Category Archives: History

Politics Science Women's history

Rethinking aging

April 29, 2007 – 2:24 pm

An excellent piece in the New Yorker about how most modern medicine is getting old age utterly wrong. There’s a fascinating mini-account of a life, and some surprising medical treatment:

She was eighty-five years old, with short, frizzy white hair, oval glasses, a lavender knit shirt, and a sweet, ready smile….She had a high-school education, and during the war she’d worked as a riveter at the Charlestown Navy Yard. She also worked for a time at the Jordan Marsh department store in downtown Boston. But that was a long time ago. She stuck to home now, with her yard and her terrier and her family when they visited.

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Blogging/IT History

Potentially useful

April 29, 2007 – 10:21 am

A site that lets you publish, I gather anything up to book length and that will automatically format it, online while not letting people copy and paste the material – the same sort of view as you get in Amazon. Open Floodgate – unfortunate name and horribly cheesy introduction, but still might be useful.

(And since I’m linking, might I also point interested persons to the History Carnivals Aggregator – listing upcoming and just posted carnivals.)

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History Women's history

A fit companion for a duchess

April 26, 2007 – 3:20 pm

Buying a dog was, it seems, a dodgy business in mid 19th-century London. I’m back with George Augustus Sala (as I was recently) in 1859 and he’s reporting on the scene in the West End at about 3.30pm,

p. 160 “Thick-necked and beetle-browed individuals, by courtesy called dog-fanciers, but who in many case might with as much propriety answer to the name of dog-stealers – forbidding-looking gentry, in coats of velveteen, with large mother-o’-pearl buttons and waistcoats of the neat and unpretending moleskin – lurk about the kerbs of the purlieus of Regent Street and Waterloo Place (the police drive them away from the main thoroughfares), with the little “dawgs” they have to sell tucked beneath their arms, made doubly attractive by much washing with scented soap, and the further decoration of their necks with pink and blue ribbons.

Here is the little snub-nosed King Charles – I hope the retrousse appearance of his nasal organ is not due to the unkind agency of a noose of whipcord – his feathery feet and tail, and his look silky ears, sweeping the clean summer pavement. Here is the Newfoundland pup, with his bullet head and clubbed, caudal-appendage, winking his stupid little eyes and meeding, seemingly, an enormous amount of licking into shape.

Here is the bull-dog, in his full growth, with his legs bowed, his tail inclining to the spiral, his broad chest, thin flanks, defined ribs, moist nozzle, hare lip, bloodshot eyes protruding fang, and symmetrical patch over one eye; or else, in a state of puppyhood, peering from his proprietor’s side-pocket, all pink and white like a morose sucking-pig become permit. … the accomplished French poodle, with his peaked nose, woolly wid, leggings and tail band, and his horrible shaved, salmon-coloured body. He can dance; he can perform gun-drill; he can fall motionless, as though dead, at the word of commend; he can climb up a lamp post, hop over a stick, hop on one leg, carry a basket in his mouth, and run away when told that a policeman is coming. You can teach him to do anything but love you.

These, and good store of mongrels and half-breeds that the dealer would fain palm upon us as dogs of blood and price, frisk and fawn about his cord-trouser covered legs, but where is the toy-dog par-excellence, the playful, snappish, fractious, facetious, charming, utterly useless little dog, that, a quarter of a century since, was the treasure of our dowagers and old maids? Where is the Dutch pug? Where is that Narcissus of canine Calibanism, with his coffee-coloured coat, his tail in a ring like the blue-nosed baboon’s his crisped morsels of ears, his black muzzle, his sharp, gleaming little teeth, his intensely red lips and tongue?”

He recalls seeing one as a five-year-old. (p. 162)
His mistress was a Duchess, the grandest, handsomest Duchess that ever lived (of course, I except Georgina of Devonshire) since the days of that Grace of Queenberry of whom Mr Thackeray was good enough to tell us in the “Virginians”. She, my Duchess, wore a hat and feathers, diamonds, and a moustache – a downy nimbus round her mouth, like that which Mr Philip insinuates rather than paints in his delightful Spanish girls’ faces. I see her now, parading the cliff at Brighton, with he black velvet train – yes madam, her train – held up by a page. She was the last duchess who at Twelfth-night parties had a diamong ring backed in a cake which was to be distributed in lots. Before she came to her coronet, she had been a singing woman at a playhouse, had married a very foolish rich old banker, and, at his death, remarried a more foolish and very poor duke. But she was an excellent woman, and the relative to whom she left the bulk of her wealth, is one of the most charitable, as I am afraid she is one of the most ennuyee ladies in England.”

