emma_in_dream

I reread Mrs Musgrave's *A Little Hero* (1887). I own it because my grandfather won it a a Sunday school prize in 1933 at Kangaroo Gully.

It's a slight story. The hero leaves India as a child as the climate is not good for his health; he stays with relatives and is falsely believed to have broken his word not to go boating; the truth is discovered - it was really his cousin; his mother comes back and dies in his arms; as an adult he becomes a soldier.
It belongs to that school of children's literature that assumes that the sun will never set on the empire.
But about the author I can find nothing.

Mrs Musgrave has no wiki. A google search does not find her. She is not in the Oxford Companion to English Literature or the Feminist Companion to Literature. She is unknown to the Guide to Children's Literature. (I keep these readily to hand).

Even Amazon does her the disservice of having a review for a different novel attached to her work.

Aside from her initial (H) and the fact that she wrote some other novels. She was published by Blackie who imprinted in London. This was typical of Australian books until after the war. Even Australian authors sent the ms to the UK to be printed and sent back.

Topically, with the Black Lives Matter movement, I read Ernest Giles *Australian Twice Traversed* (1889) about his journeys through central Australia in 1872 and 1874.


Giles compiled the book from his records of his explorations of what is now South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, often entering as the first white person. He travelled with white companions, Aboriginal guides and sometimes cameleers.


The book has an odd twee tone. He puts in numerous unattributed quotes, amidst his discussions of wandering in a waterless void while his horses die and his companions suffer. He seems to have been completely unable to have a genuine emotional response to his life, just presenting a stiff upper lip.


He generally presents the indigenous population as an inevitable danger to explorers, much like the heat, the lack of water and the native animals. However, he does sometimes acknowledge that maybe there were reasons why he was not greeted with open arms by the people already living there.


'I knew as soon as I arrived in this region that it must be well if not densely populated, for it is next to impossible in Australia for an explorer to discover excellent and well watered regions without coming into deadly conflict with the aboriginal inhabitants. The aborigines are always the aggressors [sic], but then the white man is a trespasser in the first instance, which is a cause sufficient...'

Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) has some odd sexual undercurrents. It is a largely male world, with occasional appearances by old women as nurses, sweet sellers and matrons. However, all those youthful spirits had to go somewhere.

There was a certain category of boys at the school who were deemed inferior and/because they were feminised. As Hughes put it, boys who were ‘always getting laughed at, and called Molly, or Jenny, or some derogatory feminine nickname.’

At one point Tom and his pal East had a confrontation with a peer who had been sent to round up fags for a sixth former.

‘He was one of the miserable little pretty white-handed, curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language, and did all they could to spoil them for everything * in this world and the next.’

I am fascinated that Hughes included a footnote here to comment that the fagging system was not necessarily bad but that he felt he had to include this obscure description of the moral hazards.


‘* A kind and wise critic, an old Rugboean, notes here in the margin: “The small friend system was not so utterly bad from 1841-1847.” Before that, too, there were many noble friendships between big and little boys; but I can't strike out the passage. Many boys will know why it is left in.’

I know I have a dirty old post-twentieth century mind, but can this be read as anything other than an oblique reference to homosexuality here? One that Hughes is assuming that ‘many boys will know why it is left in’.

I could compare this with the written description provided by a near contemporary. AJ Symonds wrote a description of his time at Harrow in 1854 (ie three years before Tom Brown’s Schooldays* was published, but left the manuscript at London Library with conditions preventing it being quoted or even paraphrased until 1977. He described his time at Harrow thus:

‘Every boy of good looks had a female name and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s bitch. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to another. The talk in the studies and dormitories was incredibly obscene. One could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, and the sport of naked boys in bed together.’

Tom, of course, is above this sort of thing – though it does cast a different light on the way he and East were tortured by older boys for refusing to fag for them, chased through the dormitories, barricading themselves in their studies, being aware that some boys would be taken for bullying each night out of the dormitories, and, of course, Tom having his buttocks pressed against the fire by Flashman.

