The Carnival of Feminists No 7 has just been put up by Lauren on Feministe, and it is HUGE! Lauren has arranged it in an A to Z, starting with Abortion and ending with Videogames, via Burlesque, Consumer Culture, Dating, Poetry and much, much more. I’m particularly pleased to see a strong showing from women writing from a feminist perspective about comics and videogames – a newish area for the carnival.

It is another spectacular collection. I did a rough count and there are something like 75 posts there, and all the ones I’ve read (I’ll get to them all eventually) have been brilliant.

Please help to spread the word ….!

The heft and quality of this edition makes me wonder if I should make the carnival weekly. The thought of the organisation makes me quail slightly, but ignoring the practical problems, which no doubt could be overcome, I see two ways of looking at this.

The main argument on the “go weekly” side is that it would allow the inclusion of a larger numbers of blogs without the length of the carnival getting impossible.

The main argument against is that perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. By keeping the twice monthly frequency, carnivals are still relatively unusual events that attract more notice. I’d welcome thoughts in the comments below, or by email.

Probably the other thing that I should try to do is build links with carnivals of related interest. I know that Jenn on Reappropriate (a former Carnival of Feminists host) has founded the Radical Women of Colour Carnival. (The deadline for submissions is January 31, and the call for submissions is up.)

Are there any others I should know about out there?

Miss Williams Wynn is today reporting on the first news of Waterloo reaching London; there’s a fine whack of what we’d call “insider trading” involved. Her editor then goes on at much great length – and in considerable gory detail. (You’ve been warned!)

I spend a lot of time trying to get inside the Tudor mindset – but sometimes you realise it is impossible, as when I read this letter from the widow Margaret Baynham.

Anno domini 1545, the first day of April, at Calais.

Master Johnson, I do right heartily thank you for the good beer you sent me, albeit that a great part of the same hath been drunk with much, much lamentation and mourning. For upon Palm Sunday in the morning perceived we manifestly that John Grant (which had complained seven days before) was sick of the plague, whereupon I and all my household were glad to void my house.

The same self day after Evensong, Margery, one of my sister Plankney’s daughters, waxed suddenly sick also of the same disease, whereupon my said sister forsook her own house also, with such wares as she had in her shop, and went to my garden in Maisondieu Street, where she and I with a great number of young fruit do continue in great sorrow and heaviness of heart, God be merciful unto us, help and comfort us.

And what shall become of these two sick persons we are uncertain yet, but they are very weak and feeble. They be in God’s hands — Almighty God be merciful unto them, and restore them their health again if it be his pleasure.

Thus doth God chastise and scourge me from time to time (first by the death of my husbands, then by the death of my two brethren-in-law, my sister’s husbands, and now with John Grant, on whom of late I bestowed so great cost) to keep me in awe and under correction still. I beseech his almighty goodness, even as he daily reneweth my sorrow and heaviness, so mercifully to send me patience in all my trouble and adversity, and to obtain the same the better, I desire you and good Master Cave to pray for me.

From Calais, as is above rehearsed.
By yours to her power,
Margaret Baynham,
widow.

This being written in the morning, John Grant and Margery my sister’s daughter departed this world about eleven of the clock before dinner. Now is our lamentation and mourning greater than ever it was before, Almighty God be our comfort.

Our current culture – when we worry about miniscule risks and are inclined to try to find someone to sue if we don’t make our three-score-and-ten and then some – is a long, long way from this.

It is not hard to understand why religion was so important, as the only crutch available. But can you really get inside that mindset?

(From Tudor Family Portrait, Barbara Winchester, Jonathan Cape, London, 1955, p. 56)

I interviewed Tim Flannery some 15 years ago, when he was an up-and-coming scientist with a surprising message – Australia’s sustainable population was about 4 million. (Population now 20 million.) He was a lone voice then – he’s now one of Australia’s most prominent public intellectuals. So I was reassured by this:

Dr Flannery said the world still had “one to two decades” to take action to reduce global warming, despite Professor Lovelock’s warning that billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as we know it would be unlikely to survive.
”It seems to be that [Professor] LoveLock’s pessimism about things is due to the pathetic political response we’ve had from the US, Australia and some of the other polluting nations,” said Dr Flannery, who is director of the South Australian Museum and author of climate book The Weather Makers.
”I respect him immensely, and I can understand Lovelock’s pessemism, but I don’t agree with it. You just have to keep up hope.”

… well sort of reassured …

For more depressing news, it seems that great English symbol, the hedgehog, is in trouble. Regent’s Park is their last London refuge (I’ve never seen one, although I walk there ever morning, but I guess they’re in the fenced-off, gorsed bits, away from all the dogs), and they are “dying out at a rate of about a fifth of the population every four years. By 2025, they will be gone.”

Sorry to be so depressing; for some light relief, look on the face of Lady Jane Grey … well, it might be.

… and, at last, someone with a platform is making a call for sanity over Britain’s paedophile panic.