He’s referring, he later explains, to the Duchess of St Albans, who appears thrice in the National Portrait Gallery, once in caricature – the banker was Henry Coutts, and the duke the 9th of that title. She left her money to Angelina Burdett-Coutts, a fascinating character whose high on my list of “women I must research one of these days”.

As for the Dutch pug, it seems to be simply what we’d call a pug now, and that linked article suggests perhaps it didn’t not much disappear as go downmarket in Victorian times – into more humble households.

UPDATE: Can’t resist adding another doggie history link – Elizabeth Chadwick on Living the History has been reflecting on the dogs of 1066.

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Environmental politics History Women's history

Views of Australia old and new

April 24, 2007 – 9:22 pm

Airminded has an Anzac Day post recording the thoughts of an Australian serviceman posted to Old Blighty in 1940 that are as revealing about the “old Australia” was they are about the “Mother Country”:

It is a new experience to stand shoulder to shoulder with women while buying a glass of beer.

Struth, a shiela could have gone dry while trying to get a beer back then…

And the Independent today has a letter from a Briton who emigrated to Brisbane in 2003 lamenting the demise of the quarter-acre lawn, and indeed baths, in the face of acute drought and urban water shortage – or what may well be the permanent conditions in the future. I really don’t think Australia is a great bet, should the climate – the fates forbid – start to go pear-shaped faster than expected.

Someone must have done the calculations – perhaps the highlands of Scotland, so long as the Gulf Stream holds out?

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History Politics

The secret ballot – all is not what it seems…

April 22, 2007 – 7:07 pm

Heading back from a marathon eight and a half hour day of Green Party canvassing in Norwich yesterday – my calf muscles are going to forgive me for all those four-storey flats eventually, I’m sure — I was enjoying some appropriately political reading, Cultures of Voting: The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot, R. Bertrand, J Briquet and P Pels eds, one of those books that makes you realise that things you have taken for granted don’t have the firm foundations that you’d thought. (And a product – published 2007 – of the delightful London Library “new books” shelf – into which I could disappear for days at a time if I had the time.)

The secret ballot seems an obvious, “natural” form of ensuring “real” democracy, even if it does tend to be fetishised in attempts to reconstructed failed states when on-the-ground realities don’t much match the textbooks.

The first thing I learnt was that the secret ballot is an important part of Australian history – indeed it was known for much of the 19th-century and beyond as the “Australian ballot”, since it was there, in 1837 that the method of having “a ballot bearing the names of all the candidates of all parties, so arranged as to ensure absolute secrecy and liberty in voting” first became compulsory. It was only adopted in Britain in 1872, by 4/5 of the US states in 1896, Germany in 1903 and France in 1913. What that did the US southern states was to disenfranchise a large part of the black lower-class (and illiterate) vote.

From F. Gorman, “The Secret ballot in 19th-century Britain”
British political history is traditionally told as the Reform Acts of 1832 (which abolished the worst of the rotten boroughs), of 1867 and 1884-5 as a linear tale of advance of democracy. But Gorman says each was an independent response to individual crisis, and “were meant just as much to check the speed and to dilute the force of democratisation as to encourage it”. (p. 17)

Pre-1872 in Britain there was tumultuous public participation in polls, which began with a nomination ceremony conducted at hustings, a temporary raised wooden structure from which speeches were delivered. The candidates arrived at the head of rival processions of supporters, wearing their respective colours. The poll was usually held the next day, with voters brought to the poll in groups. Their eligibility to vote was checked, the agent on either side could challenge it (and ask them to take loyalty oaths if it was thought they might be Jacobites, radicals or dissenters), then if he “passed” he orally delivered his two votes to the poll clerk, who noted them in the official poll booth. (There was no attempt to keep this secret.)

