… but the memories keep being stirred up.

The Marlowe quote is one of my favourites, but events have been conspiring lately to bring up most past.

Gordon of The Worsley Blog” has been remembering one of his former “guests”, a persistent possum, whose story is told here.

His description of their “good imitation of hobnail boots when trotting across ceilings” reminded me of when I was a teenager in my study, which had a flat tin roof. Possums didn’t seem to like to live in the huge old oak tree in the front yard, but they certainly liked its acorns, so they used to stamp across the roof from the trees in the backyard to the front in the early evening, then back at various stages during the night. If the cat happened to be out during the procession they’d sit on the guttering and hiss and snarl at her.

(Sadly the oak tree, and the house, are gone now. It was older than the Edwardian house, perhaps one of the oldest oak trees in Sydney – reputedly the site used to be a nursery and they’d pot new plants in its shade – but they knocked down both to build four villas on the big block – no doubt making a big profit since it was close to Epping station. So goes the history of Sydney.)

I’ve also been putting up on my website a couple of stories from my early days as a journalist (for reasons on which I may later post) in Henty, in southern NSW. The stories, I’m pleased to rediscover, make quite decent oral history – even if I’d now like to edit aspects of the writing.

There’s the story of Amy Kleeman, who grew up on a Murray river paddleboat, the Alpha, and of Myrtle Jenkyn, for 50 years, on her own account, an (unpaid) correspondent for local papers. That’s all so far; I might add more later.

I have only a dim memory of interviewing Mrs Kleeman – a very crowded, knick-knack-infested sitting room – but Myrtle was definitely memorable – a huge old farmhouse living room with every surface, and most of the floor, covered with piles of newspapers, magazines and clipping files. I also remember her “despatches”, always written on small pieces of paper. The old-fashioned, spidery handwriting started in lines but then snaked around the sides, was squished in the corners, and generally almost impossible to follow. (Thanks Pat, who often helped me decipher it.)

The only story of hers that I remember was about the time an old carthorse was brought back into service after a car, then a tractor, both got bogged. The report was that it got them both out.

… sit down and I’ll tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there were no “girls’ books” with pink covers and princesses on the front, and “boys’ books” with green and brown “camouflage” covers and a man with a spear, there were just children’s books.

The genre of “children’s book” is generally said to have begun in the 1740s, when three publishers, including Mary Cooper, “began to provide children with books designed to delight as well as instruct them. Increasing middle-class literacy and prosperity set the stage for this development, along with the gradual popular dissemination of John Locke’s educational philosophy, which advocated teaching children through play.” (p. 166)

In the late 18th and early 19th century, “all featured children of both sexes as characters and were intended for readers of both sexes. {They} … taught obedience, submission to authority, and selflessness as the cardinal virtues of both girls and boys.” (p. 167)

The sudden change, Elizabeth Segel suggests, occurred in the 1850s, with the market growing large enough for specialisation, with a desire to provide “suitable” reading for young misses past the childish literature stage but considered to innocent for “adult” reading, and the increasingly sharp differentiation of the genders in adult life (p. 169-170)

Boys’ books sent them out into the world, having boundless adventures, with only the occasional moral message tacked on almost as an afterthought, while girls were being trained to accept their confinement in the home, as classically represented by What Katy Did (1872), in which a her exuberance and disobedience leads to her being crippled, by which she enters the “School of Pain”, but in it she learns to be kind, virtuous and a replacement mother for her younger siblings. “The disturbing message that the ideal woman is an invalid is scarcely veiled”. (p. 174)

I had a copy of What Katy Did, and the two (?) sequels, which had been Mum’s, but remember not liking them much – I can see why now. If you want to depress yourself you can read it here.

By the time I “should” have been reading this I was in the “adult” section of the library – as I recall reading first Westerns, then romances (yes Mills and Boons, but I was only about 12), then war books … what all of that did to my head I dread to think. (And of course the Harold Robbins’s – I was about 12 when Dad said: “On no account should you read this book, which he’d got from the library; well you can guess the rest. It was “The Pirate”, and it must have made quite an impression on an impressionable mind, because I remember it still quite well!)

From E. Segel “As the twig is bent … gender and childhood reading, in E. Flynn and P. Schwickart (eds) Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contents, John Hopkins Uni Press, Baltimore, 1986.

In her comment on my post two days ago on women servants, Sharon kindly pointed to her bibliography on early modern servants here.

She also reminded me in her Denbighshire account of another woman of my “acquaintance” who was not a servant but an entrepreneur in her own right: Hester Pinney.

Born in 1658 in Dorset, the daughter of a Puritan minister who was ejected from the ministry for his beliefs and then took up lace-trading, she moved to London in 1682. His wife, Jane, and Hester’s four older sisters were also involved in the trade.

She lived in London for the next 58 years, although never with a permanent address. This might seem to be a “female” pattern, but her relation by marriage, the poet John Gay, did the same thing. Hester seems to have sometimes “lived in” with aristocratic patrons, being a high-class servant and semi-independent contractor, perhaps somewhat above a lady’s maid, but she also spent much time trading independently at the Royal Exchange.