And this also leads back to Arthur. Before meeting him, Brown worried that he might be the type of boy likely to be called by girl’s names; after meeting him, Brown is too enchanted to care. Brown calls him by the nickname Geordie or Young Un, and worries over him like a hen with one chick (as another boy observes).

Brown gets into his only serious fight at the school when defending Arthur’s honour, after another boy snickers at Arthur being moved to tears by Homer. Arthur cannot bring himself to watch the terrible violence, but instead walks up at down in the close waiting for word of the outcome of the battle.

The emotional climax of the book is when Arthur is ill and expected to die. Brown is not allowed into the sick room and instead lies awake reading the Bible. Surprisingly, Arthur does survive and Brown is reunited with him. Arthur speaks to him seriously about death and faith and Brown repents and agrees to never again use copybooks to assist in his Latin translation. This is a rather anticlimactic epiphany, but still, read the purple prose….

‘Arthur was lying on the sofa by the open window, through which the rays of the western sun stole gently, lighting up his white face and golden hair. Tom remembered a German picture of an angel which he knew; often he had thought how transparent and golden and spiritlike it was; and he shuddered to think how like it Arthur looked, and felt a shock as if his blood had all stopped short as he realized how near the other world his friend must have been to look like that. Never till that moment had he felt how his little chum had twined himself round his heart-strings; and as he stole gently across the room and knelt down, and put his arm round Arthur's head on the pillow, he felt ashamed and half angry at his own red and brown face and the bounding sense of health and power which filled every fibre of his body and made every movement of mere living a joy to him.

He needn't have troubled himself; it was this very strength and power so different from his own which drew Arthur so to him. Arthur laid his thin, white hand, on which the blue veins stood out so plainly, on Tom's great, brown fist, and smiled at him; and then looked out of the window again…’

Hughes perhaps realises he has gone slightly too far because he then introduces Arthur’s mother (come to nurse him) and has Tom fixate on her. Tom immediately wonders if Arthur has a sister he can marry, which does not perhaps resolve the homosocial desire quite as well as Hughes thought it did.

The penultimate glimpse is of Brown as captain of the cricket team, watching the play on a perfect day, while Arthur kneels at his side.

‘[Here he is], in white flannel shirt and trousers, straw hat, the captain's belt, and the untanned, yellow cricket shoes which all the eleven wear, sits a strapping figure near six feet high, with ruddy, tanned face and whiskers, curly brown hair, and a laughing, dancing eye… It is Tom Brown, grown into a young man nineteen years old, a præpostor [prefect] and captain of the eleven, spending his last day as a Rugby boy, and let us hope as much wiser as he is bigger since we last had the pleasure of coming across him.

And at [his] feet on the warm, dry ground, similarly dressed, sits Arthur, Turkish fashion, with his bat across his knees. He, too, is no longer a boy, less of a boy in fact than Tom, if one may judge from the thoughtfulness of his face, which is somewhat paler, too, than one could wish; but his figure, though slight, is well knit and active, and all his old timidity has disappeared, and is replaced by silent, quaint fun, with which his face twinkles all over as he listens to [Tom].’

That is one romantic picture.

Caroline Norton, The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of 'Custody of Infants' Considered, 1838

This little pamphlet was produced to encourage the passing of legislation to allow women to have access to their children in the event of separation from the father. Under the law that existed until the time of this debate, women who were separated from their husbands had no right to visit the children if their husbands did not agree. The father had sole custody and could make decisions about whether the mother was allowed to even see the child.

This is what happened to Caroline Norton. She was a dashing young woman, a wit, a poet and a penniless grand-daughter of Sheridan. She married a guy who turned out to be a drip, and was named as possibly having a liaison with Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister. After a very public court case, it was found that there was no evidence of her wrong-doing. Nonetheless her husband cast her out without a penny and then denied her access to her children for the remainder of their childhoods.

Married women were subsumed into their husband’s identities. Married women could not own property, control money they earned, enter into contracts, go to the courts in civil cases or have custody of children. They were subject to coverture, literally ‘covered’ by their husband’s legal identity. In Caroline Norton’s case this meant that her husband had no obligation to support her but that anything she earned was legally his property. She left the house and came back to find the doors barred against her – from then on she spent only hours with her children (all aged under ten) until the two who survived to adulthood returned to her company.

