BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Backward I look upon my life// And see one waste of storm and strife. Patrick Branwell Bronte.

For quite a long while, Branwell Brontë (born on June 26, 1817) has been the bad boy of the family, a creative lad full of promise who led the children’s literary and historical games but whose adult unhappinesses blighted the lives of others in the household and then brought tragedy: his descent into addiction, his dreadful last disease (tuberculosis, complicated by hysteria), and finally his early death in 1848. These final dramas were played out in his father’s parsonage high in the moors at Haworth where, earlier, had died Branwell’s mother Maria (in 1821) and his two elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth (both in 1825). It’s little wonder that in the writings of the survivors (notably Charlotte and Emily, although Anne also contributed before her death in 1849) the clouds gather, the winds howl, and fate stalks the moors. But partly because of his sisters’ brilliance, Branwell’s life has been reexamined, and although it’s still an unhappy story it’s clear that he experienced some joy and chalked up some victories. From the age of 10, Branwell wrote prolifically, manuscript volumes of poetry and essays, and a mock journal he fashioned after Blackwood’s Magazine. In his early 20s, he tried to extend this into real employment with Blackwood’s, and though that failed he tried his hand at painting and, more impressively, at very advanced translations of Horace’s Odes and quite a few published poems of his own, including seven in The Guardian. During this period he worked as a Latin tutor and as a railway clerk, developed a wide circle of literary and artistic friendships (including Harriet Martineau and Leigh Hunt), and clearly nurtured ambitions for a career in letters. But it all came crashing down with an unhappy love affair (which itself caused his dismissal from a promising tutoring job), alcohol, opiates, consumption, and dementia, and the years we might have seen as formative were translated, instead, into a story of wasted talents. ©

[Stanley]

Brahms once told me to 'do it how you like, but make it beautiful.' Is there anything more for me to say? Frances Woodhill Davies.

We live in strange times, politically. During the last presidential campaign the small hands of one of the contestants became a big issue, even though he had so many other frailties. But certainly in a pianist small hands are a challenge, particularly in taking on the grand piano pieces of late 19th-century music. Add to the small hands a diminutive physique, a frail constitution, and being a woman, and it we begin to understand the wonder that was Frances Mary Jemima Woodhill Davies. Born on June 27, 1861, in the Channel Islands, “Fanny” Davies inherited from her mother her long name and her love of music, in which, at a ridiculously early age, she demonstrated a precocious talent (her first public concert came in 1867). But she was not allowed to be a child prodigy, partly because of her illnesses but mainly because her parents wanted her to have a modern education, and so she was sent to her aunt’s progressive girls’ school in Birmingham where she learned to be funny, and popular, and where—on the side—she kept improving her “keyboard skills.” After a tour on the continent in her late teens and early 20s, where she was taught by Clara Schumann and met Brahms (she would later premiere one of his works in Berlin), she was ready to take the music world by storm, and she did, playing in Paris, Prague, and Vienna but mainly in England (and always promoting the newer English composers, notably Edward Elgar) and campaigning for the rights (and equal pay) of female musicians. Davies was perhaps at her best in small ensembles, and loved to continue playing in private, after the concert, sometimes for hours, exhausting her companions (e.g. a young Pablo Casals) while keeping them awake with humorous anecdotes about herself and burlesques of other concert pianists. Her death (1934) brought out a host of mourners to remember her talent, her exuberant energy, and her kindnesses as performer, teacher, and raconteur. ©

[Stanley]

Every Prime Minister needs a willie. Margaret Thatcher.

I am one of those die-hards who regard Margaret Thatcher as an accident in British politics (if an unfortunately consequential one). So I treasure the might have beens that could so easily have shunted her aside. Inside the Tory party, one of the great might have beens was the portly, avuncular figure of William Stephen Ian Whitelaw, born into a wealthy Scottish family alliance on June 28, 1918. During the second war, in which he served bravely, he married Cecilia Sprot, another chip off an old Scots block, and these two One Nation Tories, steeped in the Disraeli tradition, duly entered on their political life (theirs was a successful parliamentary marriage) when William, already aka “Willie,” won a safe northern English seat, Penrith, in 1955. His parliamentary career was a good one, successful in that he made many friends even though he was, from 1965, Chief Whip. He also performed with distinction in the hardest cabinet job in the Heath government (1970-74), Northern Ireland. Whitelaw’s “might easily have been” in relation to Thatcher came after the Labour victories of 1974, when he could have been heir apparent to Heath but a chain of odd circumstances, compounded by Whitelaw’s reluctance to jump quickly into the leadership fray, made him Johnny-come-too-lately to Thatcher’s second ballot victory. He served Thatcher loyally enough by most political standards (as Deputy Leader in opposition and then Home Secretary in government) but he was not (in her immortal phrase) “one of us.” He admired some of her qualities but did not like her, and in particular he was put off by her dogmatism and appalled by some of her attitudes (notably about capital punishment and wholesale privatization), and it was no surprise when she sent him to Coventry after the 1983 election, or kicked him upstairs to the House of Lords, where he could ruminate at leisure on his failures of leadership and her failures of vision . ©

