Over on Your London My London I’ve just reviewed Front Page: Celebrating 100 Years of the British Newspaper. But is it an early obituary, one pulled from the morgue just a little too soon?
Although of course the British Library will be dealing with the corpse for a long time. The Colindale repository is apparently full, the storage conditions inadequate, and a high percentage of the collection at risk, newsprint being, by its nature, a librarian’s nightmare.
My 19th-century “blogger” is today displaying a fine sceptical mind on the claim that a sign of “great men” is their ability to sleep under even massive pressure. (Her Victorian male editor, however, has swallowed the myth wholesale, in his gushing collection of notes.)
Miss Williams Wynn discusses the tales of Pitt (the Younger, I think) and the Duke of Wellington apparently being able to fall asleep under the greatest of pressures. She says:
This is called a proof of greatness of mind. I am more inclined to believe that youth, health, and fatigue produce a sort of absolute necessity for sleep, which no mental excitation can remove; and I am confirmed in this opinion by hearing that, in his after days, and especially in his last illness, poor Pitt never could sleep. The Duke of Wellington is always brought forward as the most extraordinary instance of a person who, under the most violent excitations of his eventful career, could always, and at all hours of the day or night, get sleep during any repose, however short it might be, that circumstances allowed. Perhaps great bodily fatigue enabled him to find ‘ tired Nature’s sweet restorer.’ I wonder whether he is a good sleeper now.
This is the lovely quote that starts the Carnival of Bad History No 6, just up on the Japanese Frog in a Well.
Congratulations to Kusuma Barnett, volunteers’ co-ordinator at the British Museum, who was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. I haven’t found a MSM story about her, but she deserves one. She is THE programme, and a volunteer herself.
Since the beach season is approaching, from my inbox, a site listing Medieval Mysteries by Historians.
If you’re stuck in the office on a quiet afternoon, you could play with National Archive’s new currency converter – converting through time and commodity. So, it says, with 1 pound, 2 shillings and 4 old pennies, in 1400 you could buy a cow.
The following is from the commonplace book/diary of a law student, John Manningham:
Folio 44b
October 1602
The Earl of Sussex keepes Mrs. Sylvester Morgan (sometyme his ladies gentlewoman) at Dr. Daylies house as his mistress, calls hir his Countesse, hyres Captain Whitlocke, with monie and cast suites, to brave his countes, with telling of hir howe he buyes his wench a wascote of 10£, and puts hir in hir velvet gowne, &c.
Thus not content to abuse hir by keeping a common wench, he strives to invent meanes to of more greife to his lady, whoe is of a verry goodly and comely personage, of excellent presence, and a rare witt.
Shee hath brought the Earl to allowe hir 1700£ a yeare for the maintenaunce of hir selfe and hir children while she lives apart.
It is conjectured that Captain Whitlocke, like a base pander, hath incited the Earl to followe this sensuall humour, of preferring strang fleshe before his owne, as he did the Earl of Rutland.
…The Countesse is the daughter to the Lady Morrison in Hartfordshire, with whom it is like she purposeth to live.
“I would be loath to come after him to a wench for feare of the pox,” said Mr Curl of Earl of Sussex.
I silently extended the contractions, but left the original spellings, from p. 97-98, Sorlien, R.P. (ed) The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple 1602-1603, Uni Press of New England, Hanover, 1976.
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