antiquarian postcards

Notes from a field-trip to Brent Cross Shopping Centre last weekend.

Shoes for boys:

Dirt Mover
Goalblaster
Galaxyspin
Damager Police
Supercharger Nucleons
Rhino Tarantula

Shoes for girls:

Cream Love
Mouseylight
Mystyglow
Emu Paddington
Lelli Kelly Lucy Dolly
Rocket Dog Sugar Daddy

‘What is the date of Beowulf?’ I was asked the other day. I had no idea. Fortunately artnouveauho was there and kindly came to my rescue, but not before I had exposed one of the more embarrassing holes in my general knowledge. Now, however, I know the date of Beowulf, or rather I know that no one really knows the date of Beowulf, which didn’t stop the BL from putting on a ‘Beowulf 1000’ season, marking a thousand years (more or less) since the poem was written.

The highlight of the season was a round-table discussion, chaired by Michael Wood, with Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, Michael Morpurgo reading his version of the poem retold for children, and Benjamin Bagby reciting extracts of the poem in Anglo-Saxon. It was Heaney that I really wanted to hear, figuring that even though I was born a century too late to hear Tennyson reading Maud or Browning reading Childe Roland, Heaney reading Beowulf was about the nearest modern equivalent. Watching him walk on stage, it struck me that Heaney is almost the only living poet whom I could identify at sight. Would I recognise Carol Ann Duffy if I saw her in the pub? I doubt it. Could I pick Andrew Motion out of a police line-up? Probably not. But Heaney’s face is as familiar as Eliot’s or Auden’s or Larkin’s; there is an image of the poet present in my mind whenever I read the poetry.

Heaney didn’t disappoint. He was benign, somewhat professorial in manner, quite restrained in delivery (no attempt to declaim), and charmed the audience by losing his place halfway through the reading. He talked engagingly about his translation, how it had taken a long time to get going and hadn’t really begun to flow until he cracked the first word, ‘Hwaet’, by remembering a cousin of his father’s whose stories had always begun with a call to attention: ‘So’. He was at his most interesting when allowing us to look over his shoulder, as it were, at the process of revision, telling us how, translating ‘Gewat him on naca, / drefen deop waeter, Dena land ofgeaf’, he had wanted to describe Beowulf’s ship ‘tightening her cables’ but eventually decided this was too far away from the original. Then he reached for the book and read us the form of words he had finally settled on, ‘the keel plunged / and shook in the sea; and they sailed from Denmark’, shaking his head ruefully: ‘Not so good!’ I daresay these are well-polished anecdotes which he has told many times before, but even so, I came away with the agreeable feeling of having been given a privileged insight into the poet’s workshop.

The star of the evening, though, was Benjamin Bagby, who sang, spoke and chanted Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon, accompanying himself on a six-stringed harp. Heaney and Morpurgo had talked of making Beowulf accessible to modern readers; Bagby made it strange again, an artifact from an alien culture – or almost strange, for every so often a recognizable word or phrase, like ‘aenig oder man’, ‘any other man’, would emerge out of what seemed, in other respects, a completely foreign language. The debate over the date of Beowulf, as far as I understand it, hinges on whether you think it is basically a literary text, in which case it was probably composed not long before the date of the manuscript in the early eleventh century, or whether you think it is grounded in oral performance, like Homer, in which case it might have been in circulation for centuries before it was ever written down. Bagby was careful not to be drawn too far on the question of historical authenticity, but his performance certainly made a powerful case for Beowulf as an oral text.

I don’t know how to describe Bagby’s performance, so I’ll settle for a YouTube recording instead. Here he is in full flow, describing the emergence of Grendel from among the cursed kin of Cain, ‘eotenas ond ylfe ond’ – dramatic pause – ‘orcneas!’



I’m not sure the close-up does Bagby many favours; what with the manic glint in his eye, the curl of his lip and the slightly sinister grin, it lends a slightly comic edge to his rendition. Better to watch from a distance, as I did, seated somewhere near the back of the mead-hall. Still, the video is worth watching for the intensity of his performance, the mesmerising quality of his voice and the powerful silence whenever he pauses for effect. If you ever get the chance to hear Bagby perform live, do take it.

I have been thinking about the Post Office: partly because of Susan Whyman’s absorbing new book, The Pen and the People, which shows how, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Post Office gradually evolved from a mechanism for government censorship into an indispensable means for people to stay in touch with each other; partly because of the current postal dispute, which after rumbling on almost unnoticed for weeks has suddenly seized the public attention. There seems to be a widespread belief that we are living in the end-times of the Royal Mail. ‘DEAD LETTER DAY’ was The Sun’s front-page headline last Thursday, the first day of the national postal strike.

( Down among the dead men .. )

Last weekend I saw Michael Slater’s new biography of Dickens on sale in Blackwell’s, and today I read John Bowen’s review of it in the TLS. One sentence in the review puzzled me, however. Noting the tremendous energy that Dickens brought to everything he did, even his leisure pursuits, Bowen writes:

A typical relaxation would be a fifteen- or twenty-mile walk “to the great terrors of Finchley, Neasdon [sic], Willesden, and the adjacent country” while he thought out the next instalment of a novel or prepared his latest role.

( What were the terrors of Finchley? )

It was a wonderful weekend. I spent most of Saturday working in the Bodleian, getting stuck into some serious research for the first time in ages. Then in the evening I had the delight of hearing a performance of Handel’s Giulio Cesare by the Oxford Singers, with the lovely artnouveauho in the title role. I was blown away by the amount of musical talent on display. Even she is prepared to admit that it went ‘decently well’, from which I think we may deduce that it went splendidly.

Outside the college guest room where I was staying was a quince tree positively groaning with fruit. Good quinces are hard to find; ‘like the mulberry’, says Jane Grigson, ‘the quince is a tree to look out for in other people’s gardens in case they do not appreciate it, or are willing to share its fruit.’ This tree certainly didn’t seem to be appreciated; some of the fruit had already fallen and had been left to rot where it fell. The temptation was too great to resist. I picked up a few windfalls, then, growing bolder, collected about a dozen quinces off the tree. The week before I’d been lucky enough to find some quinces for sale in the local greengrocer’s, but these Oxford quinces were something else. Polished and laid out on the kitchen table at home, they glowed, making their Cypriot cousins look pale and anaemic beside them.