The stalls there did not have storage, “so the sisters presumably stored their bundles of lace in taverns” (where Hester also sometimes boarded). (Which brings up the old issue of women in taverns, also discussed here.)

Her brother Azariah was sentenced to be hung in Monmouth’s rebellion, but she managed to bribe an agent who convinced the Lord Chief Justice to commute the sentence to transportation. (And he quickly set up a lace business in the West Indies.)

After her sister married (unwisely), Hester operated on her own, but didn’t please her family (particularly the tavern bit). Yet she also met other businesswomen in taverns e.g. Dorothy Rose, a seamstress who seems to have been planning to make her lace up into clothes and drapery, in a tavern on the Strand.

By the 1690s she had built up her business (which also involved money-lending and other financial dealings) so that she was a serious “catch” on the marital market but although she showed definite affection for one suitor, she chose, and to some extent was pushed by the family, to remain single.

From “Dealing with Love: The Ambiguous Independence of the Single Woman in Early Modern England,’ Gender and History, Vol 11, No 2, July 1999, pp. 209-212.

According to Amnesty International, in 2002, 81% of known executions took place in three nations: China, Iran and the United States. As you might expect, China was the chief contributor, with 1,060 (and probably more that weren’t documented), but the US and Iran were almost level in this macabre race: 113 to 71.

Leaves the state department complaints about human rights abuses in Iran pretty hollow, that does.

From Fifty Facts that Should Change the World, by Jessica Williams, Icon 2004: the first book that I have bought after reading about it on the author’s blog, Vixgirl.

Fifty Facts also notes that every cow in the EU is subsidised by $2.50 a day, more than 75% of Africans have to live on, and since 1977 there have been nearly 80,000 acts of disruption or violence abortion clinics in North America. (And that’s a statistic that can only get worse, in the current climate.)

It also talks about Brazilian Avon ladies and the American belief in aliens – a good read, if a bit depressing just at the moment.

A book that I bought for a couple of its other chapters has greatly helped me to clarify in my own mind the position of women servants in London from the 17th to 20th centuries.

Patty Seleski’s chapter on “Women, work and cultural change in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century London”, paints a picture of a group that belongs very distinctly to the working classes, has few or no emotive ties or investment in their employers, the members of which will change jobs at the drop of a hat, confident in the expectation that it will be easy to get another. They were working class, proud of it and assertive of their rights. Their jobs, however, were not much fun. “Urban domestic service emphasised the social distance between servants and their employers … [the servants] primarily performed menial and not productive labour within the household … the domestic drudgery which dominated maidservant’s days could not be confused with the duties of a mistress in training.” (p. 148)

This is the middle group in the period. The early time, to which this article makes reference, is one I’ve been exploring, when you tended to have “waiting women” rather than servants, in which, as Seleski puts it:
“Service was almost entirely contiguous with adolescence and young adulthood and it played an important role as a stage in women’s lives during which they had an opportunity to learn the secrets of housewifery before they themselves became mistresses.” (p. 148)

The final period is hinted at rather than described, but refers no doubt to our traditional view of Victorian “upstairs/downstairs” in which there was a plentiful supply of labour and servants faced a great risk, if they lost their “character”, of having no hope of legal employment. They were thus far more in the hold of their employers and forcibly separated from working-class life.

How much nicer to be in the 18th or early 19th-century, when, after you’d decided you’d had enough of one place, you could as did Mary Warnett and Mart Curtain, spend your days idling at a public house in Honey Lane Market, Cheapside, drinking, singing and generally having a good time. “Their flirtatious behaviour led some newcomers to the pub to suspect them of being prostitutes, but the pub’s regular customers defended their high-spirits and good-humour as innocent fun. Temporarily out of service, they looked and behaved like others among the labouring poor.” (p. 151)

From T. Harris (ed) Popular Culture in England c. 1500-1850, Macmillan, London, 1995, pp. 143-167.

One of the first things you learn as a journalist is never to accept informants’ claims that this is the _first time_ this has been done. The accepted form of writing this up is in a quote, or by saying “it is said to be the first” …

That way, when you get the inevitable, “but my grandfather did that in 1930” letters, you can point out that the newspaper didn’t say it was the first.

If the Dictionary of National Biography says it, however, if must be true, so I’ll report that I learnt today that the first female war correspondent, one of Barbara Tuchman’s predecessors, was Lady Dixie. The DNB says says:
“The publication of Across Patagonia (1880) established Lady Dixie’s reputation as a bold and resourceful traveller with a pen as ready as her gun. It was also partly the reason for her appointment as the Morning Post’s war correspondent in South Africa where the Anglo-Zulu War was raging; she was the first woman to be officially appointed by a British newspaper to cover a war.
“Her husband accompanied her and, although on arriving in Cape Town in March 1881 they found to her chagrin that hostilities were over, they spent the next six months in southern Africa. They toured the country, visiting the battlefields and learning something of the causes and the course of the late conflict, while Lady Dixie contributed articles to the Morning Post in which she championed the cause of Cetewayo and his Zulu people. These provided material for A Defence of Zululand and its King (1882).”
This from the DNB’s free daily email, for which you can sign up here.
(I know I also posted from one of these on Friday, but I’m not on commission, really!)