Via the interesting experimental website Regender, which “translates” (turns around) the gender of words on any website. This is one of its samples, the first book of the New Testament, “Mary’s”:

1: The book of the generation of Jessica Christ, the daughter of Davida, the daughter of Abigail.
2: Abigail begat Isabel; and Isabel begat Jacqueline; and Jacqueline begat Judas and her brethren;
3: And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram;
4: And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon;
5: And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Russell; and Obed begat Jessica;
6: And Jessica begat Davida the queen; and Davida the queen begat Sonia of his that had been the husband of Urias …

In the utterly useless but satisfying facts category:

The word toady comes from “toad-eater”: “a quack’s or mountebank’s assistant who would eat, or pretend to eat, a toad so he could be cured by the medicine man. In those days, toads were considered to be poisonous. Actually, a toad’s parotoid glands and warts do secrete a poison that tastes bad and in some species will kill small predators.”

Found via the fascinating C18 email list.

The Observer has a report on an exhibition in Manchester of images of black people in Victorian Britain.

“Her remarkable show reveals black Victorians in all their surprising manifestations, not as marginal figures, but occupying both the centre of the canvas and of their own fascinating lives.”

But what I was particularly interested in was Victoria Davies, born in Britain as the daughter of a black merchant and a woman who had been rescued from slavery as a child and taken in and raised by a naval family. She went to Cheltenham Ladies College! (Now, and I imagine then, one of the poshest schools in England for girls.)

Having been to a more downmarket but broadly similar school in Australia, I imagine she must have had a hell of a time, but maybe the Victorians could be more broadminded than we imagine – would be fascinating to know how she fared.

From The Young Gallant’s Academy (1674), by Samuel Vincent, advising on behaviour at the theatre:

Let our Gallant (having paid his half Crown, and given the Doorkeeper his Ticket) presently advance himself into the middle of the Pit, where, having made his Honor to the rest of the Company, but especially to the Vizard-Marks [women of ill-repute], let him pull out his Comb, and manage his flaxen Wig with all the Grace he can. Having so done, the next step is to give a hum to the China-Orange-Wench, and give her her own rate for her Oranges (for ’tis below a Gentleman to stand haggling like a Citizen’s Wife) and then to present the fairest to the next Vizard-Mask.
… [After the play has begun] It shall Crown you with rich Commendations, to laugh aloud in the midst of the most serious and sudden Scene of the terriblest Tragedy, and to let the Clapper (your Tongue) be tossed so high that all the House may ring of it: for by talking and laughing you heap Pelion upon Ossa, Glory upon Glory: as fiirst, all the eyes in the Galleries will leave walking after the Players, and only follow you: the most Pedantick Person in the House snatches up your name: and when he meets you in the Street, he’l say, He is such a Gallant: and the people admire you.”(p. 43-44)

So next time the crisp packets in the cinema or the mobile phones in the theatre are driving you mad, remember that it used to be worse.

(Quoted in All the King’s Ladies: Actresses of the Restoration, by John Harold Wilson, The University of Chicago Press, 1958. A quite solid introductory text, with a detailed list of all of the actresses that he’d found. Not sure how much this might have been surpassed by more recent research, but not a bad place to start.)

And I was interested to learn that the baddie wearing the black hat in a Western has a long pedigree …

“Pray,” said King Charles, “what is the Meaning that we never see a Rogue in a Play, but, Godsfish! they always clap him on a black Perriwig, when it is well known one of the greatest Rogues in England [Shaftesbury] always wears a fair one?” (p. 58)

Bound to get a huge amount of attention today is a story in the Observer about a study that found young children doing better in meeting developmental goals when primarily cared for by their mothers.

Easy to know what will be done with that – get women barefoot and pregnant back in the kitchen. But of course there is another way of telling that, as Yvonne Roberts makes clear:

Leach insisted her findings should not be interpreted as a demand that mothers stay at home. Instead, she described it is as supporting a demand for ‘developmentally appropriate high quality childcare’.

Indeed it is interesting that children with childcarers did better than those with relatives, probably the researchers suggest, because childcarers (usually women looking after three or so children in their own home) made more plans and had training in helping the babies develop, which the relatives lacked.

Somehow I doubt that the need for higher-quality childcare is the spin this story will get in most quarters, however.

Hester Thrale Piozzi in 1795 wrote “’tis now grown common to suspect Impossibilities (such I think ’em) whenever two Ladies live too much together – that horrible Vice … has a Greek name now & is call’d Sapphism”. The idea for Life Mask, the author tells us, came from this note in the commonplace book of the writer and literary salonniere, and in the novel Emma Donoghue recounts British society’s discovery of the existence and possibility of lesbianism.