What do you do with quinces? The traditional thing to do is to turn them into quince paste. The Portuguese word for quince is ‘marmelo’, and it was quince paste (marmelada) imported from Portugal in the fifteenth century that inspired the English to create their own fruit preserves and christen them ‘marmalade’. Here is a page of delicious seventeenth-century recipes for quince paste, and here is a simple nineteenth-century recipe from Gunter’s Confectioner’s Oracle (1830):

Pass your fruit, after having kept it for a short time in boiling water, through a sieve, then boil it and stir it well, till it becomes a paste, adding at that period clarified loaf sugar, boiling at the blow: keep the whole (stirring) on the fire a short time longer, and then mould it as you desire.

(I’m not sure what Gunter means by ‘boiling at the blow’. Elsewhere he refers to ‘boiling a little beyond the blow’, ‘boiling at the feather’, ‘boiling to the great feather’ and ‘boiling to the ball’, obviously a whole vocabulary, now forgotten, for different degrees of heat.)

Cutting up quinces is dispiriting work; they are very tough, and when the flesh is exposed to the air it immediately begins to discolour, so you are left with a heap of dirty brown chunks looking like turnip or swede. (John Masefield, in one of his poems, has a line about the quince being like the English character, unprepossessing at first glance; ‘you never know the quince, / how good he is, until you try’.) But when they are boiled they start to release that incomparable quince fragrance which quickly perfumes the whole house. Finally you are left with a pan full of sweet-smelling brown mush. Petra came past at this point, peered critically into the pan and announced: ‘It looks like soup.’

The fun starts when you add the sugar. ‘Stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved’, says Jane Grigson, ‘then raise the heat and boil until the mixture thickens and candies, leaving the sides of the pan and turning dark red. It will explode and pop with an occasional fat burp.’ Even Petra started to get interested at this point. Grigson stresses that the mixture needs ‘stirring and constant attention’ to stop it burning. ‘Wrap your hand in a cloth and use a wooden spoon.’ I didn’t see the need for the cloth until the mixture, popping and burping as per instructions, had scalded the back of my hand. ‘Eventually you will barely be able to push your spoon through the paste.’ Then you pour out the mixture onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper, and ‘when it cools down slightly, wet your hands and press smooth, as if you were making gnocchi’. (Don’t you love the way she assumes that all her readers will be familiar with the art of gnocchi-making?) Leave it to dry, and behold, you have a tray full of quince paste ready to be cut up into cubes and dusted with icing sugar.

Surveying my efforts, I feel like artnouveauho that it went decently well. Perhaps I should have left the mixture to boil a little longer (as it is, it hasn’t dried properly and still feels a bit sticky), and I wish I’d followed Gunter's hint to 'mould it as you desire' and experimented with some of the interesting moulds and shapes illustrated here. On the whole, though, not bad for a first attempt. And I still have a few quinces left over, just enough to turn into quince vodka.

I don’t suppose I would ever have looked into The Feudal History of the County of Derby (1886-1903), by John Pym Yeatman (‘Of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister-at-Law, formerly of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and F.R.H.S., &c.’), if I hadn’t had to answer a reader’s enquiry. With its long, undigested extracts from pipe rolls and wapentakes, fee books and feodaries, a grand parade of learning in the high Victorian style, interspersed with waspish asides on the mistakes of other antiquaries, ‘the faulty editions of Mr Horace Round’, ‘the foolish disputes of Mr Sidney Lee’, it all looked unutterably dull.

Reference checked, enquiry answered, I was about to send Yeatman back to the stacks. But I was intrigued by the fragments of autobiography embedded in the book. In Volume 2, a long account of how ‘the author was driven from a valuable practice at the Bar because he refused (as did some few others) to assist a cruel and illegal conspiracy of a wretched clique upon the Midland Circuit’. In Volume 4, an even longer account of the tribulations suffered by Yeatman in the course of various legal actions: ‘terrible ordeal .. his health had utterly broken down .. robbed by his own solicitor .. shocking degradation of the Bar .. atrocious jobbery of our great carpet-baggers ..’ Yeatman also finds room for an attack on the management of the Public Record Office (‘ridiculous regulations .. incompetent editors .. utterly useless publications .. terrible waste of time’) and the cataloguing of the manuscripts in the British Museum (‘utterly wrong, not to say incoherent’).

A search of the Times Digital Archive helped to fill in some of the details of Yeatman’s biography. In 1863 he sued his wife for divorce on grounds of adultery, and lost the case, the jury finding that ‘the respondent [Mrs Yeatman] had not committed the adultery charged, and that the petitioner [Yeatman] had deserted her without reasonable excuse’. It was the prelude to thirty years of pointless and fruitless litigation. In 1894 he sued the barristers of the Midland Circuit for damages of £20,000 for omitting his name from the printed list of members of the Birmingham Sessions Bar Mess. He lost, appealed, and lost again. Undeterred, in 1896 he sued the proprietors of the Saturday Review for describing him as ‘one of the cranks of the legal profession’ and for a review of his book The Gentle Shakespere: A Vindication which described it as ‘a nauseous and despicable compound of unctuous sectarian cant, bemuddlement, ignorance, dogmatism and fatuity’. Once more he lost, appealed, and lost again. His one small claim to a niche in legal history was a failed libel suit against Lord Esher which helped to establish the principle of judicial immunity. The legal historian Patrick Polden sums up Yeatman, accurately enough, as ‘outspoken, quarrelsome, no respecter of rank and reputation and cursed with a self-destructive streak’.



Libraries can be cruel places. Sometimes I enjoy walking through the reading rooms and tuning into the reassuring hum of intellectual activity; at other times I feel oppressed by the invisible presence of all those dead generations of readers, all those wasted hours of study, all those unwritten books. In the preface to his Feudal History, Yeatman writes of the ‘enormous labour’ of his research and his ‘bitter disappointment’ at its reception. Was it worth it?

I had been hoping that John Pym Yeatman might turn out to be related to Robert Julian Yeatman (1897-1968), the co-author of 1066 and All That, but there seems to be no family connection between the two, which is a shame; it would be nice to think of 1066 and All That as a response to the ponderous, misdirected scholarship of The Feudal History of the County of Derby. Instead, for Yeatman’s epitaph, here is the passage from Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895) on the British Museum Reading Room:

O dim, far-lifted, and mighty dome, Mecca of many minds, mausoleum of many hopes, sad house where all desires fail! For there men enter in with hearts uplifted, and dreaming minds, seeing in those exalted stairs a ladder to fame, in that pompous portico the gate of knowledge, and going in, find but vain vanity, and all but in vain. There, when the long streets are ringing, is silence, there eternal twilight, and the odour of heaviness. But there the blood flows thin and cold, and the brain burns adust; there is the hunt of shadows, and the chase of embattled phantoms; a striving against ghosts, and a war that has no victory. O dome, tomb of the quick! surely in thy galleries, where no reverberant voice can call, sighs whisper ever, and mutterings of dead hopes; and there men’s souls mount like moths towards the flame, and fall scorched and blackened beneath thee, O dim, far-lifted, and mighty dome!

