emma_in_dream

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.

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.

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.

Frederick Douglass. I'm hearing more and more about him lately. And he was a total hottie.

Just read one of his autobiographies.

Envious Casca Georgette Heyer 1941

Unnatural Death Dorothy L Sayers 1927

Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace Dang Tuy Tram 1968

Just Like Bunter Frank Richards 1963

The Testaments Margaret Atwood 2019

Ethan of Athos Lois McMaster Bujold 1986

Billy Bunter's Bank Note Frank Richards 1948

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.

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.

Little Women - a review at the time

‘We cannot commend this book. It is without Christ, and hence perilous in proportion to its assimilation to Christian forms. Don’t put in the Sunday School library.’ Zion’s Herald

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.