Philobiblon

Thompson also has a chapter on the sale of wives, which was obviously a hot topic in academia at his time of writing the essay. (There are several pages of heated self-defence that make a fascinating little study of the sociology of the ivory tower.)

The procedure involved the woman being publicly displayed with a rope halter and the conduct of a public auction (although the ‘winner’ was usually pre-decided), which in some lower-class quarters was considered to make the transaction, effectively a divorce, perfectly legal.

Thompson says that while some wives were undoubtedly abused victims, in many other cases the wife connived at, or even drove, the event. He quotes (among others) a case in Wenlock market in the 1830s:

“When he husband got to ‘market-place ‘e turned shy, and tried to get out of the business, but Mattie mad’ un stick to it. ‘Er flipt her apern in ‘er guide man’s face and said, ‘Let be, yer rogue. I wull be sold. I wants a change.'” (p. 462)

(Apologies to any ESL readers – if you pronounce it aloud it is easier to understand the dialect.)

Of course someone has also done it on eBay, as the BBC reports. Legal notes and some good cross-refs here and here.

A long time ago when I was studying agricultural economics, we were taught about The Tragedy of the Commons as a simplistic piece of propaganda for laissez-faire capitalism. The story goes that if something is not owned by someone everyone will exploit it until it is destroyed; the “obvious” answer is to privatise it.

Hence I was very pleased to read yesterday about a success of the commons, how in Woking “rough music” (i.e. loud public shaming rituals, like the charivaris discussed last week) was used to protect the common, being directed against those who overstocked the common or cut excessive quantities of woof or turfs (?) from it.

This from E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, The Merlin Press, London, 1991, p. 519. (Thanks to Sharon from Early Modern Notes for directing me to it.)

Was blog-browsing (or should I say blog-commissioning – you’ll have to read my website to get that) and came across an interesting website:

Directory of Open Access Journals
In their own words:

Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 1248 journals in the directory. Currently 320 journals are searchable on article level. As of today 59830 articles are included in the DOAJ service

It includes 31 history journals, from the History of Intellectual Culture to Nordic Notes (curiously coming out of Australia).

As part of my relaxed cultural weekend, in addition to art and theatre (the “Bollywood” production of Twelfth Night, an excellent idea not as well executed or developed as it might have been but still well worth seeing), I read Louise Welsh’s Tamburlaine Must Die, an imagining of Christopher Marlowe’s explanation of his own fate at Deptford.

It’s had mixed reviews, see a selection here. The language doesn’t always seem appropriate, but the pace is brilliant and the mentality of late Elizabethan London seems to me just right: the amorality, the fatalism, and the fervent but unreliable passions. You might ask where I’m getting that sense from and I guess to a large extent Shakespeare: a nice little piece of consilience.

More on Vanessa Bell. (Although I’m not usually into the Bloomsbury set, I think I would have liked her.)

“Her love of strong shapes and unusual colours was deeply rooted, and in her heart she was quite unapologetic. She could be fiercely condemning of other people’s taste when it fell into what she saw as the fatal traps of prettiness and refinement. Staying with her lady artist friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson in Oxfordshire she found herself repelled by the contrived and excessive care that had gone into their choice of decor – everything matched, merged and chimed; she found it dispiriting.” (p.111,112)

Having been scarred for life by a youthful exposure to such “taste”, and cushions always at a 45-degree angle, I can only sympathise.

“At Asheham, the Bell’s first Sussex home, Vanessa hung up flame-orange curtains lined with mauve. At Wissett Lodge, her rented home in Suffolk, she and Duncan distempered the walls a brilliant blue, and dyed the chair-covers with coloured ink. They even painted the hens’ tails blue. When they moved to Charleston Vanessa pained her bedroom black with red strips down the corners. Her son Quentin’s early years in London were stamped with the consciousness the the family were quite different from their neighbours – because all the other houses in Gordon Square had sober front doors while theirs was “a startling bright vermilion”. (p.115)

Let’s see: my hall and study are brilliant pink, my bedroom turquoise, my living room deep blue: getting there!

From: Among the Bohemians, Experiments in Living 1900-1939, Virginia Nicholson, Viking, London, 2002.

I also had a look at the Courtauld general exhibition, and was particularly taken by two paintings, both of women who seem to me sad.

The first, unoriginally, since everyone in the gallery stopped to look at it, and it is widely used in publicity material, was Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

The woman is described as a barmaid, but she seems far too well-dressed, and too vulnerable, to be that. The back view of her, which is almost but not quite a reflection, makes her look like a schoolgirl, with her ears reddened with embarrassment as the sinister-looking man leans towards her.

A really disturbing image.

The other piece that struck me, Vanessa Bell’s Conversation, is less obviously confronting, but my reading of it is the woman on the left in black, who is speaking is telling some tale of familiar misery that the other two fashionably dressed women have heard many times before, and while they’re putting on a sympathetic front, they’re a bit bored with it. The reproduction doesn’t really do it justice: go and see it would be my recommendation. (She was the sister of Virginia Woolf, by the way.)