In The Social Life of Information (2000), Paul Duguid tells a delightful story about working on an archive of eighteenth-century letters, and how historical research might involve smelling the letters as well as reading them:

I was working in an archive of a 250-year-old business, reading correspondence from about the time of the American Revolution. Incoming letters were stored in wooden boxes about the size of a standard Styrofoam picnic cooler, each containing a fair portion of dust as old as the letters. As opening a letter triggered a brief asthmatic attack, I wore a scarf tied over my nose and mouth. Despite my bandit’s attire, my nose ran, my eyes wept, and I coughed, wheezed, and snorted. I longed for a digital system that would hold the information from the letters and leave paper and dust behind.

One afternoon, another historian came to work on a similar box. He read barely a word. Instead, he picked out bundles of letters and, in a move that sent my sinuses into shock, ran each letter beneath his nose and took a deep breath, at times almost inhaling the letter itself but always getting a good dose of dust. Sometimes, after a particularly profound sniff, he would open the letter, glance at it briefly, make a note and move on.

Choking behind my mask, I asked him what he was doing. He was, he told me, a medical historian. (A profession to avoid if you have asthma.) He was documenting outbreaks of cholera. When that disease occurred in a town in the eighteenth century, all letters from that town were disinfected with vinegar to prevent the disease from spreading. By sniffing for the faint traces of vinegar that survived 250 years and noting the date and source of the letters, he was able to chart the progress of cholera outbreaks.

It’s a great story, and it’s been widely retold, in the ten years since Duguid’s book first came out, to make the point that digital texts and images can’t entirely supersede printed books and manuscripts. After all, how can a digital reproduction tell you what a document smells like? The story was picked up by Anthony Grafton in an influential essay in the New Yorker, which is where I first came across it, and it’s now been reprinted in Grafton’s new collection of essays, Worlds Made By Words, which I’ve just been reading. Grafton, never one to labour an anecdote, compresses Duguid’s story into two short sentences, but his point is the same. ‘Original documents and books reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things no image can.’

But is the story true? Back in 2000, when Duguid’s book first came out, a correspondent in the Economist sprinkled a few vinegary drops of scepticism over this particular anecdote:

It would be somewhat difficult to trace cholera outbreaks in 18th-century American towns since cholera did not reach North America, or Europe for that matter, until the 1830s. Letters were treated in the manner mentioned during yellow-fever epidemics.

Okay, so we’re talking yellow fever rather than cholera, but the story still stands .. or does it? A correspondent in this week’s TLS claims that the story is scientifically impossible, as vinegar would leave no smell after two hundred years:

Without going into the uncertainty of when the vinegar was sprinkled, it is hard for a chemist familiar with boiling points and vapour pressures to imagine acetic acid on cellulose surviving 250 years at room temperature without drying out.

By this stage I was getting interested in the history of disinfected letters, so I turned to Google to find out more. It turns out there is a Disinfected Mail Study Circle dedicated to this very subject (you can join!), and an American microbiologist has recently published an interesting article, 'Osler and the Infected Letter', in which he asks whether infectious diseases really could have been spread by mail. As he shows, cholera and yellow fever could not have been carried by mail, as one was water-borne and the other insect-borne. But smallpox spores might well have attached themselves to a letter, so disinfection was a sensible and necessary precaution.

In the sixteenth century, letters were disinfected by dipping them in vinegar, but from the eighteenth century onwards – beginning in 1720, with an outbreak of plague in Marseilles – they were fumigated with sulphur. This, to my mind, brings the question of historical smells back into play. The smell of vinegar might not linger after two hundred years, but what about the smell of sulphur? Burning sulphur would produce sulphur dioxide, which has a very strong smell – often compared to the smell of burnt matches – and I don’t find it implausible to suppose that some trace of this might remain on a letter, even after centuries.

Alas, K.F. Meyer, author of the standard work on the subject, Disinfected Mail (1962), was only able to find a single example from eighteenth-century America, in a letter sent from Baltimore during a yellow fever outbreak in 1797. According to Meyer: ‘The brownish discoloured paper of the letter shows a large splotchy area on the margin of the fold covering a sharp edged incision extending through the entire letter, of the type that was at that time commonly made to permit the fumes of sulphuric acid to penetrate’. (No mention of any smell.) So Duguid’s story starts to seem less and less likely, though I still like to think that it has some basis in fact. The bundles of letters, the dust, the wooden boxes .. surely Duguid didn’t just make the whole thing up? Dammit, it deserves to be true.

One of the hazards of being a parent, particularly if you have a daughter, and particularly if your daughter favours shoulder-length, my-little-pony-ish hair, is that you pick up lice. It’s not an experience I would recommend. The tell-tale itching of the scalp, barely noticeable at first, then gradually forcing itself on your attention – the fateful discovery (in my wife’s case, when a louse dropped plumply out of her hair and landed on her computer keyboard) – the skin-crawling disgust, the perpetual distraction – and then the boring nightly ritual with the nit comb and the special shampoo. No, not to be recommended. Even typing these words causes my scalp to itch in sympathy and sends me scurrying to the bathroom to run the comb through my hair one more time .. just to be sure.

All this by way of preamble to the following poem, which I discovered in the stacks the other day (BL Harl MS 6947, for anyone who's interested). It’s a manuscript in an early eighteenth-century hand, and the note at the bottom, ‘This to be fairly writ on a Table, to Hang out at my Dore’, suggests that it’s a draft for a London shop sign.

Let None (The Loftiest Hee or Shee,
Of what Degree so’er They bee)
Thinke Scorne or show Themselves so Nice,
As to be Thought to Breed no Lice.
No, No! All know That Cannot be,
‘Tis an Impossibilitie;
Wee dayly See ‘tis Naturall
To Every Child, (both Boy & Girle)
Ev’n from the Cradle to the Tombe
Lice dayly Breed, Lice dayly Come,
Yea Sure, & will do, Till the Day of Doome,
Except some Better Meanes be known
Than Hitherto has Yet been Showne.