[Tripps]

Didn't he once accuse someone of 'going round the country stirring up apathy' ?

[Stanley]

WIKI says you are right David and I agree....

[Stanley]

Grown ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. The Little Prince, 1943.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator, aristocrat, author, and hero-martyr of the Free French Armée de l’Air, was born in Lyon on June 29, 1900. His father’s death (in 1904), while it did not reduce the family to penury, was a severe enough blow that the boy Antoine always felt that he made his own way in life, and his own way was (after failures as a naval cadet and a trainee architect) to take to the air, first with the French air force in the colonial service (Morocco) and then on his own as a pioneer of postal, transport, and passenger service (for instance in Argentina and then, rather romantically, on the Dakar to Timbuktu route). His stormy marriage to a Salvadorean novelist, Consuelo Suncin (he called her his muse and his misery) probably enhanced his skills as a writer. In the 1930s he won several literary prizes (for memoirs and fiction), fought briefly for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and was thus very ready to take to the air when France, again, went to war with Germany and, this time, with Hitler. Nazi brutalisms made Hitler and his movement the perfect foil for the aristocratic humanist Saint-Exupéry, who quickly made himself available to the Free French. It was during Saint-Exupéry’s long tour of North America (the USA and Canada), acting as Free French publicist, that he composed and wrote the book for which he is best known, on the face of it a children’s fantasy, The Little Prince (1943), about a gentle sort of lad born on an asteroid whose memories of his home and travels through the adult world (including, of course, Earth) convince him of the beauties of nature but also demonstrate to him (Gulliver-like) that age and experience do not necessarily bring one to wisdom, humanity, or humor. The book (also illustrated by Saint-Exupéry) was a wartime sensation and still fascinates a world readership. Its author disappeared, presumed dead, on a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in July 1944. ©

[Stanley]

I expect to think that I would rather be author of your book [The Origin of Species] than of any other on Nat. Hist. Science. Hooker to Darwin, December 1859.

Of Sir Joseph Hooker it might be said that botany was in his blood, for his father, William Hooker, who was a gentleman scientist when Joseph was born on June 30, 1817, would during Joseph’s youth (1820) become Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University and then (1841) founding director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. In 1865 Joseph succeeded his father in the directorship and kept Kew fiercely independent from bureaucratic and political attack. He retired in 1885, leaving the Garden intact and powerful as one of Britain’s great scientific organizations, so it is little wonder that this year Kew is making much of Hooker’s bicentennial. Kew was indeed the pinnacle of Hooker’s achievement, but had there been no Kew we would still know him as a great scientific explorer, a botanist of distinction, and above all as friend, confidante, and defender of Charles Darwin. They began to correspond in the early 1840s, after Hooker had returned from his own voyage of exploration, the Antarctic voyage of the Erebus (1839-43). Darwin showed Hooker an early version of his evolutionary theory in 1847, and was thus qualified to play a leading role in the agreement between Darwin and Alfred Wallace which led to the joint announcement and joint publication of their evolutionary theories. By his own estimation, Hooker would play the most prominent role as Darwin’s defender at the famous 1860 debate over “Darwinianism” and ever after. But he had his own life to live, and his explorations of the Antarctic, the Himalayas (1847-51), the Middle East (1860), North Africa (1870), and the American west (1877), each produced specimens and publications that would alone have secured his scientific fame. At Joseph Hooker’s death, in 1911, the nation offered the family a burial place next to Darwin, in Westminster Abbey, but it was Joseph Hooker’s wish to be planted at Kew, near his father, and so it was done. ©

[Stanley]

Mouse Castle. The name bestowed on the Brackenbury house in London where the 'mice' could meet to plot their next moves against the cats.