I’d like to say her story had a happy ending. It almost did – After her husband finally died she remarried, but then died 14 weeks later.

However, she did produce a large quantity of popular Victorian poetry and a few leaflets dealing with the pivotal issue of her life – access to children. I am happy to say that changes to the law were made in 1839 that allowed contact between mothers and children. This was part of the gradual disentangling of married women from their husbands in the 19th century, with later acts vastly improving the status of married women.

As she wrote in this snappy pamphlet, the key issue was ‘the general feature of all the laws respecting women (namely, the non-admission of their separate legal existence when married)’. Her husband was a magistrate (a job she got for him through her connections and that he did not give up despite it being the gift of Melbourne) but not capable of batting in this league.

Norton was careful not to claim too much or to personalise the debate. Indeed, the pamphlet was originally released anonymously. She kowtowed appropriately to the rule of the fathers. ‘Doubtless the claim of a father is sacred and indisputable…’

You can feel the but coming; she continued: ‘ but when the mother's claim clashes with it, surely something should be accorded to her. There are other laws besides those in made by men —what says the holier law, the law of nature?

Does nature say that the woman, who endures for nearly a year a tedious suffering, ending in an agony which perils her life, has no claim to the children she bears ? Does nature say that the woman, who after that year of suffering is over provides from her own bosom the nourishment which preserves the very existence of her offspring, has no claim to the children she has nursed? Does nature say that the woman who has watched patiently through the very many feverish and anxious nights which occur even in the healthiest infancy, has no claim to the children she has tended ?’

She follows up the pamphlet with an overview of the most relevant precedents, including a woman whose child was ‘’cruelly tak[en]… from the breast’ and fulminations against the men who wronged women.

Norton was a society beauty, who was immortalised as the figure of Justice in the Halls of the House of Lords The painter chose her specifically as a beautiful woman who had been wronged by the law.

https://www.adams.ie/52312/Daniel-Maclise-RA-RHA-1806-1870-A-Figure-of-Erin-Oil-on-canvas-102-x-76cm-40-x-30-Signed-and-inscribed-Caroline-Norton-a-Study-for-Justice-in-the-House-of-Lords-Provenance-Thought-to-have-been-a?ipp=All&keyword=&view=lot_detail

Mrs Oliphaunt wrote a huge number of novels – she churned out too many to be classed as a ‘great’ novelist. But she also has her moments.

*Phoebe* was the last of her Carlingford novels, which, like Trollope’s contemporary series, tracked life in the middle classes in small towns. The plot is essentially romantic – who will Phoebe marry? Either the young man with a sinecure who loves her but will never amount to much, or the dim witted, enormously rich youth who she can shape for greatness. She decides on the one she can shape, who will be, as she says ‘a career’ for her.

He was not very wise, nor a man to be enthusiastic about, but he would be a career to Phoebe. She did not think of it humbly like this, but with a big capital--a Career. Yes; she could put him into parliament, and keep him there. She could thrust him forward (she believed) to the front of affairs. He would be as good as a profession, a position, a great work to Phoebe. He meant wealth (which she dismissed in its superficial aspect as something meaningless and vulgar, but accepted in its higher aspect as an almost necessary condition of influence), and he meant all the possibilities of future power. Who can say that she was not as romantic as any girl of twenty could be? only her romance took an unusual form. It was her head that was full of throbbings and pulses, not her heart.


Oliphaunt was sometimes accused of heartlessness, but my sympathies are with Phoebe. The only career open to her is marriage and yet it provides a limited scope to a girl of her abilities. Marrying money will allow her to push her husband into the parliamentary career that Phoebe is so suited to. As the novel writes…..

And Clarence got into Parliament, and the reader, perhaps (if Parliament is sitting), may have had the luck to read a speech in the morning paper of Phoebe's composition, and if he ever got the secret of her style would know it again, and might trace the course of a public character for years to come by that means. But this secret is one which no bribe nor worldly inducement will ever tempt our lips to betray.