But Now, to Cheere & Comfort All Mankind
Loe! Here, The Perfect Remedy you’l Find.

Therfore be Wise; Take Good Advice,
Use wholsom Means to kill your Lice.
Whilst Here ‘tis to be Had.
Or Else the wise will Think you Mad.

Fare Well, if you will.

There's more lousy poetry than you might expect. The best known is Burns’s ‘To a Louse’, the source of the famous lines ‘O, wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!’ (Most people who quote these lines probably have no idea of their context; Burns is admiring a pretty girl in church when he suddenly notices a louse crawling up her bonnet.) There is Rimbaud’s gorgeous, haunting poem ‘The Lice-Seekers’, in which a young boy sits by the window while his two sisters pluck the lice out of his hair. (French original here; choice of English translations here and here. I think Jeremy Harding's translation is the better of the two.) My own favourite is St Teresa of Avila’s poem ‘Pues nos dais vestido nuevo’ (‘Since thou giv’st us, King of Heaven / New clothes like these’). The nuns in Teresa’s convent found that their habits, made of frieze (a coarse woollen cloth), were infested with lice, and Teresa wrote this song for them to sing in procession. I like it because it doesn’t take itself too seriously:

Daughters, you’ve the Cross upon you;
Have courage too.
Since salvation He has won you,
He’ll bring you through.
He’ll direct you, He’ll defend you,
If Him you please.
CHORUS: Do thou keep all nasty creatures
Out of this frieze.

Drive away whate’er molests you
With fervent prayer;
Nothing else so surely tests you
If love is there.
God will help you if within you
Firm trust He sees.
CHORUS: Do Thou keep all nasty creatures
Out of this frieze.

‘From that day to this’, according to Teresa’s niece, not a single louse was ever found in any of the nuns’ habits. A miracle! I just hope I won’t need to put this to the test any time soon.

An advertisement for holiday cottages in south-west France, in this week’s LRB, invites readers to ‘vacation like a queen, relax like an admiral’. Like an admiral? Is this some French idiomatic expression? (Yes, you can try googling ‘comme un amiral’ but it doesn’t help.) Just back from a week’s holiday in France, staying with friends near Toulouse, and while I don’t exactly feel as if I’ve been relaxing like an admiral, I had a very happy time, which went too fast and ended too soon. I needed a holiday; unfortunately I still do.

This is Cathar country. We visited Lavaur, scene of one of the early atrocities of the Albigensian Crusade, where the dame-seigneur Girauda was thrown down a well by Simon de Montfort, and Albi, whose cathedral, described in my guidebook as ‘rising over the town like some Tolkienesque dark lord’s tower’, was built after the crusade as a visible symbol of the triumph of orthodoxy. Since returning home I’ve been acquainting myself with the books of Mark Gregory Pegg, who argues that the Cathars never existed at all, but were perfectly orthodox Christians (known to their neighbours as ‘bons omes’ or ‘bons femnas’, good men or good women) who had the misfortune to be classified as heretics. This does not, of course, diminish the horror of their deaths.

I knew very little about this part of France; Albi was only a name to me, and Lavaur not even that. But for my holiday reading I’d picked Hilary Mantel’s new novel, Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell and the Henrician Reformation; and as I idly turned the pages my eye suddenly fell on the word ‘Lavaur’. It is 1533: and the French ambassadors, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, have a walk-on part at the coronation of Anne Boleyn:

Henry watches from a gallery, high above Westminster Hall, as his queen takes her seat in the place of honour, her ladies around her, the flower of the court and the nobility of England. The king has fortified himself earlier, and is picking at a spice plate, dipping thin slices of apple into cinnamon. In the gallery with him, encore les ambassadeurs, Jean de Dinteville furred against the June chill, and his friend the Bishop of Lavaur, wrapped in a fine brocade gown.

‘This has all been most impressive, Cremuel,’ de Selve says; astute brown eyes study him, taking everything in. He takes in everything too: stitching and padding, studding and dyeing; he admires the deep mulberry of the bishop’s brocade.

Normally I would have skimmed over this as a slightly gratuitous piece of historical scene-setting. But the mention of Lavaur snagged my interest, and I was curious to know where Mantel had got her information, so I rummaged around on the Internet, and .. the penny dropped. These aren’t just any old ambassadors, they’re The Ambassadors of Holbein’s famous painting in the National Gallery. Suddenly the costume references, the ‘fine brocade gown’, the ‘deep mulberry of the bishop’s brocade’, all start to make sense. Even the description of ‘Jean de Dinteville furred against the June chill’ is historically accurate, as his letters home from London complain of the unseasonably cold and damp weather.

Mantel drops a clue for the attentive reader a few pages earlier, where Cromwell exchanges a few words with the French ambassador on his way into Westminster Abbey. ‘One hears you have been painted, Maitre Cremuel. I too have been painted. You have seen the result?’ ‘Not yet. Hans is so occupied.’ (This prepares the ground for a pivotal scene later in the novel when Holbein unveils his portrait of Cromwell, the portrait now in the Frick Collection in New York.) Apart from that, however, Mantel leaves the reader to make the connection. Wolf Hall isn’t a flawless novel: my feeling is that Mantel doesn’t really ‘get’ religion and isn’t really comfortable writing about characters for whom religion actually mattered (her treatment of Wolsey is far more sympathetic than her treatment of Thomas More), which is something of a problem if you’re writing a novel about the Protestant Reformation. But it’s rare, these days, to find a novelist who trusts her readers to do some of the work and doesn’t feel the need to spell everything out. Wolf Hall is an artful book, ‘like an eighteenth-century cabinet, everything sliding nicely and full of secret drawers’ (as J.R. Ackerley wrote of one of his own novels), and I admire that, and look forward to the sequel.

One of the books I badly need is Harold Love’s edition of Rochester, one of the great modern editions of an early modern author. It’s in print, but at an absurd price, so I’ve been waiting for an affordable secondhand copy to come along. On Sunday morning I checked my e-mail and found that a copy had turned up on AbeBooks for £40. Triumph! Unfortunately, in the three hours between 4am, when it was added to AbeBooks, and 7am, when I checked my e-mail, someone else had snapped it up. Disaster!

The prosaic reality is that it was probably somebody in America idly browsing the internet late on a Saturday evening. However, I prefer to imagine some Rochesterian rake staggering home after a night of debauchery, unable to sleep, checking his e-mail at 4am and just managing, through a haze of alcohol, to type his credit card details into AbeBooks.