Among my favorite paintings, a prizewinner at a 1967 art fair, was a self-portrait, “Woman of Strongly Held Opinions.” The artist-subject has become a printmaker (several of her prints hang in our apartment), but that 1967 painting still springs to mind when I read of women whose struggles advanced women’s rights. Among these was another portrait painter, Georgina Agnes Brackenbury, born on July 1, 1865 into a military-political family. Her mother, who thought housework an imprisoning device, took to portrait painting herself, and set Georgina and her sister Marie Venetia on their careers which, in both cases, mixed rather good portrait work with militant commitment to women’s rights. After the father’s death (1890), the mother and the two sisters set up shop in the family mansion in London (at Campden Hill Square) but kept a cottage in rural Surrey. At the height of the suffragette campaign, both properties would become redoubts for women on the run, for women recovering from imprisonment, for women who just wanted to get together and plot their next moves against the patriarchy. The three women joined up, first, with the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and then the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union. Georgina was imprisoned in 1908 but, nothing daunted, emerged from Holloway Prison to join the Tax Resistance League and become a leading speaker/agitator for women’s rights, not only in Britain but also on the continent. Feeling somewhat mollified by the partial suffrage victory of 1918, Georgina resumed her artistic career. Among her works are two portraits (of Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst) that still hang in London galleries, and when Georgina and Marie died (1949 and 1950), the last of the Brackenburys, they left the Campden Hill house to posterity as a women’s refuge where women of strongly held opinions could find friends and further their work. ©

[Stanley]

It is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. Harriet Brooks, letter to her dean, 1906.

Even after women—ever so slowly—began to pursue higher education and then, horror of horrors, infiltrate the professoriate, disabilities remained, and taken together they insured that progress would be slow. Some problems were ‘trivial’ (the absence or scarcity of female restrooms, for instance), others stupid (men-only faculty clubs), but some combined triviality and stupidity in a way that seems downright malevolent. It all reminds us that intelligent people do not necessarily behave intelligently, a useful function, but otherwise is today an embarrassment. A bad example was the rule that a woman professor who married was forced to resign. Or, as Harriet Brooks’ dean put it, “the dignity of women’s place in the home demands that your marriage shall be a resignation.” This was in 1906 and at Barnard, Columbia University’s women’s college!! And so a promising career in nuclear physics came to a premature end, for our Miss Brooks chose marriage rather than career. Harriet Brooks was born in Ontario on July 2, 1876, and educated at McGill and Cambridge universities (in both places she chalked up several “firsts”) and, while still at McGill, became Ernest Rutherford’s very first graduate research assistant. She was also, briefly, assistant to Marie Curie. So she was no scientific slouch. Indeed, Rutherford himself always credited Brooks with the accurate laboratory measurement of radioactivity, which itself came in conjunction with her discovery of the element radon and her proof that radon itself was a result of the radioactive decay of thorium. No doubt that discovery would have been made soon, by someone, somewhere, very likely a male, but it’s good to remember that it was the work of Harriet Brooks before she committed the solecism of becoming Mrs. Frank Pitcher. ©

[Stanley]

If I ever did one good thing it was to introduce sport into the rehabilitation of disabled people. Ludwig Guttmann.

Among those who might claim to be patron saint of the Paralympic Games, pride of place certainly belongs to a Silesian Jew, Ludwig Guttmann, who was born on July 3, 1899. His interest in the whole business of traumatic injury or illness began in his late teens when he served as orderly in the world’s first accident hospital in Konigshutte (now Chorzów, Poland), and continued through his medical training. As a practicing physician at Breslau, Guttmann experienced some of the horrors of Nazism, but his expertise enabled him and his wife, Else, to secure British visas at the very last possible moment, and from summer 1939 they made their home in Britain, where he began as fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and on the medical staff of the Radcliffe Infirmary. During the war Guttmann moved to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire where he developed the science to go with his view that patients with severe spinal and nerve damage would benefit from physical therapies, and so it was that in 1948, to coincide with the London Olympics, that Guttmann organized a gold medal competition—featuring archery—among severely wounded veterans of WWII. Stoke Mandeville Hospital still houses Europe’s largest spinal injuries unit, but its sports facilities were soon outgrown by the ambitions, abilities, and gallantry of Ludwig Guttmann’s “sporting chance” paraplegics, whom he knew as “the best of men.” That pioneering archery competition became Guttmann’s “Grand Festival of Paraplegic Sports” and then the “Stoke Mandeville Games,” which in 1954 hosted a 14-nation competition among teams distinguished by a rich variety of physical disabilities. By the time of the Rome Olympics (1960) they had become truly international and since 1976, winter as well as summer, they have mirrored and in some ways eclipsed the ‘regular’ Games. “Paralympics” still serve, as Ludwig Guttmann intended, as a beacon of hope—and a spur of ambition—to anyone severely disabled by injury or illness. ©

