just how far magical protection can help someone in the story gives the reader a sense of the limits of magic in this world that’s not quite ours.

Canberra bushfire, picture L Rose

So many writers find something that works as grounding for their fiction. For some people it’s the quirks of everyday life. For others it’s clothes and manners. For me, in my contemporary novels, it’s history. 

It’s so easy to remember those paintings and to envisage the difference between the nineteenth century station and the twentieth century fields with a burgeoning city in the background and then the city overtaking the sheep and transforming them into cars and houses. Because it’s easy to see, it’s easy to write about.

Two weeks ago I gave a workshop on world building for writers. I talked about discovering the geology that creates the landscape, because it’s exceptionally useful in grounding the story and in getting details right. The sheep were brought to Canberra because the farming land was mostly poor thin soil. The ancient rocks brought this poor thin soil into existence. But they also count for the shape of that slope I looked at from the bus: even when the sheep are gone, the land is there. It’s the foundation of the world of the story. 

Landscapes over time are terribly important to understand how people live in a place and interact with it. It’s the foundation of all our stories, whether we realise this or not. Once we know a place, we can tell its stories. And now that you know where I’m coming from, I can tell you stories of Canberra. Not every month, but now and again, when something strikes me as interesting.

I’ll leave you with a vignette, just to whet the appetite. 

The reason the Australian Labor Party has US spelling for its name is because one of its founders was American (or from Canada – it’s not entirely clear). King O’Malley was a famous teetotaller. One of my favourite pubs is named after him. I live in a city that has a pub named after a teetotaller politician from over a hundred years ago. This suggests that Canberra is not entirely the dull national capital it appears from outside. 

Our history helps dig beneath that surface and to the bedrock of the city. I look forward to introducing you to it.

The beauty of Bunyan, by Vanora Bennett

August 3, 2016, 5:18 am

≫ Next: Thunder Powder, Phantasmagoria, and Artificial Asses' Milk - by Katherine Langrish

≪ Previous: History belongs in all fiction (Canberra's history, part one) by Gillian Polack

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I used to think it must be a twee little book, the Pilgrim’s Progress, because the four sisters in Little Women read the famous Christian allegory so assiduously on Sundays and it seemed to be full of the kind of religious goodness that I figured any red-blooded child must (at least secretly) find boring.

It was written by John Bunyan and published in 1676. It made him famous. It was pretty much the only book apart from the Bible that children in Victorian days were allowed to read on a Sunday.

We don’t know it half so well these days, but since Bunyan is remembered in the Church with a minor feast day in August, and since I have been thinking since That Referendum about cussed free-thinkers through history who have come out and surprised the powers that be with their ideas, sometimes changing the course of history, I have dipped into my granny’s copy, which may have been her granny’s too, since it was published in 1861, in Bunyan’s honour.

Bunyan, it turned out, had a colourful life. He was a tinker and a soldier, born in Bedford, whose wife introduced him to freethinking religious ideas and an austere sect in which he could do penance for his past sins – dancing, and helping as a ringer in the parish church belfry, and playing tipcat on Sunday. He started preaching, but came a cropper after the Reformation, when tolerance for freethinking went down to near zero, and he was packed into jail for more than 12 years for his nonconformist ideas. He wrote the Pilgrim’s Progress – “from this world to that which is to come” while in jail though it was only published after his release, as religious dissent became more tolerated. He spent his last years continuing to preach and was known affectionately as Bishop Bunyan.

Here is what the newspaper cutting my grandmother left in her handsome leather-bound Rutledge copy of the book in 1938 says about it.

“It is probable that the average modern reader does not know ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ as did his forefathers, who made acquaintance with it almost before they had left the nursery. In the Victorian era it was among the most popular of ‘juvenile gift-books.’ Benevolent uncles and aunts played for safety when they chose this as their present; the most censorious parents could not object to it; it was indeed among the very few story books which might be opened on Sundays. The children loved it for its thrills and for the vigorous illustrations which usually adorned it. Bunyan’s theology did not interest them. But Christian seemed a delightful kind of sabbatical Jack-the-giant-killer, and the Pictor of Apollyon as he ‘straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way’ was one to haunt the memory.  Then in later years, when they could better appreciate its greatness, they returned to Bunyan’s masterpiece as to an old friend. It appeals still to every one who prizes our English speech, and it has brought solace and delight to millions of simple readers.

“What is the secret of its power? This English classic is the work of an uneducated man, the ‘little schooling’ he received being, as he confesses, ‘almost totally forgotten’ soon afterwards. His handwriting is an illiterate scrawl and his manuscripts had to be drastically edited before a printer could deal with them. Again, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ did not gain its success by any striking novelty of theme. The idea of human life as a pilgrimage, suggested in the New Testament, had been developed by many allegorists; one such book had appeared not long before Bunyan’s. 

Yet there was a clear point of difference. In all the other allegories of pilgrimage the characters were merely conventional puppets of virtue or vice; in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ they were most real men and women. Bunyan had seen and known them all, and draws their portraits with astonishing deftness, with the most engaging blend of kindliness and satire. They have their counterparts in every age. We still meet Mr Byends, disdaining those who ‘are for holding their notions though all other men are against them; but I am for Religion in what, and so far as, the times and my safety will bear it’; and Mr Facing-both-ways, and the young woman whose name is Dull, and the heroic Mr Greatheart, whom we could ill spare today. Beyond question, it is this company of living people met by Christian and Christiana on their journeys that give Bunyan’s work its vitality and perennial charm, together with the magic of his style, felt by all those who value English prose.”