My serious reflection on all this is that there is something definitely amiss with modern academic publishing when Oxford University Press can price Love’s edition of Rochester at £172 while at the same time making a large proportion of it available for free as a ‘limited preview’ on Google Books. Oh well, so it goes. Meanwhile, the pursuit of Love will have to continue for the time being.

On Friday I had the pleasure of attending the premiere of Benjamin Till’s Oranges and Lemons in the church of St Mary le Bow. One of the texts set by Till (and beautifully sung by a tenor soloist) was a piece of doggerel supposedly recited by the bellman of St Sepulchre’s church, near Newgate, to the prisoners awaiting execution:

All you that in the Condemn’d hold do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near,
That you before th’Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent,
That you may not t’eternal flames be sent:
And when St ‘Pulchre’s bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls!

I’d never come across this rhyme before, and I wasn’t the only person to be intrigued by it. wolfinthewood has traced it back as far as The Tyburn Chronicle (1768), which says that it ‘has long been a custom’. But was it ever actually recited to the prisoners on death row, or is this just one of those picturesque pieces of London folklore?

( cut for obsessive antiquarian overkill )

And the performance? I thought it was thrilling. Take two hundred bells, recorded from seventeen different City churches and mixed together in a Phil Spector-ish wall of sound. Add a choir – put them in fancy dress, because, well, why not? – and just for good measure, throw in a Bengali singer and a group of London schoolchildren performing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ on handbells. It might have turned into an awful mess, but in fact it worked brilliantly, swept along by the energy of the music and the enthusiasm of the performers. Afterwards there was a walking tour through various backstreets and alleyways, which artnouveauho and I dutifully followed as far as Old Broad Street before playing truant and slipping off for a meal in Wagamama. Altogether a wonderful evening; huge thanks to artnouveauho, belle of the bells, for inviting me along.

The title of this post, by the way, is taken from Macbeth, ‘the fatal bellman / Which gives the stern’st good night’. The Fatal Bellman would make a great title for a detective novel; I’m surprised that no one seems to have used it yet. P.D. James take note.

For the past few weeks I’ve been keeping notes on the books I see people reading on the Underground.  (That creepy guy who peered over your shoulder while you were trying to read your book on the Tube?  Yup, that was me.)  Here, then, are the results of my totally random survey of Books Read By People On The Northern Line:

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Once I started paying attention, I was surprised by the number of people I saw reading a book on the Tube, as opposed to flicking idly through the London Lite or staring vacantly into space.  In fact I’m fairly sure there are more book readers than there were four years ago, when I moved to London and started travelling on this stretch of the Northern Line.  I suspect this has something to do with the slump in newspaper sales.  Fewer people seem to be buying a daily paper to read on the way to work, and it wouldn’t be surprising if some of those ex-newspaper-readers had got into the habit of packing a book in their briefcase instead.  Or maybe the awfulness of the two London free sheets has driven some people back to books in sheer desperation.

There’s less difference than I expected between male and female reading habits.  (Less Andy McNab and less chick-lit is what I mean, I suppose.  On the other hand, Stephenie Meyer.)  Paperback fiction predominates, of course, but Londoners seem to be pleasingly eclectic in their literary tastes.  Many of the books I’d never even heard of or seen on display in a bookshop.  It was also nice to see a scattering of books – not many, but some – that had obviously been borrowed from public libraries.  Next time I see a book advertised as ‘the novel that everybody’s reading this summer’ – or next time I see a newspaper article announcing the death of the public library system – I shall take it with an even larger pinch of salt than usual.

William Diaper’s account of the sex-life of the tortoise, from his translation of Oppian’s Halieuticks (Oxford, 1722):

Justly might Female Tortoises complain,
To whom Enjoyment is the greatest Pain.
They dread the Tryal, and foreboding hate
The growing Passion of the cruel Mate.
He amorous pursues, They conscious fly
Joyless Caresses, and resolv’d deny.
Since partial Heav’n has thus restrain’d the Bliss,
The Males they welcome with a closer Kiss,
Bite angry, and reluctant Hate declare.
The Tortoise-Courtship is a State of War.

That sent me to Google, of course, where I discovered that there are more videos of mating tortoises on YouTube than I would ever have imagined:



And that led me to the extraordinary story of William Grey Walter (1910-77) and his Machina Speculatrix or robot tortoises. 'The tortoises were extremely primitive creatures' (so writes Rhodri Hayward in an article memorably entitled The Tortoise and the Love-Machine: Grey Walter and the Politics of Electroencephalography, published in 2001). 'They had been bundled together out of a pair of motors and batteries, two condensers, three trolley wheels, an electrical contact, a small lamp and a photoelectric cell. Yet despite their simplistic construction they seemed to imitate humanity's most intimate and fundamental longings':

The amatory behaviour of the tortoises had been encouraged through a small number of fairly straightforward wiring arrangements. Their speculative, exploratory behaviour had been achieved by mounting the photoelectric cell on a rotating motor so that the tortoises continually moved in long arcs in their search for a source of light. Moreover this circuit had been arranged so that the tortoises' steering mechanisms locked once they had encountered some form of illumination ..

Through this primitive arrangement the tortoises were able to imitate the same narcissistic self-love and the romantic involvements that so occupied their human creators. As Walter noted, if the tortoise was placed in front of a mirror 'the creature makes for its own reflection, but as it does so the light is extinguished so that the stimulus is cut off .. The creature therefore lingers before a mirror, flickering and jigging like a clumsy Narcissus'. Unlike Narcissus, however, the tortoises maintained a healthy if somewhat frustrated interest in their fellows. When placed together each would be mutually attracted by the other's light, but would then 'extinguish the source of attraction in themselves in the act of seeking it in others'. Moreover, the tortoises' built-in abhorrence of physical contact meant that the creatures would immediately retreat after the slghtest accidental touch. The tortoises were thus condemned to an elaborate but demure courtship, demonstrating the sudden pull of new attraction alongside a frustrating inability ever to consummate their desires.

It's a far cry from William Diaper and the tortoise-courtship as a state of war. These are very British tortoises, trapped in a perpetual state of sexual frustration.