In 1904, in a small, ragged parlour in a house in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, nearly 40 years after the official abolition of slavery in America, a mismatched group of black people are struggling to find a way to survive and thrive in a white world.

Solly Two Kings (Joseph Marvell), profession dog-shit collector, looks like a buffoon, until he explains that his stick is notched 62 times, for each slave he helped guide to freedom on the Underground Railroad. He sums up the predicament these ex-slaves and younger freeborn Blacks face: “Freedom. I got it, but what is it? I still aint found out.”

Eli (Lucian Msamati), his friend and comrade, is building a wall around this house, hoping to keep its inhabitants safe, with the help of an intruder, the ironically named Citizen Barlow (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who looks like a man with problems. He’s tried to find a decent, fair-paying job, and failed, but the weight on his shoulders is more than that.

Always in the house is Aunt Esther Tyler (Carmen Munroe), who claims to be 285 years old, and certainly is regarded, almost worshipped, as a seer and problem-solver. She’s also fervently religious – but does this really help the people she guides? Caring for her is Black Mary (Jenny Jules – who is notable for a really stunning stage presence), who has fled the “Uncle Tom” ways of her bullying brother Caesar (Patrick Robinson), who has chosen to carve out a place for himself by enforcing the white men’s law.

The play is Gem of the Ocean, the work of August Wilson, who died last year at the tragically young age of 60, and one of a cycle of ten that, decade by decade, tell the story of the black experience in America. It is the fifth of his plays to have UK premieres at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, that northwest London theatre jewel. READ MORE

Way back in July 2004, when I was a total blog neophyte, with my second-ever post I asked about a pamphlet that I’d stumbled across in the British Library:

The Confessions, Prayers, discourses and last dying sayings of Mr Edward Harrison, who was try’d and convicted and deservedly sentenced the Sixth and Ninth of this Instand April 1692, for the late unheard of Murder of Dr Clench, and accordingly Executed in Holbourn, on Friday the Fifteenth following … this Day about the Hour of Eleven, carried from Newgate to Holbourn, against Furnivals-Inn, where a Gibbet was Erected.”

I wrote then: “The execution site is about 50m from where I live, so I couldn’t help being interested, although the pamphlet reads like it was written entirely by the Ordinary of Newgate, being full of pious injunctions to friends and other young males not to follow in his footsteps. Frustrating it contains no information about him and his crimes. Does it ring any bells out there?”

This was typical of my early posts – this blog was initially going to be about snippets of historical research only – and now look at the monster ….

But anyway, would you believe it? On the Head Heeb Jonathan has just posted the whole story, and it was indeed no ordinary London murder. The victim was a distinguished member of the Royal Society, and he was lured out one night with a tale of a patient urgently needing his services …

As the coach proceeded through the city streets, the passengers twice ordered coachman John Sikes to stop and run errands, ostensibly for things that would help in the patient’s cure. When the coachman returned from the second errand, he found the mysterious gentlemen gone and Dr. Clenche motionless in his seat. In an attempt to revive him, Sikes “pull’d him, and cried, Master, Master, for I thought he had been in Drink,” but it soon became clear that the doctor was dead. …
His murderers had placed the coal against his windpipe and then fiendishly garrotted him with the handkerchief. The killers were, of course, no longer around to be questioned; both men had fled into the night, leaving passers-by with but a fleeting glimpse of their faces.

But, just like in bad novels, that handkerchief was to prove the murderer’s undoing ….

Jonathan posted this in conjunction with his plan to host the first Internet symposium on the Old Bailey online database. It contains: “The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834: A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.” And the project now has funding to extend the digitisation project up to 1913.

This stupendous resource – one which I wrote a story for The Times in 2004 – certainly deserves to be highlighted and celebrated in this way.

You might not be a historian, but if you’ve read this far you’re almost certainly interested in history. This symposium is meant to be broad-ranging: maybe you’d like to do a little research for it, or maybe if you write fiction you might want to use one of its tales as a foundation, and thus participate in the symposium, which is to be on February 12?

Just picking out today’s trial, as possible inspiration (there is one case featured on the site each day):
Joseph Taylor (otherwise Cutler otherwise Turner) was sentenced to death for “having been found at large in the city of London before the expiration of the term for which he had received sentence to be transported”. You might think that a tough sentence, but there was more to it. A city centre resident testified:

“I live at the corner of the Old Jewry in the Poultry, on Sunday evening the 15th of January, I saw the prisoner and another man at my back door, I observed the prisoner endeavouring to open my door; I collared him, after some struggle he was secured and took to the Compter; there was a picklock in my door and eight or nine more found in his pocket.”

The convict himself testified that he’d been to Philadelphia, where the city authorities had put him on a ship back to Bristol. His must have been quite a life-story.

*I invented the term blogography (no, I didn’t spend hours dreaming it up), after an earlier similar cross-fertlising research development, about the Mary Lady Broughton widow and Keeper of the Gatehouse Prison. I have had accepted for publication my first-ever academic article about this phenomenon. The (online) journal was due out in the middle of last year, so I’m hoping it will be published soon …