Philobiblon

Also on my holiday reading list was John Brewer’s Sentimental Murder, HarperCollins, 2004, an account of the treatment through the centuries of the story of the killing in 1779 of Martha Ray, the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, by a clergyman with whom she had apparently had only casual social contact, James Hackman.

It was an enjoyable, informative read, although not, it seems to me, quite so astonishingly original as some of the reviews, particularly the Observer’s, suggested. It does, however, draw together a wide range of sources in an analytical way.

(That reminds me of one final lovely line from Richard Vinen – “Historians are fond of complimenting each other on their ‘mastery of the sources’ (as if ‘the sources’ were a rebellious tribe on the North-West Frontier).” p. 642.)

One thing that is striking in reading Sentimental Murder is how often the same debates come around again and again.

“One critic of the ‘new journalism’ complained to the Morning Post:

The Political Controvery at the beginning of the Present reign [George III’s], taught printers to feel their Power: we then first find Personal Abuse, unrestrained, stalk abroad, and boldly attacked by Name the most respectable Characters. Your brethren were not idle in taking the hint: from that Period we find a material change in the stile of every News-Paper; every Public Man became an object of their attention; and many a sixpence has a Patriot earned, by Paragraphs, which a few years before, would have brought the Printer unpitied to the Pillory.” p. 42

Vinen also has a lovely line in anecdote. A few examples:
Talking about the start of the 20th century: “In Germany, and especially in Prussia, … a tough police force, composed largely of former army sergeants, enforced a ferocious penal code; in Berlin, even the length of hatpins was regulated by law.” p. 45

In the Great War, “During a single night in the Carpathian mountains, a Croat regiment lost 1,800 men to hypothermia.” p. 56.

And the one that really got me thinking about the dangers of “family” campaigners: “… the natalist policies of the Vichy government. Subsidies were given to women with children and better child-care facilities were provided, while penalties for abortion were tightened. In 1943, a woman was guillotined for having carried out an abortion.” p. 149 (There no footnote on that one; anyone know any more about the case?)

Finally an interesting conclusion about WWI:
“It was the ‘primitive’ peasant populations of eastern Europe who behaved most rationally — they deserted, allowed themselves to be taken prisoner or mutined. The fact that the war proved so long and so destructive was the result of the ‘sophistication’ of western European societies.” p. 54.

More from Richard Vinen:

In economic terms, the Thatcherite revolution benefited the young, the highly educated and the rich. Yet the rank and file Conservative Party members were old (their average age was sixty-two), poorly educated (over half of them had left school at or before the age of sixteen) and poor (six in ten had an annual income of less than £20,000). In the early 1990s, the rank and file members of the British Conservative Party — bitter, xenophobic victims of a revoltuion that their own leaders had started — bore a startling resemblence to members of the Russian Communist Party.” (p. 548)

Definitely the best of my holiday reading was Richard Vinen’s A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, which attempts to tell an even account of the history of the entire continent, not, as is traditional in most western European historiography, one focused on Britain/France/Germany, which produces an inevitable emphasis on the two “world” wars (in which for example Spain did not take part).
While the issue of “European refugees” is usually seen as a WWII and post-war problem, he points out:

There were 9.5 million refugees in Europe in 1926. One and a half million people were forcibly exchanged between Greece and Turkey; 280,000 were exchanged between Greece and Bulgaria; 2 million Poles were uprooted from their homes, as were 2 million Russians and Ukranians, 250,000 Hungarians and 1 million Germans. p.210

He has a lovely line in dry sarcasm, e.g. talking about “analysts in the 1950s” who had a view on women’s tendency to vote more often for right-wing parties.

Emphasis on [women’s] false consciousness is deceptive, because it implies that the male working class had a ‘true consciousness’ of its interests. In fact, as it turned out, the vision of the future held out by the ‘press du coeur’ was slightly more realistic thatn that held out by Humanite (some secretaries did marry millionaires, but no western European country experienced a proletarian revolution).” p. 380.

He also raises some interesting questions: “How does one compare the benefits of a laptop computer, which most bourgeois Europeans take for granted now, with those of a well-trained parlour maid, which most bourgeois Europeans took for granted in Keynes’s day?” p. 632.

… from the several hundred emails I’m hacking through after a week away.

A subscription to the new Dictionary of National Biography online costs several hundred pounds (and I can’t wait to get to the British Library to check out all of my key characters), but if you can’t justify that you can get a daily email, free, from here.

Yep, I’m back, and I was very good: I stayed away from blogging all week. I do think holidays are meant for getting away from it all.

Tonight, having arrived back in bleak rainy London, having had a wrestle at the door of my flats with a guy pushing his way in through the security door, having called the cops and after I’d spelt out the address three times giving up on them, I thought I’d share the “eureka” moment of my holiday. It was a very small thing, but I enjoyed it.

Walking along the beach at La Grau du Roi (near Montpellier)I came across what looked very like the shell of a land snail, but it had obviously been washed up from the sea. Eureka I thought, for it exactly matched an image on a replica of a 1,500BC Mycenaean cup with which I have been doing handling at the British Museum (with the Troy exhibition, now concluded). When we were doing the training, the image of snail was pointed out (together with the more prominent octopus and dolphins), and I’d thought “sea-snails, uh?”

You don’t get shells like these in Australia, so it seemed odd, but like many things you’d like to understand but never get around to exploring, it had passed me by. Now here was the answer under my feet.

Sorry if it doesn’t sound very exciting, perhaps you had to be there. Since you weren’t, however, you might like to explore all about snails at this site.

I can’t point you to a picture of the cup itself, but if you want to see some lovely Mycenaean things here’s a nice place to start.

P.S. Yes I had a lovely holiday and I’m sure London will look better in the morning.