The vain pathos of the tortoises' courtship was reinforced by their superficial appearance. Walter had christened his first two tortoises 'Elmer' and 'Elsie'. Elmer (aka Electro-Mechanical Robot) was clad in a dull bakelite shell befitting the workaday male. His female companion Elsie (aka Electro Light Sensitive with Internal and External Stability) was more attractively attired in a modern coat of red perspex. Their gender distinction was not simply limited to their outward appearance; Walter had attempted to hard-wire contemporary ideas of sexual difference into the tortoises' actual design. Elsie was given a much narrower threshold of tolerance to bright and dim lights so that she was condemned to dart about in an insistent neurotic manner in her search for photic equilibrium. In contrast, Elmer was granted a much wider latitude of tolerance, allowing him to lead a far more relaxed and sedentary existence, resting in the shade or slumbering under an armchair.

For me, it induces a deep sense of melancholy. Yet for Walter, the tortoises were the heralds of a future utopia where the mundane chores of everyday life would be carried out by robots and computers, leaving humanity free to rise to new realms of existence 'where our private worlds and the exalted mysteries of the cosmos are united in tenderness and grandeur'.

The travelling bookshop arrived at school today, and at going-home time Petra and I queued up to buy three of her favourite Rainbow Magic books (£3.99 each). The nice young teacher who was handling the cash got hopelessly muddled with the change, and eventually had to work out the very simple sum on her pocket calculator.

Me (as we were walking away): I'm not very impressed with Miss Smith! I really think she could have worked out the difference between £11.97 and £12.07 without having to use a calculator.
P: Well, she is only 21, you know.

This from a child of seven -- said with absolute seriousness. Petra is the family peacemaker and obviously felt I was being too harsh on poor Miss Smith.

It’s just over a week since I saw Peter Grimes at the Coliseum, and I’m still trying to sort out my impressions of it. David Alden’s production has been praised, and criticised, for its twisted take on many of the characters – Auntie as a cross-dressing lesbian, the Nieces as autistic twins in kinky schoolgirl outfits, Ned Keene as an Oswald Mosley lookalike – and most of the conversations I overheard during the interval seemed to be running along the lines of ‘wonderful music, shame about the production’. Actually I liked the twistedness. It doesn’t have much to do with Britten’s original conception of the characters, but I’m not a purist in these matters, and I thought it was a perfectly valid way of bringing out the opera’s darker side, and a clever way of situating it in a 1930s/40s dreamworld that, without being too historically specific, resonates with the period when it was written.

More troubling to me was the way Alden handled the opera’s moral dynamics. Whatever else you do with the opera, it seems to me that you have to portray Grimes as a violent man barely in control of his emotions, who treats his apprentices roughly and is at least capable of murder even if he doesn’t commit it. And the full horror of the situation only comes out if you suppose (as does Crabbe in the original poem) that Grimes’s neighbours know what’s going on, know that something isn’t right, and yet choose not to interfere:

None reasoned thus – and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, “Grimes is at his exercise.”

Yet this Grimes was a gentle giant who scarcely seemed capable of raising a hand in anger; the power was there, but not the suppressed violence. And Alden’s production goes out of its way to suggest that Grimes is an innocent man who, through no fault of his own, becomes the scapegoat for his neighbours’ guilt. At the start of Act III, during the dance in the Moot Hall, several anonymous apprentices appear on stage, one staggering under a heavy load, another slung over a man’s back like a sack of potatoes, the implication (presumably) being that every house in the Borough has its neglected and abused child-slaves. This, it seems to me, comes close to letting Grimes off the hook, by suggesting that whatever he does to his apprentices is really no worse than what his neighbours do to theirs.

But I don’t want to be over-critical, because in so many other ways this was a wonderful production. The singing was excellent, the orchestra was first-rate, and even if I was underwhelmed by John Daszac’s Grimes (Daszac replacing Stuart Skelton on the night I was there), this wasn’t entirely a bad thing, as I felt it brought some of the other characters, particularly Amanda Roocroft’s Ellen, out from under Grimes’s shadow. Now I’m wondering if I can make it to Lulu at the Royal Opera House before it ends on 20 June.

A long time ago I used to work at a drop-in centre for the homeless in Cambridge, where one of my jobs was to help prepare and serve the meals. We took a lot of trouble over the food – it was cheap and basic (it had to be) but nourishing and palatable – yet however much we varied the menu, and however hard we tried to make the food interesting, many of our customers would immediately smother it under massive quantities of salt, pepper and ketchup. Many years later I mentioned this to a worldly-wise friend, who was amused by my innocence: ‘Don’t you realise that heroin numbs the sense of taste?’ (Well, no, I didn’t.) At the time, though, I thought it must be a cultural thing. Anyone brought up on English institutional cuisine – whether in a children’s home, borstal, prison or public school – could be forgiven for assuming that food was, at best, something tasteless to which flavour had to be applied, and, at worst, something positively distasteful from which flavour had to be suppressed.

I was reminded of this today when idle curiosity led me to the Manual of Cooking & Baking for the Use of Prison Officers, printed and published at HMP Parkhurst in 1902. In many ways it is a humane and sensible work, much exercised by the dangers of poor hygiene and food adulteration. Yet there are some eye-opening passages, such as the rules for cooking vegetables, with its list of average cooking times:

Potatoes, half an hour when small, 40 to 45 minutes when large.
Cabbage, half an hour when small, 40 to 45 minutes when large.
Carrots and Turnips, 45 minutes when young, one hour when old.
Parsnips, 45 to 60 minutes.

Then there is the advice on cheese:

When cheese is kept it undergoes a change known as “ripening”, which is essentially a decomposition .. The maggots or larvae of a fly (mites) are frequently present in cheese undergoing decomposition. These products are harmless, indeed they are much appreciated by some .. Prisoners, as a rule, like a fairly full-flavoured cheese.

Odd, this Victorian tolerance for maggoty cheese; I’ve come across it before. In October 1900 Francis Jenkinson (Cambridge don, University Librarian and amateur entomologist) noted in his diary:

Found the flies in the grocer’s shop belonged to cheese (Piophila casei), and the females were hard at work ovipositing, pushing their tails in. I remarked that the cheese would soon be full of maggots. “Oh!” said the grocer, “it will all be sold before that!”