(I can’t vouch for the full historical accuracy of this, but it certainly is true that the often pornographic libels of earlier political conflicts – in the Civil War and the period between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution – don’t seem to include this claim, and they do sling mud on any other sexual topic you can think of. And historical tradition tells us that news of the development had still not reach Queen Victoria when she was considering laws against homosexuality.)

Donoghue does an excellent job of recreating the intersecting late 18th-century worlds of high society and theatre in Life Mask, with the rustle of silk and the squeak of greasepaint. Yet what is most remarkable – and probably authentic – is that her characters, at least the central women, live in an atmosphere of tension and fear that permeates the whole book, and left this reader osmotically on edge. In the Beau Monde, what it calls “the World”, these two women – an actress and a widowed sculptress – live, for different reasons, on the edge of expulsion.

That’s not to say Life Mask is not an enjoyable read – it is, and a solid, if slow-moving, tale based apparently on fact – “I’ve tried to stick to the truth where it seemed to matter most”, Donoghue says. (Although this does raise a question of what “matters”. It seems safe to assume that the bedroom scenes were made up, but what else?) An interview with the author helps to answer that question.

At the novel’s centre is the relationship between the Earl of Derby and London’s “Queen of Comedy”, the actress Eliza Farren. Derby is tied with, it seems the same solidity as he holds his Whig political views, to this woman of humble Irish background, whom he woos in chaste chase – her mother always in attendance as chaperone. He can only wait for his ill wife, already put aside for adultery, to die.

Eliza is riding on a knife-edge – “unwomanly” because of her chastity in the face of this sustained campaign, yet the smallest slip towards sexual display can slide her back into the status of “kept woman”, forever outside the circle of polite society. The fall need not even be the result of her own actions; the showers of competing scandal sheets that float across London daily – far less controlled and controllable than any modern-day tabloid assault – could sway the theatre mob against her, and take away reputation and career with one deft phrase, one outrageous sketch. And every year she gets older, and has to wonder if a younger rival mightn’t come along. Even her faithful mother pushes at times for her to take the traditional courtesan route, accepting second status, outside society, in return for a guaranteed income for life.

Anne Damer, who becomes her unlikely friend, at least has the security provided by a steady if small income, a respectable ancestry and her work as a sculpture, albeit that she is the only “lady sculptor” in living memory, and hence more of an oddity on show than someone to be taken seriously as an artist. Yet she has in her past a feckless husband with whom she was never on good terms, who finally shot himself dead in a tavern in the company of two whores and a fiddler . It wasn’t her fault, says society, really, but then why did their relationship never take off, never produce children …

This is a period of wider political concerns. The novel covers in considerable detail the time before and after the French Revolution, as many of the milder Whigs swing over to the conservative side of Prime Minister William Pitt, pushed by the excesses in Paris. Derby is a solid backer of Fox right to the end, as is Eliza, as she’s pulled into the political orbit, while Anne swings to the Burkean right.

Derby tells the House of Lord:

“It is the government’s Secret Committee that strongly resembles the sinister Jacobins. It is the spider’s web of spies and informers that stretches across our islands – men who invent conspiracies to earn their pay – it is these spider’s webs … that adopt the abominable techniques of the French. … My Lords, if you pass this Habeas Corpus Bill in a spirit of panic, you’ll be suspending that sacred liberty, won by our forefathers, that until this year has defined us as Englishmen.”

There are definite modern resonances there – even arguments about the same foundations of English law being undercut in the face of foreign and domestic threats.

The story also swings through the world of contemporary letters, with Anne the confidante of the elderly Horace Walpole. It is at his home that she meets Mary Berry, who is to complicate and confuse other relationships in the book, and finally draw in on all of them a terrifying wave of scandal.

So there’s much to get into in this novel, many lives, many ideas, many images, but I was left on the final page with a feeling of dissatisfaction. Certainly it is pleasing to see the unjustly neglected Anne Damer resurrected – nearly all of the Google hits for her come from this novel – and the relationship between the Earl and Eliza was notable for her ability to hold out for what she wanted – the title and the place in society – denied to many former actress “queens” from Nell Gwyn onwards. But Life Mask doesn’t seem, in the end to have anything to say; any real reason for existing. It is a tale of its time, but but has nothing in particular to say to our time.

The delightful Scribbling Woman has also reviewed Life Mask, while here is the Guardian’s view.

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