emma_in_dream: (Default)
Hattie Burr, The Woman Suffrage Cook Book,1886.


So in 1886 the suffrage movement in the US pulled together a fundraising recipe book – The Woman Suffrage Cook Book. Hattie Burr edited it and compiled a list of recipes provided by various members of her network. I am not an expert on American suffragism but I could immediately see Lucy Stone and one of the Stantons.


The recipes themselves are bafflingly oblique. Take this recipe for bread. 'Two cups cooed oatmeal, or rice, salt to taste, two tablespoons sugar, one cup sweet milk, one third cup yeast, flour to make it stiff.'

They clearly assume a huge bundle of information that I don’t have. They just list a chunk of ingredients and give no instructions on how to combine them or how to cook them. Perhaps the point is to highlight that despite being suffragettes they are ‘feminine’ enough to just know these things and be naturally houseproud and wifely.


The book ends with a list of quotes from prominent 19th century Americans in support of the vote. I am reminded of a description of 19th century novel that a friend gave me – it was suffragette porn. In between each round of activity would be a discussion about how women should have the vote. This cook book falls into the same genre of obscure efforts to propagandize through every possible means.
emma_in_dream: (Default)
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.
emma_in_dream: (Default)
I have just reread Gene Stratton Porter's *Freckles* (1903). I wish that these turn of the century children's novels were not so persistently pro-eugenics. Less in this than in Jean Webster's *Daddy Long Legs* (1912), but still.

I just checked and both authors died before the 1940s eugenics nadir.
emma_in_dream: (Default)
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...'
emma_in_dream: (Default)
Frederick Douglass. I'm hearing more and more about him lately. And he was a total hottie.

Just read one of his autobiographies.
emma_in_dream: (Default)
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.
emma_in_dream: (Default)
There had been books published prior to 1857 that were set in schools; but there had not been a genre of school stories up until when Thomas Hughes published *Tom Brown’s Schooldays*.

Reading over it now, almost every convention of the genre is there in his first book, beginning with the journey from home to the school. School stories almost begin with the obligatory journey to another world, usually by train but in this case by stage. (Although written in the era of trains, the story is set a generation earlier, in the time that Hughes himself went to Rugby).

It has the new child’s awe at the fantastic buildings – Tom Brown looking at the close at Rugby; Darrell Rivers admiring the stone walls of Malory Towers; Harry Potter viewing Hogwarts. The protagonist is self sufficient, sociable, not terribly academic but good at sports. There’s the antagonist, a sneaky bully who has no school spirit. There is the emphasis on friendship and sports. There’s a god-like Head Master, Arnold, who makes even Dumbledore seem run off the mill. It contains various adventures, the outwitting of dim masters, defeating the bully, moving up through the school. The penultimate scene is of Tom in his final days at Rugby, head of the cricket eleven and respected throughout the school.

There are also a few ways in which *Tom Brown’s Schooldays* includes material not taken up by future school story writers. The book begins with an unnecessary and embarrassing chapter on how Tom would play with the little boys from the village when he was a child, even though they were his social inferiors and spoke with comical peasant accents. And there is a lot more religion than modern authors would include.

There is a substantial plot involving Brown meeting and being redeemed by his relationship with Arthur, a delicate and beautiful boy who demonstrates true Christian grit by getting on his knees to pray in front of the other boys in the dormitory. Arthur and Tom share a special bond, share a study and spend quite a bit of time reading the Bible together. (Hehe).

The final scene of *Tom Brown’s Schooldays* is Brown rushing back to Rugby, after hearing of the death of his Head Master. Overwhelmed, he goes to the chapel and pulls himself together by reflecting that no matter how magnificent Arnold was, his character was just a way of glimpsing the workings of God.

‘And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there, than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes.’


Hughes was taught by Thomas Arnold, the famous Head Master of Rugby. Apparently he was quite the inspirational speaker, a proponent of the muscular Christianity of the nineteenth century. Hughes does not seem to have been a special protégé of Arnold, but the massive success of this book basically set Arnold’s image up for the rest of the century – supremely wise, incapable of error, stern, basically the Old Testament God.

I find those parts of the book pretty repellent, but you have to hand it to Hughes – there was something about this novel that inspired a heap of incredibly talented authors to follow him.