Some of the prison food sounds quite pleasant – the fish stew, for instance: half a pound of white fish (cod or haddock) softened in butter, boiled in a quarter-pint of water and seasoned with salt, nutmeg and lemon juice. ‘A little chopped parsley may be sprinkled over the fish when it is served.’ That, however, was in the prison hospital, where the regime was a lot less strict. The basic convict diet was pretty grim – bread and gruel for breakfast; meat and potatoes for dinner; and then bread and gruel again for supper. No frills here:

INGREDIENTS to produce 1 pint of gruel – 2 oz. coarse oatmeal, 1 pint water, 1/4 teaspoonful salt.
METHOD. Mix the oatmeal in a pan with sufficient cold water to form a paste. Heat up the remainder of water till it boils, and stir in the mixed oatmeal, add the salt, and allow it to simmer for at least 20 minutes. It is necessary to stir the mixture occasionally with a wooden spoon or bat, otherwise it is likely to burn.

‘Skilly? A can o’ hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at de bottom; dat’s skilly’, as the tramp says to Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. It doesn’t sound very nice. But we are, after all, entering a new age of austerity, where wartime recipes are back in fashion and enterprising journalists are bringing out books with titles like The Thrift Book: Live Well and Spend Less or The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to Eat Well with Leftovers. And as Jenny Turner kindly points out in a recent review for the LRB: ‘if you are genuinely committed to being thrifty, to aiming, even, at something like food justice, you’re going to have to stint, I’m afraid, and to eat things that simply aren’t very nice.’ Maybe by this time next year we will all have been reduced to eating gruel.

Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces.
The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.
(Ezekiel 1: 15-16)

Those wheels have been perplexing biblical commentators for centuries. The leading modern commentator on Ezekiel suggests that the prophet is describing some sort of four-wheeled chariot or throne – though even he admits to ‘a certain conceptual difficulty’ in verse 17, where it is stated that the wheels could move in all directions without turning. The most recent commentary that I’ve been able to consult says merely that the wheels are ‘symbolic of mobility’, which I think I could have worked out for myself.

None of these considerations, however, disturbed the Revd Tresham Dames Gregg when he mounted the platform at the Sheffield Music Hall on 24 February 1863 to deliver a lecture on ‘The Steam Locomotive as Revealed in the Bible’. Gregg had no time for symbolic interpretations. He regarded the passage as an entirely literal description of the prophet’s vision, and argued that the wheels were those of a railway train - four railway trains, to be precise:

I conclude, then, that the prophet saw without understanding the matter beyond what a spectator of his age would, four steam locomotives, with a passenger carriage attached to each, in vision; and the roof as it were stripped off of these passenger carriages, so that he could see the passengers seated within, as in vision. And that their eyes were brightly developed; while the rest of their countenances and persons did not draw his attention. That he saw them simultaneously in movement, and perhaps (as where many lines branch off) in different directions.

He went on to enumerate the striking parallels that had led him to this remarkable conclusion. ‘And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber’ (verse 4): the orange lamp at the front of the locomotive, emerging out of a cloud of steam. ‘And their feet were straight feet, and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass’ (verse 7): the railway line, obviously. ‘And they had the hands of a man under their wings’ (verse 8): the stokers shovelling coal into the firebox. ‘And their rings were full of eyes round about them’ (verse 18): the passengers looking out of the windows. ‘And there was a voice from the firmament that was over their heads, when they stood, and had let down their wings’ (verse 25): the hiss of steam as the train came to rest at the station. What could be clearer? ‘I unhesitatingly, then, submit to the learned world the theory that the Cherubim of the first chapter of Ezekiel are the steam locomotives of these latter days.’

Gregg’s lecture is occasionally cited today as an example of the misplaced ingenuity of biblical fundamentalism. Yet its real interest, it seems to me, is in showing what a powerful hold the steam locomotive exercised over the nineteenth-century imagination. Gregg could not believe that ‘so wonderful a moral instrumentality as the steam locomotive is – one so certain to precipitate the subjection of all mankind to truth, reason, religion and civilization’, should not be foreshadowed somewhere in the Bible. He tantalised his audience by hinting that there was another passage in the Bible which described not only the steam locomotive but also the electric telegraph and the photographic process. ‘Shall I say where the passage is? No, excuse me; that is rather beyond the business of this evening.’ He did, however, suggest that the description of Elijah going up to heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2: 11) might be interpreted along similar lines, as a description of some sort of ‘aerial locomotive’ yet to be invented. ‘Why should we not, thus led, be by the divine goodness, at last enabled to construct locomotives that would connect the earth with the other planets?’ This, as a contemporary reviewer pointed out, unwittingly subverted Gregg’s own argument by implying that the miraculous works of God would, in due course, be ‘emulated and surpassed by human skill and scientific discovery’.

Gregg’s obituary in the Times (1 Nov 1881) described him as ‘a distinguished, eloquent and profound Hebrew scholar’ but added that ‘during the latter years of his life .. his intellect became warped’ (or as the Oxford DNB helpfully explains: ‘in his later years he had strange ideas about .. his own personal immortality’). His theories have a modern parallel in the writings of Erich von Daniken, who famously argued in Chariots of the Gods? (1968) that Ezekiel’s vision was an eyewitness account of the landing of an extra-terrestrial spacecraft, ‘a craft that came from the north, emitting rays and gleaming and raising a gigantic cloud of desert sand’. As for the wheels, Daniken interprets them (‘the description is astonishingly good’) as ‘the wheels of a multipurpose vehicle, say an amphibious helicopter’, or possibly ‘one of these special vehicles the Americans use in the desert and swampy terrain’. I think I prefer the steam locomotive.

Whatever I was expecting to find when I opened a volume of early seventeenth-century assize proceedings, it certainly wasn't this:

The information of Robert Stone of Puddletown [Dorset], taken upon oath the first day of September [1631].
He saith that on tuesday the 23th day of August he this examinate goeinge afeild to a close of ground which he hath in Puddletowne he saw William Gould servant to George Style with a ewe sheepe in a ditch belonginge to the same ground. And this examinate conceiving that the said Gould was about to put that sheepe into his (this Examinates) close, to pasture there by stealth, this examinate approached neerer unto him and then found that the said Gould had placed the said sheepe in the ditch in a posture fitt for th’execution of a bestiall and unlawfull action, viz putting the head of the Ewe into the hedge and holding the backe part of her towards himselfe taking hold of the Ewe with his hands by both his sides. And this examinate then saw him upon his knees bending his body upon the hinder part of the sheepe and did perceave him in such motion & action that he verely beleeveth he did there withall committ the fowle act of Buggery, where upon this examinate taking indignation at soe foule a fact, came neer unto him with a hooke in his hand purposely to have striken him therewith, but fearing to doe more hurt then he intended he layd asyde his hooke & struck him with his hand and sharpely rebuked him for soe fowle a fact, who then falling upon his knees to this examinate desired to keepe his Counsell saying that the Ewe went to blissome, and this examinate asking whether he would blissome her he told this examinate that he had been tempted thereunto two dayes together.