[Stanley]

No, I have not a drop of what they call white blood in my veins. Edmonia Lewis.

“What to a slave is the Fourth of July?”. Frederick Douglass asked in 1852, a good question then and still. For Edmonia Lewis it had some meaning, for she always insisted it was her birth-date: July 4, 1844. She was born of mixed African and Native American (Chippewa) descent, and when her parents died she was adopted by her Indian aunts and, named “Wildfire,” learned traditional weaving and moccasin-making techniques. Wildfire did receive good schooling, though perhaps against her will, and in 1859 was admitted to Oberlin College, where she pursued the “young ladies’” course. Oberlin ended badly for her, but not before she had developed a taste for high art, specifically sculpture. Her talents developed quickly, and Boston’s abolitionist circles were delighted to have in their midst a black woman of such refined aesthetic sensibility. Most of her sold work related to Union army and abolitionist heroes, notably a bust of the Union martyr Robert Gould Shaw, but she also ventured afield to take on some characters from mythology. With her income and with support from her friends, Lewis moved to Rome where she apprenticed to master sculptors and began, in some of her works, to depict Americans like her. She also further adapted to classical themes and subjects, mythological and historical, and developed a considerable clientele with some commissions reported to be in the $50,000 range, a major work (The Death of Cleopatra, 1876) in the American hall in Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, and a commission from Ulysses Grant to fashion his bust, in marble. Although she, and her works, did travel to the USA, she found life in Europe much more congenial for a woman of color (even though, over the years, her work fell out of fashion). After a long and for several decades successful career in creative art, Edmonia Lewis, “born on the 4th of July,” died in exile, in London, in September 1907. ©

[Stanley]

Use butter only sparingly. Sylvester Graham.

Many “foreigners” come here to stay, but quite a few have come to look, to probe our mysteries, and then to report. In the early 19th century several foreign observers produced classics, among them Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, and Alexis de Tocqueville. All of them commented on features of our curious politics, but several took time to editorialize on the American diet, not only what we ingested but how. Most concluded Americans ate too fast, too much, and too awfully and drank too prodigiously. That judgment has since been echoed by historians (one entitled his book The Alcoholic Republic). But it was not only a foreign obsession. The period saw a host of native-born reforms, and it should be no surprise that reformers decided to look also at diet. Among the most famous dietary reformers was Sylvester Graham, born in Connecticut on July 5, 1794, the 17th child of a Presbyterian minister who was destined to become one himself, if only after negotiating an unhappy childhood. Looking back at his own unhappinesses, and observing those of others, Sylvester Graham decided that good health could come only from an imitation of Christ (in the spiritual sense) and an imitation of Adam (in terms of diet). So Graham turned “temperance” into “abstinence” and, more especially, became a crusader for plain food (as vegetarian and as unprocessed as possible) and for cheerful, spiritual table talk. He developed quite a following many of whom bought “Graham Flour” and “Graham Crackers.” Students at Oberlin College were, for a time, forced to eat only a “Graham” diet (until they uncheerfully rebelled in 1841). However, Sylvester Graham never earned a penny from those Graham products. Despite his earnest diet and his abstaining life-style, Graham died at 57. But since we are, as Frances Trollope thought, a reckless people, we continue to eat his crackers, anyway. ©

[Tripps]

How did he know what Adam ate - except for the odd apple?
I have a vague memory (like most of them these days) that I've heard of Graham Flour, and leaving aside any reference to our dear leader, and his dietary preferences - I take it there is no connection at all to Golden Grahams

[Stanley]

I thought about them when I read it David. I always assumed there was a connection..... I shall ask Uncle Bob.

[Stanley]

Even to enumerate, certainly to dwell on, all his contributions to histology would be impossible here. . . From the long article on von Kolliker in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica.