There is a sub-plot where a Minister embezzles a small amount of money, but the entire matter is capably dealt with by Phoebe. There is, though, a great deal of careful observation in Oliphaunt’s description of the temptations of money.

A momentary disappointment when he saw how little James's draft was--then a sense of that semi-intoxication which comes upon a poor man when a sum of money falls into his hands--gradually invaded his soul.


Oliphaunt herself spent her life always in debt, writing to pay off money already spent, so she was well aware of the allure of money.

Archibald Forbes, The Afghan Wars of 1839 and 1379 (1892)


Archibald Forbes had a ridiculously action-packed life. He started out in the army but was invalided out and instead became a war correspondent. One might almost say *the* war correspondent.

He was one of the first to begin using telegrams to send in his reports, with his first work covering the Prussian campaign in Paris in 1871 (by which I mean entering the city with the Prussian invading forces). He survived nearly being drowned in a fountain as a German spy by a French mob, and stayed in the city for the duration of the 1871 commune/massacres/civil war.

In 1873 he represented the Daily News at the Vienna exhibition; subsequently he saw fighting in Spain, on both sides; and in 1875 he accompanied the Prince of Wales on his visit to India. In 1876, he was with Michael Gregorovitch Tchernaieff and the Russian volunteers in their Serbian campaign. In 1877 he witnessed the Russian invasion of Turkey, and was presented to Alexander II as the bearer of important news from the Schipka Pass. On this occasion, the emperor conferred upon him the order of St. Stanislaus for his services to the Russian soldiers.

His life makes Flashman’s life look plausible, though, of course, they had different motives for being at the centre of things.(1)

During 1878, after a brief visit to Cyprus to witness the British occupation, he lectured in England upon the Russo-Turkish war. In 1878-9 he went out to Afghanistan, and accompanied the Khyber Pass force to Jellalabad. He was present at the capture of Ali Musjid, and marched with several expeditions against the hill tribes.

From Afghanistan, he went to Mandalay before zipping back to cover the Zulu war. After the victory of Ulundi, he rode 110 miles to Landman's Drift in twenty hours. Two days after his arrival there he appeared in a state of utter exhaustion before Pietermaritzburg, having ridden by way of Ladysmith and Estcourt, an additional 170 miles, in thirty-five hours. The news of Ulundi first reached England through his agency, he having completely outpaced the official despatch rider. He put in a claim for the Avar medal on the strength of this, but the request was refused by the war office which considered that he was sometimes too critical of their military leaders.

It is his experiences in Afghanistan that fed into *The Afghan Wars*, first published in eight volumes in 1892. The book covered the two major 19th century British campaigns in Afghanistan.

The first from 1839 to 1842 began with the intelligence officer’s head being paraded through Kabul on a spike and ended in the virtually total destruction of the British army, with a sole survivor stumbling out of the Khyber pass to warn the outpost at Jellalabad that all was lost

The entire retreat was disastrous, with about 12,000 camp followers and 4,500 military personnel (some British troops and some Indian troops commanded by white officers) setting out while the survivors measured in dozens. The retreating force made their way slowly through the snow, under constant harrying, losing their supplies, walking into ambush after ambush.

When you read the accounts, they are the stuff of nightmares – people waking up after sleeping to find those next to them had frozen to death; women passing their children to strangers galloping past after their own horses went down under artillery fire; the negotiations for passage out involving one of the British officers hearing the Afghan leader say to his tribesmen in Dari – a language spoken by many British officers – to "spare" the British while saying in Pashto, which most British officers did not speak, to "slay them all"; the female camp followers (having dishonoured themselves by following the British) being stripped naked by the Afghans and left to freeze to death in the snow; panicked troops rushing into a pass under fire only to meet panicked followers rushing in the other direction, with people trampled the death; a last stand at Gandamak on a slight hill in thigh high blood stained snow where they formed a square that held out for some hours until being overrun.

Contemporary British accounts did not refer to this as a war but as ‘the Disaster in Afghanistan’ and they had a brief rerun in late 1842 to demolish parts of the capital and recover prisoners. They set up a puppet Government, and bowed out.

You would have thought that this experience would have meant they would leave well enough alone, but Afghanistan seems to have some fatal attraction for superpowers. The
second Anglo-Afghan campaign in 1878 to 1880 was nominally successful for the British, ending with them marching out with a largely intact army. Once again, the intelligence officer and British representative was slaughtered (along with his servants, hangers on and anyone unlucky enough to be in the area) but the Afghans opted for pitched battles, where the British were able to overwhelm them. They retreated, having got some nominal treaty concessions.

This is the war that Forbes attended and he died in 1900, so was not present for the third Anglo-Afghan war of 1919 (once again, strange, fatal attraction).


With material like this, Forbes’ book could hardly fail to be thrilling. It’s a style of military history that we don’t read so much anymore, full of open jingoism and purple prose.

‘The patriotism of a savage race is marked by features repulsive to civilised communities, but through the ruthless cruelty of the indiscriminate massacre, the treachery of the stealthy stab, and the lightly broken pledges, there may shine out the noblest virtue that a virile people can possess. A semi-barbarian nation whose manhood pours out its blood like water in stubborn resistance against an alien yoke, may be pardoned for many acts shocking to civilised communities which have not known the bitterness of stern and masterful subjugation’

But it is still massively accurate. I read this passage to my co-worker, who was previously in the British army in Afghanistan. He says it would be an entirely accurate description today (except for minor variations in spelling):

‘Afghanistan fifty years ago [1840s], and the same is in a measure true of it to-day, was rather a bundle of provinces, some of which owned scarcely a nominal allegiance to the ruler in Cabul, than a concrete state. Herat and Candahar were wholly independent, the Ghilzai tribes inhabiting the wide tracts from the Suliman ranges westward beyond the road through Ghuznee, between Candahar and Cabul, and northward into the rugged country between Cabul and Jellalabad, acknowledged no other authority than that of their own chiefs.’

He said Herat is lovely country (but hard to see beyond the compounds) and that the Ghilzai people are notoriously ‘mad’. He also showed me photos of a ‘tank graveyard’ which is a well known ‘tourist’ attraction in the area.

Forbes quotes Sir Frederick Roberts, the leader of the second British invasion force who concluded: "We have nothing to fear from Afghanistan, and the best thing to do is to leave it as much as possible to itself. It may not be very flattering to our amour propre, but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us.’ My co-worker also agrees.







(1) Forbes also wrote Barracks, Bivouacs, and Battles (1891) which sounds a lot like Flashman’s Dawns and Departures of a Soldier’s Life.

Eliza Action, Modern Cookery in All Its Branches, 1845

Isabella Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861

Modern autobiographers and food critics fall into one of two camps – followers of Eliza Acton or of Isabella Beeton (the famous Mrs Beeton). The beef goes back to 1861 when Isabella Beeton wrote her mammoth *Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management*, and bulked it out by lifting a very large number of recipes from Eliza Acton’s work. Both were vastly popular in their day, but Beeton’s husband’s relentless promotion meant she came to be seen as the definitive nineteenth century cook and Acton’s contributions were overlooked.

Acton’s Modern Cookery in All Its Branches, 1845

Very little is known about Eliza Acton – there are only four letters to her that have survived so basically what you get in her books is what you know about her. She produced three massive cookbooks and one collection of verse. Her recipes appear to have all been individually tested as she adds an ‘observations’ note at the end of most, which implies personal experimentation, often with reference to adapting recipes to local tastes or to make them cheaper.

As an example:

QUINCE OR APPLE CUSTARDS

Add to a pint of apple juice prepared as for jelly, a tablespoonful of strained lemon juice, and from four to six ounces of sugar according to the acidity of the fruit; stir these boiling quickly, and in small portions, to eight well beaten eggs, and thicken the custard in a jug placed in a pan of boiling water, in the usual manner. A larger proportion of lemon juice and high flavouring of the rind can be given when approved. For quince custards, which if well made are excellent, observe the same directions as the apple, but omit the lemon juice. As we have before observed, all custards are made finer when made with the yolks only of the eggs, of which the number must be increased nearly half when this is done.

Prepared apple juice (see page 427), 1 pint; lemon juice, I tablespoonful; sugar, 4 to 6 ozs; eggs, 8. Quince custards, same proportions, but no lemon juice.

Obs – In making lemon creams the apple juice may be substituted very advantageously for water, without varying the receipts in other respects.

We read the ingredients list as a normal part of the recipe, but this was Acton’s brilliant contribution to the genre. Previously there had been no list of ingredients – you had to scan the recipe to check you had everything. And previously the measurements were imprecise – ‘a handful’, ‘as much as makes a good mix’ etc. Acton made it clear and repeatable.

The full title of her cook book says the instructions were ‘given with the most minute exactness’, and her improvements to the standard way of setting things out certainly made it a lot easier to successfully follow the book’s instructions.

My observations of Acton’s work… She has a sense of humour. She includes recipes for a publisher’s pudding ‘which can scarcely be made too rich’ and an author’s pudding that is essentially some cinnamon in milk heated over a candle.

One thinks about Victorian cooking as consisting of endless meals of over-cooked cabbage, and Acton did record the first brussel sprout recipe. However, she includes a whole section on curries and another on ‘chatneys’. She attributes the ‘great superiority of the oriental curries over those generally prepared in England’ to the freshness of the available ingredients. She gives a variety of recipes and notes that some would be ‘somewhat too acid for English taste in general, and the proportion of onion and garlic by one half too much for any but well seasoned Anglo-Indian palates’. This is a reminder that Victorian London was at the centre of a trading empire, which for Acton domestically meant a brother in the East Indies.

Acton, wrote that ‘until very recent years, [English] cookery has remained far inferior to that of nations much less advanced in civilization’. She means here French and Italian cuisine, but even that is charming to meet in what one thinks of as the insular innards of English cooking.

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861

Beeton took Acton’s success with listing the ingredients and gave it a twist. She put the information at the top of the recipe and also added some details on how much is made and how much it costs.

So her recipes look like:

PLAIN AND ECONOMICAL; A NICE PUDDING FOR CHILDREN

Ingredients: 1 teacupful of rice; 2 tablespoonful of moist sugar; 1 quart of milk; ½ oz of butter or 2 small tablespoonfuls of chopped suet; ½ teaspoonful of grated nutmeg

Mode: Wash the rice, put it in a pie dish with the sugar, and stir these ingredients well together; then add the butter cut up into very small pieces, or, instead, add the finely minced suet; grate a little nutmeg over the top, and bake in a moderate oven, from 1.5 to 2 hours. As the rice is not previously cooked, care must be taken that the pudding be slowly baked, to give plenty of time for the rice to swell, and for it to be very thoroughly done.

Time 1.5 to 2 hours. Cost 7d. Sufficient for 5-6 children. Seasonable at any time.

In addition to taking Acton’s idea about recipe lay out, Beeton shamelessly copied whole sections of Acton’s recipes. Beeton was operating under time pressure and picked up one third of her soup recipes straight from Acton; one quarter of the fish recipes, usually without mentioning the plagiarism.

She also provided a lot more than recipes. Acton was content to produce a really good cook book. Beeton wrote a guide to household management – covering all areas. The index is astonishing, with references to a random section running…. Tartlets (subdivision Polish), Tarrogan, Taxes, Tea (subdivisons on And coffee, Mrs Nightingale’s opinion on, To make), Teacakes (subdivision To toast), Teal (subdivisions To carve, To roast), Teething, Tenancy.

While Beeton lacked the patience to create her own recipes, she does have a great turn of phrase. Her introduction is notably stirring, with its martial comparison of the housekeeper as warrior defender. Acton used a similar idea: ‘Who, indeed, can guard all the interests of home as [women] can?’ But this generic, diffused guarding is a lot less memorable than Beeton’s warrior defender.

‘As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of the house. Her spirit will be seen throughout the whole house; and in just proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.’

I am an Actonite.



Food History Notes

When I read these books I realise how easy modern life is. When I want to make jelly, I get a packet of jelly crystals. When they wanted to make jelly, they started with some calf feet and began by skinning them.

Also, lucky me to live in the age of food testing and standards. Both books are full of advice of how to test for adulteration and how to clean the food after it was received from the grocers. Acton’s description of how to check currants goes into the most gruelling detail, but remember that the currents were packed in hessian sacks that can easily pick up gravel and are stored in batches, complete with stalks and leaves.

TO CLEAN CURRANTS FOR PUDDINGS OR CAKES

Put them into a cullender [sic], strew a handful of flour over them and rub them with the hands to separate the lumps, and to detach the stalks; work them round in the cullender, and shake it well, when the small stalks and stones will fall through it. Next pour plenty of cold water over the currants, drain and spread them on a soft cloth, press it over them to absorb the moisture and then lay them on a very clean oven tin or a large dish, and dry them very gradually (or they will become hard), either in a cool oven or before the fire, taking care in the latter case that they are not placed sufficiently near it for the ashes to fall amongst them. When they are perfectly dry, clear them entirely from the remaining stalks, and from every stone that may be amongst them. The best mode of detecting these is to lay the fruit at the far end of a large white dish, or sheet of paper, and to pass it lightly, and in very small portions, with the fingers, towards oneself, examining it closely as this is done.’

I would have run out of energy at this point and eaten the currants without pudding, I think. After individually flouring, washing, drying and inspecting them, of course.

Ethel Turner, Little Mother Meg, 1902

Technically, a 20th century novel, I have nonetheless sneaked this into my nineteenth-century reads, as it is the sequel to the 1894 classic *Seven Little Australians*.


Ethel Turner had never set out to be a children’s author and she struggled with her editors about being forced into that box. Although she needed cash and had to write about the Woolcotts again, she was always pushing the boundaries and trying to sneak in a bit of writing for older audiences. The focus of *Little Mother Meg* is, as the title says, squarely on growing up.


Meg is married to boring Alan and living in a cottage and taking care of ‘Little King Baby’ which is, frankly, a bit naff. Nell was reformed in the previous book, so she now has a mild, mild flirtation and then accepts the courting of a character even more boring than Alan. I literally can’t remember his name. And the flirtation is so mild that he almost kisses her cheek but is then revealed to be a cad who flirts with other girls. Pip is studying to be a lawyer and has zero adventures of any sort. Bunty and Poppet get the most interesting sequence, as they buy two bicycles together.


So, not a lot of plot in this one. Except that Turner has to fix Meg’s finances which she does by writing a gothic interlude where Nell rescue a small child from a fire and then Alan nurses the kid back to health and is showered with cheques.


However, what Turner is good at is characterisation. There’s a chapter where they are discussing whether to have a dance party and how to pay for it – and the characterisation of all of them is so good. Nell, eager to entertain. Pip, guilty that he didn’t share his money with Bunty and Poppet when they bought their bikes. Esther, disorganised but kind hearted. Bunty, torn between generously offering up his pocket money and worrying that there won’t be enough food.


Turner’s strong point is always characterisation, and it shows through even in this book that she did not particularly want to write, in this genre she did not particularly want to write.

So, the circulation records of the working class Huddersfield Educational Institute Library exist for 1856-57.


Of the poetry books, the two most popular were Songs of Home and Happiness and the pious Songs of the Affections by Felicia Hemans.


We know Hemans because of the endless parodies of ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’ but she was very popular in her time.


Poets that we know well today—Cowper, Gray, Burns, Collins, Young, and Gay—were not borrowed at all.

I am charmed by Lucie Cobbe Heaton Armstrong’s social column, originally appearing in the issue of * Women’s Suffrage Journal* for 1 May 1884.

It begins “Mrs. Frank Morrison gave a highly-successful ‘At Home’ the other day, at the South Kensington Hotel, for the principal supporters of women’s suffrage. There was quite a brilliant company assembled. I noticed Lady Harberton and Lady Wilde amongst the guests. The meeting was held in a charming room, with cream-coloured panels picked out with a narrow line of pale pink and pale blue,”


I for one applaud the combination of feminism and fashion, bread and roses too.