There’s the Flashman chronicles by George MaczDonald Fraser. I cannot recommend them enough – basically he takes Hughes’ cowardly villain, Flashman, and writes a series of supremely funny novels about him being a coward and a villain who, through a terrible series of events, is forced into the thick of battles and the centre of politics.

The scene of little Arthur praying in the dormitories may seem familiar. It’s because Terry Pratchett took it up in *Pyramids* where a student brings in a goat and attempts to sacrifice it in his first night at the dormitories of the Assassin’s Academy. The lines ‘Garn, the little pious git’ and ‘There’s no shame in a chap being man enough to pray’ are virtually line for line from *Tom Brown’s Schooldays* but read quite differently with the addition of the pentagram.

And, of course, Hughes stands at the head of the still flourishing genre of school stories. Without Hughes, there is no Malory Towers, no Chalet School, no Greyfriars, no Hogwarts. This book is not without flaws, but if you have inspired authors ranging from Enid Blyton to JK Rowling, George MacDonald Fraser to Terry Pratchett, you have done pretty well.
emma_in_dream: (Default)
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
emma_in_dream: (Default)
Ruth Herbert, The St James Cookery Book 1894

The St. James's Cookery Book (1894) is an odd book, in that it takes a position of utmost respectability and snobbishness but was written by Louisa Ruth Herbert, a well known stage actress and model (which, by Victorian standards, was to say a well known loose woman).
Herbert was born in 1831, daughter of a brass founder. She married but separated and became an actress under the name Ruth Crabbe. She worked at the St James theatre. She specialised in comedy and burlesque, and was known as a beauty.

She modelled for Rossetti in the late 1850s. He wrote:

‘I am in the stunning position this morning of expecting the actual visit at 1/2 past 11 of a model whom I have been longing to paint for years – Miss Herbert of the Olympic Theatre – who has the most varied and highest expression I ever saw in a woman's face, besides abundant beauty, golden hair, etc.’

She clearly had smarts as well as beauty, as she managed the St James from 1864 to 1868, and then married again. She published the St James Cookery Book under her married name. All the hints on home management are uncompromisingly pro-management.

‘Do not feel, as too many mistresses do, that you are intruding when you go into the kitchen. Never forget that the house is yours, and that you are responsible for the disposition
of the stores bought with your or your husband’s money.’

One hard and fast rule should be made in every house, and
that is, that whatever comes into a house belongs to the
master and mistress ; and I hold that a servant looking
upon dripping and other things that have cost her mistress
money as her “ perquisites ” is dishonest, and has nothing
to recommend it but custom, and that custom should be
abolished…’

Servants at this time earned very little but were meant to get their board and traditionally had certain perquisites such as being able to sell off coffee grounds or ends of candles. You’d have thought someone who started off at the bottom end of the ladder would have had more sympathy.

The recipes certainly show the changes industrialisation had wrought in cooking in the half century from Eliza Acton to Ruth Herbert. The first step in Acton’s jelly calls for dismembering calves’ feet. The first step in Herbert’s is to take ‘half of a sixpenny packet of Nelson’s Gelatine’. Her cooking is a lot closer to our own, with its reliance on ready made conveniences.

I wonder if she had some kind of marketing arrangement with Nelsons as the 1903 edition I read contained advertising for the company in the inside cover.

In short, Herbert was a very attractive woman who did well for herself. But you would not want to have worked for her.
emma_in_dream: (steve)
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.
emma_in_dream: (Corellia)
I was bored by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s *Poems on Miscelleneous Subjects* (1854) when I first read them. They seemed mandarin, guarded, obsessively obedient to literary conventions.

Then I read about her life – this is a woman who was anything but obedient to conventions. She was an abolitionist, suffragist, poet, teacher, public speaker, and writer.

Biography
Born free in 1825 (but in a slave State), she had a long and prolific career. At 14, Frances found work as a seamstress. During her early twenties, she published poems and articles in the local newspaper and published her first volume of poetry at 20 (extant as a single, recently discovered volume). At 25, the Watkins family fled north after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed. She started publishing pieces in antislavery journals in 1839.

Harper's second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), was extremely popular and was reprinted numerous times.