At about the same time that Charles Darwin was formulating his theory about how macro-organisms (like us) came into existence, several gifted scientists were at work on the other end of things, not so much micro-organisms but the single biological cell. Cells had been known about for quite some time, but the idea that they were a universal attribute of life on earth and therefore must be the key to life was quite new, first fully articulated in 1839 by Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann. Beyond much doubt, the scientist who did most to establish the “cell theory” and draw out many of its profound implications was Rudolf Albert von Kölliker, born in Switzerland on July 6, 1817 and in 1939 beginning his graduate work at Bonn and Berlin and learning how to deliver science lectures in Latin. (In his maturity, he would shift to several modern languages, including of course German). His researches (mainly at Würzburg) didn’t end until a year before his death (in 1905) and included pathbreaking works on embryology and anatomy, but the weight of it was in histology, the new science of the cell. He traced the cell back to its sexual origins (in both plants and animals), demonstrated that we (and all other living things) consist of cells, proved the existence (and something of the functions) of what we now call mitochondria, and produced detailed work on the cells of the nervous system, musculature, skeletons and exoskeletons. Von Kölliker theorized, too, about the existence of a “genetic material” that must be transmitted from generation to generation, an idea that would find fuller expression in the 1950s discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. Because his findings so clearly resulted from new (and often revolutionary) laboratory techniques, they were widely accepted despite their radical implications (although he never did embrace Darwinism). Because of his generosities of mind and spirit, his death was equally widely mourned. ©

[Stanley]

Nettie Stevens was a trained expert in the modern sense—in the sense in which biology has ceased to be a playground for the amateur and a plaything for the mystic. Thomas Hunt Morgan, obituary for Miss Stevens, 1912.

Perhaps Betsy DeVos (Trump’s Education Secretary) would like to hear of a school that successfully transitioned from the private to the public sector. That would be Westford Academy (as it’s still called), founded in 1793 and, since 1928, the sole public high school of Westford, MA. In 2012 98% of its graduates went on to college. In 1880, one of its graduates, Nettie Stevens (born on July 7, 1860), decided not to go on to college, but rather to teach others, so her higher education was much delayed. She attended first a teacher training course to qualify for higher pay, then in fairly rapid succession in her 30s a “normal school”, Stanford University, and Bryn Mawr College. She emerged, aged 43, not only a fully certified school teacher but a PhD in Biology with a research lab appointment at Bryn Mawr, where Thomas Hunt Morgan chaired the Biology faculty. Almost immediately, Nettie Stevens began to publish, mainly in Morgan’s field, cytology, and became quite well known, winning a 1904-5 fellowship to study at Würzburg (where she met the aged Rudolf von Kolliker, one of the founders of cell science). It was her work at Würzburg that made her truly famous, leading to her discovery of the “XY” chromosome which determines the physical sex of beetles, blue whales, bears and bees (and us). Along the way, she made other discoveries and published pioneering work on (inter alia) sea urchins and meal worms. It also should be noted that she was an innovator in lab technique, one of the first to appreciate and use the fruit fly as a perfect subject for genetic experiment (Drosophila was the source of Thomas Morgan’s 1933 Nobel Prize). But still, Nettie was a woman. Westford’s most distinguished graduate died young, in 1912, at Johns Hopkins University Hospital (she had followed Morgan to Baltimore), widely admired and widely mourned, but despite several applications she had never attained a faculty position, even at Bryn Mawr.©

[Stanley]

Two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one. Maria White (Lowell), 1842. From her translation of "Ingomar the Barbarian."

James Russell Lowell may have been the most surprised lover in 19th-century America when in 1839 he asked Maria White’s father for her hand in marriage and was turned down. After all, he was a Lowell, rich as Croesus, not only a recent Harvard graduate but scion of the senior branch of New England’s first family and, he then thought, a very passable poet. But old Abijah White looked him over, thought him a potential wastrel instead, and told him to find a profession first. Reflecting on the whole episode, Lowell agreed that he had indeed wasted his youth in doggerel (“I was as great an ass as ever brayed & thought it singing”), and in 1840 he took steps to become a lawyer. So he won Maria, in 1844, and was transformed by her, although not into a great lawyer. Rather, this frail but steely woman convinced her husband to improve his poetry and use it to become a leading reformer, notably but not only in the abolition movement. Maria White Lowell was born in Watertown on July 8, 1821, and her father was serious enough about women’s education to send her to the local Ursuline Convent, where she learned to take herself seriously, write introspective poetry, and look out at the wider society as needing much improvement in many areas. It’s possible that she thought her husband came under that heading, too, but Maria continued to write her own poetry as well as read her husband’s, and at her early death (in 1853) Lowell eulogized her as “half of earth and more than of heaven” and published a memorial volume of her poetry. It’s a literary critic’s thought that Emily Dickinson was inspired by it, and James Russell Lowell certainly was. Later, Amy Lowell would think Maria’s poetry quite wonderful, better than anything James ever wrote, and Amy would herself become the Lowell family’s very best poet, at least until Robert Lowell came along. ©

[Stanley]

My heroines never go to bed without a ring on their fingers, not until page 118 at least. Barbara Cartland.

Despite the family’s reduced circumstances (owing partly to a grandfather’s bankruptcy and suicide and party to a father’s death in battle, they were down to only two domestic servants and could not even afford new mourning clothes), Barbara Cartland’s mother hoped that Barbara would marry an earl. That never happened, although by hook and by crook Polly Cartland was able to give Barbara a debutante season and introduce her to Lord Beaverbrook, who liked the girl (she was then only 19, having been born on July 9, 1901) and encouraged her to write. Never was a press magnate’s encouragement taken more to heart. After a short stint as a Beaverbrook gossip columnist, Barbara Cartland sold her first “romance” in 1923. When she died in 2000 she had two manuscripts in preparation and had published 723 novels. Scores are still in print even in the USA (most of them identified as from “The Eternal Edition”), and the records they set of UK library borrowings (one million a year between 1988 and 1994) will never be equaled. I haven’t read a single one of them, which in view of her publishing record suggests deliberate intent. I plead guilty, even though John Ezard, of The Guardian, found something to admire in them, and in her life too. He does credit her also with a more than passable memoir of her life in the WWI era and the roaring 20s that followed, We Danced All Night (1970) which, one day, I might take a look at. But I gather that although Barbara Cartland didn’t herself marry an earl, a suspiciously high proportion of her fictional heroines did just that (or, when not an earl, a Scots laird), and I’m told that every last one of them went to the altar as virgins. Barbara’s daughter Raine did marry an earl, twice, and on the second try thus became stepmama to Princess Diana of Wales, but that’s another story. ©

[Stanley]

Geography is about maps// But biography is about chaps. E. C. Bentley, 1905.

He signed “E. C. Bentley,” and thus he appears in bibliographies, for he authored the first ‘modern’ detective story (Trent’s Last Case, 1913). It was an effort to break free of Conan Doyle and his ridiculously insightful Sherlock, and is said (in its turn) to have inspired Dorothy L. Sayers to undertake her entrancing mysteries. Bentley must also have inspired Michael Innes’s cruelly clever Inspector Appleby whose ability to make erudite jokes of murders came along in 1944. E. C. Bentley, born in London on July 10, 1875, lived out quite a long life as a journalist and essayist, and really did not do much detective fiction. Trent was trotted out again in two books (1936 and 1938), and then came a crime novel, Elephant’s Work (1950), in which an amnesiac Church of England bishop is mistaken for a gangster. This one perhaps found a modern echo in Peter Ustinov’s highly comic Krumnagel (1971). And indeed, Bentley became for many years president of the Detection Club, an English society for authors and readers of crime fiction. But Edmund Clerihew Bentley will always be better known as the inventor of the “clerihew,” a four-line biographical witticism in rhyme. Indeed, Bentley published whole books of them, Biography for Beginners (1905), followed by More Biography (1929) and then, with a surely false modesty, Baseless Biography (1939). It’s a sobering thought that Bentley thought up his first ‘clerihew’ as a schoolboy in class, bored to tears by his history master, at St. Paul’s School, London. Wikiquote has a small slew of Bentley clerihews, among them my favorite:

John Stuart Mill

By an effort of will,

Overcame his natural bonhomie

And wrote Principles of Political Economy.

It has in it something of the wearied student, wanting sleep but forced to listen. ©

[Stanley]

The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 1994.

When I turned 13, our new neighbor, Jean Lodwick, a middle-school English teacher, asked me my age. I answered correctly, and she gave me Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, and said “then you’re old enough to read these.” She was trying to tell me that in literature was life, and if in reading about Doc, Lee Chong, and the girls at the Bear Flag I dimly realized that, I was ready also to read Harold Bloom. However, alas and alack, Bloom was then only a PhD student at Yale, having been born just 13 years before me, on July 11, 1930. Bloom is still going, although at 87 not as strongly, and he first published (on Keats) when I was 16, but while I was aware of his existence from early on I am pretty sure I read no Bloom until I became dean of the UMSL Honors College (by then, surely, old enough at 54) and I was advised to get cracking on Bloom by the associate dean. So since then I have read a bit, intend to read more, and have used Bloom in class (along with others, of course) to try to convince students that they can indeed find out a very great deal about life (and history) from and in literature, and that they are already old enough for Cannery Row or, better yet, Hamlet. I’m not well read enough to say that Harold Bloom is “the greatest literary critic on the planet” (as a Cambridge professor declared recently in The Independent), and Bloom has some flaws (I dislike and regard as dishonest, given his own insights, his dismissal of historical criticism), but the charge from some quarters that this almost nonagenarian is just a myopic, crabby, and crotchety conservative is way, way, way wide of the mark. He’s still immersing himself in literature because he’s still alive, and still narrating his experience of it. For starters, why not try his latest, Falstaff: Give Me Life (2017), wherein you will find that Harold Bloom “fell in love” with Sir John Falstaff when he was only 12!!! ©

[Stanley]

Am I not a Man and a Brother? Legend on Josiah Wedgwood's anti-slavery medallion.

If you visit the Wedgwood website you’ll not find much about the company’s history, but it’s now part of Fiskars, a Finnish group that makes just about everything and includes, in the kitchen and dining line, Royal Doulton, Royal Copenhagen, Waterford, and Royal Albert. It’s an interesting chapter in capitalism’s history, for Wedgwood was a family operation for seven generations, a remarkable span. They were all Staffordshire potters, but the ‘real’ founder was Josiah Wedgwood, of the 4th generation. Born of dissenting stock (Unitarian), on July 12, 1730, he became a master potter despite a childhood illness that left him without the use of one leg. Indeed he never could have begun to pot, but was apprenticed to his brother Thomas who made special allowances for this one-legged thrower. Josiah did become a master potter, and proved a brilliant designer too, but he was also an indefatigable entrepreneur, an inventor of new industrial processes, a creator of new products, at least a passable scientist (of clays, glazes, and their chemical properties), a miraculously adaptive marketer, an idealistic employer, and (through partnerships) a hugely successful capitalist. Along the way, he had his right leg amputated (assuredly without the aid of whiskey), was a leader in Britain’s transportation revolution (turnpikes and canals), acquired a reputation as a reformer (he supported the American and French Revolutions and worked for the abolition of slavery), and learned too how to work the world of politics. So multifaceted were his dealings, so rapid his progress, that it’s hard to say when Wedgwood made his crucial breakthrough, but we could say that he had “arrived” by the 1770s, a decade during which he designed and produced huge dinnerware sets for Queen Charlotte of England and for Catherine, Empress of all the Russias. And, oh yes, his daughter Susannah married another Unitarian, Robert Darwin. But that’s another story. ©

[Stanley]

If you must break the law, do it to seize power. Julius Caesar.

Before Julius Caesar came, saw, conquered, crossed the Rubicon, became dictator, and was assassinated, July was “Quinctilus,” and he was born on the 13th of Quinctilus, in the year we now know as 100 BCE. His was a family of respectably ancient lineage (he would later claim direct descent from one of those wolf-suckled twins), but it had gambled politically in ways that hadn’t paid, and so Julius entered on the scene with several marks against him. His first office (aged 28) was a military one, and he proved to be a brilliant commander, first in Spain. His exploits there won him adulation, but he declined to take immediate advantage because, already, his sights were set on higher things, which came through election to a higher office (pontifex maximus at 37) and then further and spectacular military successes, notably the conquest of Gaul, and then (in 54 BCE) he was able to proclaim a victory in Britain. It was a pretty narrow one, but Caesar had become his own publicist (his narratives are classics) and to many he seemed an all-conquering hero. And many in Rome thought that was just what the Republic, already in decline, needed. But there was enough opposition that Rome, too, needed to be conquered, and so in 49 BCE he marched into Italy. The rest is well known, though not quite accurately, through Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But it is important to the history of modern dictatorships that Caesar was elected, proclaimed dictator for life, even declared a cult, all through ‘normal’ processes. And Quinctilus became July. But there were enough old republicans and new jealousies to put him in danger, and he was spectacularly assassinated, in the Curia, on the Ides of March, 44 BCE. His assassins buried him without praise, but in due course his nephew would punish them, deify Caesar, establish the Roman Empire, and into the bargain make “Sextilis” (the month of his own birth) into our August. ©

[Stanley]

I was struck by 'Pontifex Maximus' the sobriquet now used by the pope so I looked it up as I had never understood the connection with bridge building...... LINK

[Stanley]

The river is dark and smooth and full of mysterious reflections, like a road of triumph through the mist. Gertrude Bell, describing the Tigris in a letter to her father.

In the film version ofThe English Patient, a dialogue: “How do we get through those mountains?” “The Bell maps show a way.” “Let’s hope he’s right.” But “he” was a she, Gertrude Bell, born into wealth in northern England on July 14, 1868, and destined not only to map ways through the desert but to create the Iraqi state. Brought up to be her own person, she whizzed through Oxford, the first woman to earn First Class Honours in Modern History. At that point aged only 19, she was considered too “Oxfordy” for the marriage market and was sent on her travels to rub off some of the hard edges. One of her early stops was in Tehran, with her uncle, then ambassador to Persia. By the time she got there (1892) she had fallen in love with the region, and would fall in love with several of its (mainly British) menfolk, but she remained an independent person, a scholar in ancient and modern middle eastern cultures, an explorer and geographer, an alpinist of very considerable achievement, fluent in several regional languages (also German, Italian, and French), a wartime spy (with T. E. Lawrence) in the “Arab Bureau,” and a post-war accomplice (of Winston Churchill’s) in drawing the map of the modern middle east. Throughout, Bell had become particularly active in what we now call Iraq, where she was known as “al-Khatun,” learning disdain for the Shia sect, hatred, fear, and admiration for the Kurds of the north, paternal (or maternal?) affection for the dashing Sunnis, (tribal chiefs and sophisticated urbanites), and acquiring the belief that if you banged them all together and called it “Iraq” you could continue to run the show like an imperial puppet master. Properly horrified by the Armenian genocide, yet coldly appreciative of the efficiency of aerial bombardment (including incineration) of recalcitrant Shia villages, Gertrude Bell embodied and indeed helped to create many of our own delusions about Iraq. ©

[Look Gertrude and Mesopotamia up on the site search..... She is an old friend of ours....]

[Stanley]

Patronage is a wicked word. Dwight David Eisenhower.

In early modern England, patronage and its fellow, clientage, can be seen as institutions. There were other ways to get ahead in life, e.g. talent, hard work, and luck, or an astonishingly good marriage, but patronage features prominently in many ‘poor boy makes good’ biographies, for instance that of Inigo Jones, humbly born in London on July 15, 1573, and destined to design two of England’s most beautiful buildings, the Queen’s House at Greenwich and the Banqueting House in Whitehall. How he got there is still a bit of a mystery, for his father was a poor clothworker, an immigrant from Wales, but he did learn to sketch, and this brought him noble patrons, an earl or two, who late in Elizabeth’s reign sent the young man to the continent, where he imbibed varied skills and tastes that (back in London and working as a stage designer with Ben Jonson) would gain him still more and higher patrons, including, critically, Elizabeth I’s Robert Cecil and James I’s queen, Anne of Denmark. That last patronage connection may have been formed in Denmark, for besides the usual tour of Italy Jones had been employed for a time by King Christian IV in the design of his palaces. At any rate, plucked by patronage from the Jacobean stage, Inigo Jones became (after a second Italian sojourn), Surveyor of the King’s Works, at which point he toured Italy a third time, now with the earl of Arundel, an eminent patron of artists looking for another client. Not surprisingly, Jones’s most famous buildings were influenced by the new buildings of Renaissance Rome, but his design for Covent Garden square, including St. Paul’s (parish) Church, derives directly from classical Rome. He did substantial ‘remodeling’ work on the old St. Paul’s Cathedral, for which he might also be remembered but for the Great Fire which, 14 years after Jones’s death, reduced the gothic building to rubble and brought Christopher Wren to town, where he needed less patronage and made a greater impact. ©