Those who opposed the secret ballot argued that the vote “was a public trust exercised on behalf of the non-voters by the voters.” (p. 29)

And those in favour had interests that might not square with our views: “The main objective of the bill was to keep the voter ‘from from illegitimate influence’ while securing for him ‘the full force of all those legitimate influences arising from the education, the character and the tone of those with whom he lived.’ … the object of the bill was to protect voters from agitators and mob orators just as much as from electoral patrons.”

“For the ordinary voter to fully realise there were no overt pressures on him to vote in a particular manner would take time … Most tenants seem obediently to have done what was asked of them by their patrons. In Lincolnshire, one of the counties most closely studied, the ballot made little difference, either to patterns of voting ot to patterns of representation… This was also the case in many boroughs.” (p. 32-33)

J. Crowley “Uses and abuses of the secret ballot in the American age of reform”
p. 59 “From the 1880s aristocratic reformers came to realise that the Australian ballot, which they had traditionally opposed, could serve the purposes of the anti-democratic reaction… Left-wing parties and movements were still demanding the ballot in the name of democracy, and Southern supremacists were agitating for it for their own purposes.”

In the South the Austalian ballot was, mostly explicitly and straightforwardly racist…
p.60 “In some cases candidates were placed on the ballot in alphabetical order with no indication of party affiliation. Each ballot, remember, comprised dozens of names. In one famous case the entire ballot was printed in medieval Gothic lettering. … Several states hit on the astute principle that voters should strike out the candidates they did not wish to see elected by drawing a line through three-quarters of the length of their names.” (Which left an awful lot of judgement to the polling officer – very like those pregnant, dimpled and hanging chads of recent memory.

The collection also includes a fascinating account by Christophe Jaffrelot of the development of the voting system in India – how the attempt to overcome illiteracy by use of symbols firmly entrenched a system with only a few parties, but also how the Electoral Commission has developed increasingly sophisticated methods to stop vulnerable groups of voters being intimidated by ensuring the way they voted couldn’t be determined, but how they still often decide collectively how to vote “tactically”.

Some of that fetishisation of the method of voting is found in R. Bertrand’s “The engineers of democracy: election monitoring agencies and political change in post-Suharto Indonesia”, which paints a rather depressing picture of the country in the grip of political militias.

And the secret ballot can be presented as creating division and discord; in David Recondo’s “From Acclamation to Secret Ballot: the Hybridisation of Voting Procedures in Mexican-Indian Communities” is an account of the effects of the 1995 decision in the state of Oaxaca, in the south, to officially recognise the “habits and customs” by which rural communities designated municipal authorities.

p. 160 “Those who have founded a family and own a parcel of community land are obliged to work for the community, in do doing they acquire the right to participate in collective decisions. Women do not always participate in the assembly, although the survey found that in 70 per cent of municipalities they did so.”

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History

London awakes in 1859

April 15, 2007 – 3:05 pm

Wikipedia describes George Augustus Sala, the 19th-century journalist and writer as “voluble”, and that hardly covers it – he’s not a man to use five words when he could think of 50, but he’s nevertheless engaging, if distinctly lightweight. I’m reading his Twice Round the Clock or the Hours of the Day and Night in London (1859). He starts at 4am, at Bllingsgate Market. Since I’m staying now in Somers Town, thought I’d share this segment. (“Offal” means odd lots of different kinds of fish, or pieces of fish.)

“‘Offal’ is bought only by the ‘fryers’ … [He] buy(s) 15 to 20 doubles [baskets] of one kind or another; and in the season the habitues of the market say he will purchase from 25 to 30 bushells of periwinkles and whelks … this Rothschild of the offal tribe, resides in Somers Town. To him resort to purchase stock those innumerable purveyors of fried fish who make our courts and bye-streets redolent with the oleaginous perfums of their hissing cauldrons.” (p. 21)

The feel of Somers Town now – still crowded, old, a little down-at-heel, makes it easy to imagine these sellers plying their wares. (Although not as bad as a decade or so, a cab driver was telling me, when it used to be a serious red-light district, of which now only traces remain.)