In 1850, Watkins moved to Ohio, where she worked as the first female teacher at Union Seminary and then Wilberforce University, the first black-owned and operated college. In 1853, Watkins joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and became a travelling lecturer for the group. In 1858 she refused to give up her seat or ride in the coloured section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia (100 years before Rosa Parks).

After the Civil War ended she moved south to teach newly freed black people during the Reconstruction. She was a strong supporter of abolitionism, prohibition and woman's suffrage. From 1883 to 1890, she helped organise events and programs for the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union and helped organise the National Association of Coloured Women in 1894, and was elected vice president in 1897.

Poetry
Such an exciting life. Such conventional poetry. Take for example the stulitifying rhythms of ‘The Dying Christian’.

The light was faintly streaming
Within a darkened room,
Where a woman, faint and feeble,
Was sinking to the tomb.

I assume that Watkins was keenly aware that if she wrote with passion, she would be a hysterical woman. If she ignored classical conventions, she would be an uneducated uppity person who was incapable of understanding western culture. Hence the iron control.

There are some poems with a bit more oomph. *Bury Me in a Free Land* was written when she was seriously ill on an anti-slavery tour before the war, so presumably came from the heart.

I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother’s shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.
emma_in_dream: (steve)
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.
emma_in_dream: (Default)
*Jessica’s First Prayer* (1866)

It is unlikely that this very slight children’s book would continue to be read today if it were not for its evangelical message.

Hesba Stretton was the pen name of Sarah Smith (1832 –1911), an English writer of children's books. She was a Methodist and one of the most popular Evangelical writers of the 19th century. Her moral tales and religious stories were printed in huge numbers and often chosen as school and Sunday-school prizes. She became a regular contributor to Household Words and All the Year Round under Charles Dickens's editorship, after her sister had successfully submitted a story of hers without her knowledge. Altogether she wrote more than 40 novels.

The book that won her widespread fame was Jessica's First Prayer, first published in the journal Sunday at Home in 1866 and the following year in book form. By the end of the 19th century it had sold at least a million and a half copies (nearly ten times as many as Alice in Wonderland).
The plot is incredibly slight – Jessica is a street waif with an alcoholic mother who befriends a street coffee seller. She follows him to the Church where he acts as a warden and is converted. In turn, her sweet nature converts him from his money-grubbing ways.

This book launched a thousand sequels, with all those stories about street arabs (a very odd 19th century term for the urban poor) and the importance of philanthropy to the poor. I found it very hard to take the Christian message straight as there is such a long debate about whether or not she should be allowed in the Church as she looks so ‘low’ in her rags and without shoes. In the end, the compromise is that she puts on a second hand cloak belonging to the Minister’s daughter every time she goes to Church so as to not distract the congregation with her scruffiness. Otherwise there might have been some kind of Peterloo-like uprising, I suppose. Surely the more Christian response would have been to clothe the poor?

Having said that, Stretton did herself walk the walk as well as talk the talk. She worked with slum children in Manchester in the 1860s and in 1884 was one of the co-founders of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children which later combined with other organisations to form the national society we now know. She was the chief writer for the Religious Tract Society which started producing easy-to-read novels and fiction in the 1850s. In her retirement she and her sister ran a branch of the Popular Book Club for working-class readers.

I would also note that the book has a lot of reviews on Goodbooks. Far more than you would imagine that a mostly forgotten work of minimal literary merit would have. It now seems to be read either by:

• Evangelists who like the message and the way the language is pitched at the right level for using as a home school text. It looks like some American publishers still print it.
• People interested in 19th century children’s literature.

My summary – it’s a very short read. The language is plain. The plot is straightforward. It was and continues to be famous only for its evangelical piety.
emma_in_dream: (CaptainAmerica)
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.
emma_in_dream: (Leia)
Ethel Turner, The Story of a Baby, 1895.


This novella was Turner’s attempt to move into adult writing. It’s the story of a couple who separate and then reunite for the sake of their child. It’s certainly not a strong work and her publishers begged her to return to children’s fiction where she had a huge market waiting for her.


The crux of the novel lies in the heroine’s decision to enter a concert despite her husband forbidding it. She tells herself that 'no on literally interpreted that word "obey" in teh marriage service, now that the equality of the sexes was recognised. It was merely a relic of darker ages when women had been little more than chattels; the progress of the century had made it elastic, before long it would be removed altogether.'