This certainly makes me want to know more. The pictures in the edition on my lap are robust, lively etchings of solid, rambunctious English people, too – real-looking people you can imagine with forthright opinions and a bit of a sense of humour. It seems perfect reading for understanding a bit more about how the underbelly of history worked, where ideas come from, and how they survive, grow and finally die, maybe only centuries later. Who knows, there may even be a clue for me about the strong currents and cross-currents of thought in our country today. What's certain, though, is that even if twee goodness might be boring to the red-blooded reader, goodness born of sin, stubbornness, dancing, bell-ringing, tinkering and soldiering sounds altogether more fun. No wonder the Little Women enjoyed it so. It’s going to be top of my reading list for this summer too.

Vanora’s website

Thunder Powder, Phantasmagoria, and Artificial Asses' Milk - by Katherine Langrish

August 3, 2016, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: An Addictive Resource - Joan Lennon

≪ Previous: The beauty of Bunyan, by Vanora Bennett

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This book has been in our family for a very long time; I remember opening it as a teenager and laughing over some of the contents with my mother, in whose bookcases I recently rediscovered it.  Published in this ‘improved’ edition in 1837, it is a compendium of all sorts of useful information and tips for every imaginable kind of domestic circumstance or emergency.  Do you wish to ‘increase the durability of tiles’? Prevent fishing lines from rotting?  Purify wool infested with insects?  Do you wish to ‘write both blue and red letters at once with the same ink and pen and upon the same paper’?  Do you wish to cure boils, burns, nosebleed, the hiccough, gout, gravel or jaundice?  How about advice on how to prevent accidents from leaving a poker in the fire (weld a small iron crosspiece to the end of the poker, so that it will catch on the fender, should it slip out) – or on how to ‘make Transparent Screens for the Exhibition of the Phantasmagoria’? 

Our ancestors lived dangerously, it seems. In 1837, Charlotte Bronte was nineteen. Much wonder has been expressed that she and her sisters in their quiet, remote parsonage, should have been able to construct such passionate and dramatic imaginative worlds.  All right: but this little book, if they had possessed it, would have encouraged them to attempt amusements such as these:

Thunder Powder

Take separately three parts of good dry saltpetre, two parts of dry salt of tartar and pound them well together in a mortar; then add thereto one part, or rather more, of flower of brimstone ... put this composition into a bottle with a glass stopper, for use.

Put about two drachms of this mixture in an iron spoon, over a moderate fire, but not in the flame; in a short time it will melt and go off with an explosion like thunder or a loaded cannon. 

Such fun!  Or Charlotte, Emily and Anne could have written their books with:

The Phosphoric Pencil 

Is a small bit of phosphorus, put into a quill, and kept in a phial, in water; when you write, dip your pencil often in the water, to prevent its taking fire. 

It was possible also to make your own matches by ‘mixing one part of flower of sulphur with eight of phosphorus’: the author warns however:

This requires caution, and should afterwards be handled with great care, lest any part of the mixture get under the finger nails, a small portion of which might occasion great inconvenience. When used to procure a light, a very minute quantity is taken out of the bottle on the point of a match, and rubbed upon cork or wood, which produces an immediate flame.

Conditions in homes may be guessed at by entries such as these: “A mouse trap, by which forty or fifty mice may be caught in a night’ (a see-saw placed at the edge of the dresser, baited with butter and oatmeal, which tips them into a bucket full of water where they drown). A receipt ‘To destroy Bugs’ is also illuminating:

The risk of bugs in a big city is inevitable; the clothes-boxes of servants, the going to a public place of in a public carriage, or the insect being blown against the apparel while walking the streets, may introduce it into the house. But to cleanly people, whose beds are examined, and the joints oiled with pure sweet oil three or four times a year, they cannot become troublesome; except what no person can guard against ... a filthy, though perhaps very fine predecessor, who has permitted the animal to entrench itself in the walls and the ceiling. 

The only solution then is to seal up the fireplace, windows and doors, and fumigate the rooms with ‘vitriolic acid gas’...

Do you wish to make artificial Asses’ Milk?  Then take: 

Two ounces of pearl barley, two ounces of hartshorn shavings, three ounces of Eringo root candied, nine garden snails; boil these in six quarts of spring water till it comes to three; put two spoonsful of cow’s milk into half a pint of the above, and drink it lukewarm about half an hour before you rise in the morning. 

NB – You may leave out the snails if you do not like them, but it is best to use them.

Were you, like me, hoping all through this recipe that the Artificial Asses’ Milk was going to be used as a toilet water, rather than as something to drink?  I love the footnote. 

‘For improving coffee’ – ‘To discover vitriol in Beer’ – ‘To discover if bread is adulterated with alum’ – ‘To cure smoky chimneys’ – ‘To preserve meat by treacle’ – this enchanting book goes on and on. I shall share some more with you another time, but will leave you for the moment with this:

Vulgar Error respecting the putting of Spirits into Boots and Shoes to prevent the Effects of Cold

The custom of pouring brandy into the boots or shoes, when the feet have got wet, with a view to prevent the effects of cold, is a practice which (though very common) is founded in prejudice and misconception, and often proves fatal, by bringing on an inflammation and consequent obstruction of the bowels.