At 5am Sala’s in Printing House Square, as The Times starts distribution:

“The tables are covered with huge piles of newspapers spread out the full size of the sheet. These are, with dazzling celerity, folded by legions of stout porters, and straightaway carried to the door, where cabs and carts, and lift express phaeton-like vehicles, are in readiness to convey them to the railway stations. The quantity … is prodigious,l but your astonishment will be increased when I tell you that this only forms the stock purchased every morning by those gigantic newsagents, Messrs Smith and Son, of the Strand. As the largest consumers, the Times naturally allows them a priority of supply, and it is not for a considerable period after they have received their orders that the great body of newsagents and newsvenders — the ‘trade’ as they are generically termed — are admitted, grumbling intensely, to buy the number of quires or copies which they expect to sell or lend that day.” (p. 35)

At 6am he’s in Covent Garden market…

“And so from all outlying nursery-grounds and market-gardens about London: from Brompton, Fulham, Brentford, Chicwick, Turnham Green and Kew; from sober Hackey, and Dalston and Kingsland, bank-clerk beloved; from Totten ham and Edmonton, sacred to John Gilpin, his hat and wig; from saintly Clapham and Brixton, equally interested in piety, sugar-naking, and the funds, come, too heavy to gallop, too proud to trot, but sternly stalking in elephantine dignity of profession, the great carts found to Covent Garden.” (p. 43 – Not too many of those places today are recognisable from those descriptions.)

But some of the produce comes from further afield: “Black steamers from Rotterdam and Anterwep belch forth volumes of smoke at the Tower stairs, and discharge cargoes of peaces and potatoes.” (p. 45)

At 7am he’s imagining himself in aristoractic nurseries:

“Many meek-faced, plainly-dressed young ladies, of native and foreign extraction, attached as governesses to the aristocratic families in question, are already in the school-room, sorting their pupils’ copy-books, or preparing for the early repetition of the music lesson, which is drummed and thrummed over in the morning pending the arrival of Signor Papadaggi or Herr Hammerer, who comes for an hour and earns a guinea. The governess, Miss Grissell, does not work more than 12 hours a day, and she earns perhaps 50 guineas a year against Papadaggi’s 1,500 and Hammerer’s 2,000. But then, she’s only a governess. Her life is somewhat hard, and lonely, and miserable, and might afford, to an ill-regulated mind, some cause for grumbling: but it is her duty to be patient, and not to repine.” (p.55)

Their sisters in taverns are also at work:

“Young ladies who officiate in the bar, and look very drowsy, in their curl-papers and cotton-print dresses, are rubbing the pewter counters and the brass-work of the beer-engines, the funnels and whisky noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogy, cutting up the pork pies which Mr Watling’s man has just left, displaying the Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal canopies. … I like the barmaid, for she is often pretty, always civil, works about 14 hours a day for her keep and from 18 to 20 pounds a year, is frequently a kinless orphan out of that admirable Licensed Victuallers’ School, and is, in nine cases out of ten, as chaste as Diana.”

At 8am the shops start opening:

“In the magnificent linendrapery establishments of Oxford and Regents Street, the cast shop-fronts, museums of fashion in plate-glass cases, offer a series of animated tableuax poses plastiques in the shape of young ladies in morning costume, and young gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths, faultlessly complete as to costume, with the exception that they are yet in their shirt sleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and myserious feat known as “dressing” the shop window. By their nimble and practiced hands the riched piled velvet mantles are displayed, the moire and glace silks arranged in artful folds, the laces and gauzes, the innumerable whim-whams and fribble-frabble of fashion, elaborately shown, and to their best advantage.” (p. 77 Not much has changed there then.)

At 9am: breakfast

“Are those eggs we see in the coffee-shop windows, by the side of the lean chop with a curly tail, the teapot with the broken spout, and the boulder-looking kidneys, ever eaten, and if so, what secret do the coffee-shop propreitors possess of keeping them from entire discomposition? For I have watched these eggs for weeks together, and known them by bits of straw and flecks of dirt mucilaginously adhering to their shells, to be the self-same eggs; yet when I have entered the unpretending house of refreshment, and ordered “tea and an egg” I have seen the agile but dingy handmaiden swiftly approach the window, slide the glass panel back with numble (though dusky) fingers, convey an egg to the mysterious kitchen in the background, and in a few minutes place the edible before me boiled, yet with suffient marks of straw upon it to enable me to discern my ancient friend.” (p. 79)

He’s of his time, of course, but it does feel like Sala’s heart is in the right place…

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