Turner wrote this novel after the wild success of *Seven Little Australians* and before marrying her lawyer beau. If a friend of mine wrote this novella while engaged to be married, I would be extremely worried about them. Additionally, the novella has extra short stories to pad the book out to novel length which address:


A man takes the fall for a woman’s crime and she then marries someone else.
A child is sold to a feckless mother.
A man lies to another man and thereby win’s the hand of the woman they both love.
A wife learns that her husband demonstrates his love for her by beating her.
A wife learns to submit to her husband.
One random happy one about a disorganised household.


This is a pretty grim list of preoccupations on Turner’s mind in the 1890s. Of course, her actual home life was quite difficult. Her step-father was opposed to her marriage and quite keen on keeping her at home. He behaved very oddly at the wedding, pushing her husband out of the way to claim the first kiss of the bride. (Gross).
emma_in_dream: (Singin')
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.
emma_in_dream: (CaptainAmerica)
While Catherine Helen Spence’s autobiography was published in 1910, I have sneaked it into the nineteenth century challenge on the grounds that is outlines her long nineteenth century life.

Spence’s life, as described by herself, was one of constant stimulation. After emigrating to South Australia in 1839 with her family after her father was ‘ruined’ financially, she appears to have lived very happily as a single woman involved in everything. She went everywhere and met everyone. Her list of acquaintance is like a who’s who of the nineteenth century. She knew the Australian Federalists intimately because of her decades-long advocacy for preferential voting. She ran for the Federal Convention in 1897, being Australia’s first female political candidate (came 22nd of 33). She met with Harriet Tubman, Susan B Anthony and Mrs Fawcett because her work for women’s votes (which she regarded as part of the larger problem of fair voting). She wrote novels and met with George Eliot.

She was a tireless crusader for improvements to children’s homes, and an inspector of the State’s charity for the elderly. At different times she was a theosophist, an agnostic, a Unitarian and a rationalist. She was the first woman to run for office in South Australia. She had opinions on everything. She believed Mrs Oliphant to be superior to Eliot in style and theme. She designed better menus for orphanages. She lectured on Barrett Browning and Baconism (the theory that Shakespeare’s works were written by Bacon). She was a journalist and a teacher. She wrote text books. She was the first woman to read papers at the South Australian Institute. She delivered sermons in Church. She had radical ideas about tax reform.
emma_in_dream: (obbit)
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.
emma_in_dream: (Singin')
Mary Martha Sherwood wrote “The History of the Fairchild Family” in three volumes, published 1818, 1842 and 1847. I read the first book, which is chiefly about the Fairchild children – Emily, Lucy and Henry – realising that all humans are depraved sinners in need of redemption. To quote from the first few pages:

Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild loved and feared God, and had done so, by the mercy of God, ever since their younger days. They knew that their hearts were very bad, and that they could not be saved by any good thing they could do: on the contrary, that they were by nature fitted only for everlasting punishment: but they believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and loved him for having died for them; and they knew he would save them, because he saves all those who trust in him.

The book is essentially a series of vignettes of the children being instructed on the righteous path. Emily, for example, succumbs to the temptation to eat some forbidden plums: 'no eye was looking at her, but the eye of God, who sees every thing we do, and knows even the secret thoughts of the heart; but Emily, just at that moment, did not think of God.'

Even worse, their cousin Augusta plays with candles after being told not to and is burnt alive. The stakes are high in this novel, because every sin is a step towards losing their souls forever. When Mr Fairchild catches his children quarrelling, he first thrashes them, reciting Dr. Watts's 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite' between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging. Lesson learned.

The works were massively popular in the 19th century, in print constantly until 1913. There is some evidence, though, that it was not always read as intended. Lord Hamilton wrote that 'there was plenty about eating and drinking; one could always skip the prayers, and there were three or four very brightly written accounts of funerals in it.’

Frances Hodgson Burnett, perhaps a more pious child, states that she read it in two sections, first reading the religious statements because she thought she should and then reading the story for pleasure.
emma_in_dream: (CaptainAmerica)
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.

Profile

emma_in_dream: (Default)
emma_in_dream

December 2020

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
1314 1516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 24th, 2025 06:40 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios