I wonder if anyone has any experience, personal or second-hand, of the London Library? The subscription is £180 a year, which sounds a lot, but looking at the effective monthly rate of £15 (only two or three books purchased on abebooks or Amazon) it starts to sound like good value. And it does look rather swish.

In return I offer an excellent little website that I discovered yesterday. It is on the Victorian Research Web, but is a listing by date of academic and similar lectures in London, nearly all free, on just about any subject you could imagine.

Listed on it for today was “The Scarlet Staine of Divinity and the King’s worst enemy: Dr Wild and Mr Jekyll,” an Institute for Historical Research seminar that I attended. It was about political campaigns by the Presbyterians during the Restoration (although I didn’t know that when I started – it was one of my “lucky dips”).

The Jekyll was John, father of Sir Joseph (the only web reference I found). A very well-connected man, whose wife I learnt kept a diary of his exploits during the Civil War, he was arrested during Monmouth’s Rebellion (the area in which the talk intersected with my current interests) but immediately released after a petition to the King.

The Wild was the poet Robert, who Dryden recognised as the most popular in London.
His complaint about the nonconformist’s postion in 1672 after the “declaration for liberty of conscience”:

“We wou’d make Bonfires, but that we do fear
The name of Incend’ary we may hear.
We wou’d have Musick too, but ’twill not doo,
For all the Fidlers are Conformists too.
Nor can we ring, the angry Churchman swears
(By the Kings leave) the Bells and Ropes are theirs.”

Checking out this took me to an interesting article: Making all religion ridiculous: Of Culture High and Low: the Polemics of Toleration, 1667-1673. Also found the Historical and Literary Chronology: 1659-1700.

This excursion into the 17th century followed a day spent a million or two years earlier, on the tools of early hominids – of which more in a week or so. I do love a bit of intellectual variety!

Jill Ker Conway, the subject of my last post, moved from the outback of Australia, which she left at age 12 to go to Sydney, where she went to school for the first time. (She’s funny on the subject of “not understanding” what PE classes were FOR – in the Bush you got plenty of exercise anyway.)

She went (eventually) to a posh private school, where teachers, parents and pupils were split on whether the pupils were seriously studying, or just waiting for marriage (just as they were in my semi-posh private school in Sydney some 30 years later).

Next was the University of Sydney still, at least in the field of history, a humble colonial outpost, then on to Harvard. Along the way she’d done the obligatory tour of Europe (that is something else that hasn’t changed), although in her case with her mother, during which time she learnt a healthy contempt for English snobbery, understandingly enough.

She seems to have an unfortunate almost hero-worship for America at the end of The Road from Coorain. I’ve already ordered the next volume of her memoir, True North, which takes her from Harvard, to Toronto, to the presidency of Smith College. It will be interesting to see where she ends up on that point.

She’s obviously a brilliant intellect, yet there are so many points at which this chain could have been broken and she could have ended up yet another bored, frustrated housewife suffering from Betty Friedan’s “the problem that has no name”. There’s part of a fair answer there to the anti-female head of Harvard University’s claim that women don’t get to the top because they lack “innate ability”. (Doesn’t he look curiously like a pig, by the way?)

I was trying to think of any people of whom I have read who’ve made longer journeys – temporally, socially and culturally – than Jil Ker Conway and I only came up with one, Pascal Khoo Thwe, author of From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey. A member of a hill tribe from Burma, he ends up, after a brief period at the University of Mandalay, fighting in the jungle against the government. Then, through the intervention of a don, he suddenly finds himself at Cambridge, studying English literature.

If I could find my copy I’d provide an extract; I really am going to have to have a total bookshelf reorganisation. Sigh.

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outback, originally uploaded by natalieben.

My resolution never to go into television journalism was formed early, when I went out drinking with a local TV newsreader. I had to run interference for her all evening in a nightclub, as drunken people who thought she was their friend because she was in their living room every night came to pour out their troubles to her.

Consequently, even though I’m sure my readers are a far more distinguished lot, I haven’t got a picture of myself on this blog, but I reckon I’m safe enough posting this nearly two decade-only pic of me on a very good polocrosse horse who knew I wasn’t a good enough rider for him. It was taken on a property west of Nyngan (western NSW).

And it does nicely illustrate for those who haven’t seen it the sort of country that Jill Ker Conway describes growing up in, near Lake Cargelligo in western NSW, in her The Road from Coorain.

I mentioned previouslyher excellent advice on difficult partings.

This book speaks a lot to me on many levels – although I didn’t grow up in the bush and am the next generation there’s many echoes of my family in her circumstances – but what I want to talk about here is her view of Australian, specifically Sydney, society in the 1950s.

“The most interesting circle at the University [Sydney, then the only one] revolved around the philosophy and political science departments, and a small coterie of gifted faculty and students who were iconoclasts, cultural rebels and radical critics of Australian society. I liked their ideas, and enjoyed the fact that their circle also contained journalists and serious writers about Australian politics.” (Interesting distinction made there!)

She complains, however, that in this group it was obligatory to reject “bourgeois conventions” of sexuality by sleeping with many different people, and that the women were doing all of the housework, childcare, etc, while the men did all the fun and glory-generating stuff.

“I came to see that their position of isolation from the mainstream of Australian society was an unhappy and paralyzing one. There was no social group on which cultural radicals could base a program of action in Australia. …We might spend all the time we liked discussing McCarthyism in the United States and the antidemocratic tendencies of Catholic Action in Australia, but there was no one waiting for our pronouncements … My radical friends were isolated and alientated, more like a religious sect within an uncaring secular society than their models, the European intelligentsia who labored intellectually in a world where ideas mattered. (p. 220-222)

Funny, or I might say tragic, how that reflects Australia in 2005. There were patches of advances, in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, but my impression of Australia now is that it is closer to the Fifties than any of those better decades.

Apparently in the 18th century French, or at least, Parisian, society had a very practical method of dealing with illegitimacy, and stopping girls and women seeking abortions. Louis Sebastien Mercier, chronicler of the city, reports midwives would house girls in their apartment, each living in a screened-off area so that they could talk to but not see each other.

They would tell relatives, friends and neighbours that they were spending time in the country. The midwife would take the baby to be adopted or to a foundling hospital.

The only problem in this comfortable tale is that this service was expensive, so available only to the bourgeois and above. (p. 27)

These babies would, apparently, be joining many others. Some have calculated that 40 per cent (!!) of all children born in 18th-century France ended up in foundling hospitals (p. 20)

From: The King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray, by Nina Rattner Gelbart. See below.

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midwifemap, originally uploaded by natalieben.

I think I’ve already found one of my books of 2005, The King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray, by Nina Rattner Gelbart.

Above is the map assembled by the author (from ten years of research, primarily in French provincial archives) of the travels of Mme Coudray (1715-1794), who after more than a decade as a leading midwife in Paris move to the countryside and, seeing the horrific state of ignorance and mutilation of women and babies that was occurring decided to fix the situation.

Through skilled, persistent campaigning, she won support and funding from the king (and she had to keep fighting to retain it). She was utterly realistic about her work, developing a “machine” that modelled a baby and womb so that ill-educated or uneducated countrywomen could learn by feel what was needed in normal, or abnormal, births.

Unlike her contemporary in England Elizabeth Nihell, she was not explicitly feminist, prepared to work with and adapt to the surgeons and male midwives then trying to take over the profession (and educate them, when they were prepared to listen).

Having developed this programme, she then took it to all the parts of France that would accept her, as the above map indicates, at a time when it was customary to make a will before embarking on a journey, and the experience could only be described as an endurance test.

The effects she had can be illustrated from a survey in 1786 of medical services around the country. Of the 6,000 midwives whose answers survive (many have been lost), two-thirds had been trained by Mme du Coudray or one of the surgeons that she had trained in her method. (And she is the only trainer mentioned by name. p. 250)

Sadly, but perhaps inevitably, she was after all the “royal” midwife, she died in unknown circumstances while in the hands of the agents of the Revolution, but her “niece” (any blood relationship is unclear), Mme Coutanceau, who she had trained but who became more explicitly feminist, managed to carry on the work from Bordeaux, where she established and ran a birthing clinic that helped the poor and trained midwives.

(Almost nothing on the web: there’s a picture of the only surviving machine and reviews of the book here and here.)

A fascinating Historical Association talk today at the British Museum on George III and the King’s Library, by Robert Lacey. The revisionist view of George is that he wasn’t really mad, just ill, porphyria, and there is an attached claim that he had assembled his huge and expensive library of (finally) 65,000 volumes with the intention of it ending up as the property of the nation. Lacey disputes the latter, with what seemed to me persuasive evidence.

The key points (as I understood them):

* His will of 1770 (the one that seems to have been probated – although it is impossible to be sure, since monarchs’ wills, unlike any others, remain secret – nice to live in a democracy) left the books explicitly to his son, the future Regent and George IV, then a “promising” little boy.

* Several unsigned wills drafted in 1808 (when he knew what his son was really like), that the King meant to sign but was prevented from so doing by illness, directed that the books “should be enjoyed by our son and heir … and after his demise … by the person entitled to the Crown.”

* The young George bought the collection of the British Consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, of fine “high-class” books at about the same time as the Thomason collection of Civil War pamphlets. The latter he immediately gave to the then British Museum, the former he kept for himself.

When George III died, his indebted and profligate son actually tried to sell the whole lot to Czar Alexander of Russia, through the Russian ambassador’s wife, the lively Princess Lieven, but pressure from politicians, including the much-maligned Lord Liverpool, forced him instead to give it to the nation (probably in a trade-off for grand building schemes at Windsor Castle and Buckingham House).

(The “old” royal library, built up from the time of Edward IV, was given to the Museum by George II, who very definitely wasn’t the bookish sort; the “new”, post-George IV one, was willed by his brother, William, in such a way as to ensure it has to remain in the royal family. Mischievous thought: Wonder what would happen to it if Britain became a republic?)