I've never come across a case like this before, at least not in the seventeenth century. (I've seen similar cases in nineteenth-century court proceedings, but the details are never reported.) However, a little googling led me to Erica Fudge and an article from History Today on Bestiality in Early Modern England (or, as it was headlined on the magazine cover, 'A nation of animal lovers'), from which it seems that such cases are not as unusual as I'd supposed. Fudge gives several other seventeenth-century examples (all from Yorkshire for some reason) and argues that it was only in the early modern period that people started getting worked up about it:

Bestiality had not always been regarded as the serious offence it became in the sixteenth century .. The Reformation had caused a new interrogation of the self, and a new emphasis on what it was that made a human human, while the New Science saw bodies investigated in a way that compromised the distinction between human and animal. In the light of changes such as these to the category of the human, animals were moving ever closer; gone was Aelian's sense of the wonder of nature, instead beasts became a threat.

Hmm .. it all sounds a bit over-schematic to me. Were people in the Middle Ages really so unconcerned about bestiality? Still, Fudge has covered the ground pretty thoroughly, so I think my article on 'Sheep-shagging in early modern England' will have to wait.

Poor William Gould! Bestiality in those days carried the death penalty. He made a full confession, and even went back to the meadow to point out 'which Ewe it was with which he would have committed the sayd foule fact' (it seems to have been one particular sheep, rather than any old sheep chosen at random). His defence was that he hadn't actually committed the foul deed before he was interrupted (which in strict legal terms meant that there was no case to answer, since without penetratio there was no crime). Whether that was enough to save him from the gallows, I don't know.

What does one wear to a Baron Corvo party? An Italian linen jacket, perhaps, with the insignia of an obscure military order pinned to the lapel? In the end I just wore my usual curatorial undress (corduroy jacket and cashmere jumper) and managed to blend inconspicuously into the crowd. There were the usual book-trade types, a scattering of elderly men in blazers, one genuine celebrity and a lot of other interesting people including one of my great heroes, Timothy d'Arch Smith, to whom I actually got to speak for a few minutes before another admirer snatched him away.

The party was in honour of the late Donald Weeks, whose Corvo collection had just been catalogued and sold en bloc to Leeds University Library. I never met Weeks, described by Timothy d'Arch Smith as 'a small, friendly, talkative figure with no obvious faults except for a dubious taste in cloth caps and being permanently out of cigarettes'. His end was a grim one. 'He gradually cast off all moorings and seemed to drift into a castaway existence on the fringes of lord knows what outlying borough of a city in which he was still an alien', or in the soberer prose of the Telegraph obituary:

He continued to collect books and ephemera all his life, keeping in touch with friends in letters which were always entertaining and erudite, if barely legible. Yet he also guarded his privacy, and even good friends could contact him only via an accommodation address .. Weeks died in Middlesex Hospital on September 7 2003. As he left no will or details of next of kin, he was classified as missing. It took friends three months to discover he had died.

I have to admit I've never been a great fan of Corvo, partly because he reminds me of a friend (now ex-friend) from my own past life, another Catholic fantasist who left a trail of wreckage behind him wherever he went. But I've always been fascinated by the circle of his posthumous admirers who made it their business to collect every piece of information about him and every last scrap of writing from his pen. Weeks was the last of the great Corvo collectors, a line that runs in a kind of apostolic succession back to A.J.A. Symons in the 1920s and even further back to figures like R.M. Dawkins and Harry Pirie-Gordon who had known Corvo personally. In that sense, yesterday's party was a mildly historic occasion, at least for archive geeks like me, as it marked the end of the line, the moment when the last significant block of Corvo manuscripts moved out of private hands and into a permanent institutional home. It had to happen, of course, but there is something slightly sad about it, as when some rare and exotic animal disappears from the wild and survives only in captivity. Today the world seems just a little bit duller.

The other day, for trivial but complicated reasons, I had to check a reference in the Spectator for 1860. The reference was found in no time, but having got the bound volume up from the stacks I couldn't let it go again so easily, and spent the next hour living happily in the mid-nineteenth century (work schedules and timesheets be damned).

Here then, in no particular order, are some facts about the year 1860 that happened to catch my eye:

1. Leaves of Grass was published in England. The Spectator was not impressed. 'The paper, print and binding are indeed superb, but where are the phallic emblems, and the figures of Priapus and the Satyrs that should have adorned the covers and the pages of this new gospel of lewdness and obscenity?'

2. The riots at St George's-in-the-East continued through the spring and summer. The parish clergy were mobbed in the street, and one man was arrested for shouting 'There go the Puseyites'. 'Mr Yardley [the magistrate] said that he did not know the meaning of the word Puseyite, but he knew that it was an offensive expression, more likely to lead to animosity, a breach of the peace, and bloodshed, if uttered in St George's-in-the-East, than the most offensive and infamous word.' The offender was fined 40s.

3. During the year, 239 people were killed and 579 injured in railway accidents. The Spectator felt that the railway companies were not paying enough attention to safety. 'Passengers like to be punctual', the paper pointed out, 'but they do not wish to sacrifice life, much less risk their own existence.'

4. The term 'juvenile delinquents' was already in general use. According to the Spectator, juvenile crime was 'nearly extinguished' in the provinces, but 'in London there is a large number of regular professional juvenile delinquents. We are willing to admit that the number is decreasing, but some of our readers will be startled when we tell them that there are some two hundred boys who, under different names, have been six or seven times convicted and sent to prison'.

5. Divorce was on the increase. 'At the sitting of the Divorce Court on Monday, no fewer than six marriages were dissolved.'

6. It was rumoured that the Prince of Wales was about to get engaged to a German princess, leading the Spectator to observe that 'the whole of European royalty is at the present moment one vast family of brothers, sisters and cousins'. 'Without subscribing in full to Mr Darwin's theories about the progress of the species by means of "natural selection", it is yet a fact not to be denied that a certain amount of intermixture between different races is absolutely necessary for the physical as well as moral well-being of the human family.'

7. In America, the Southern states were threatening to leave the Union, but the Spectator was sanguine. 'We may expect a good deal of bluster, but there is little to warrant an anticipation of secession.'