1 Comment Posted on June 1, 2017June 1, 2017 17th Century, 18th Century, Georgian Britain, literature, London, Persons of Interest, Sex, The Enlightenment, The Restoration

Agony Uncles: Advice From The Anthenian Oracle (Part 1)

Athenian_Mercury_Feb_28_1693 Most people today would probably consider Dear Abby, with her origins in the 1950s, as the archetypal advice columnist, but this brand of casuistical journalism actually has its roots nearly three hundred years earlier. Usually credited with producing the first English-language advice column, John Dunton (1659–1733) first published his Athenian Mercury in London in 1690.

Although the Mercury answered questions on topics which are still modern advice column stalwarts, such as love dilemmas and health complaints, it also addressed a bewilderingly wide range of other topics from history, to science, to mathematics, and philosophy. Despite the claim to virtual omniscience inherent in setting up as an advice columnist, this might have been a tall order for just one man. Dunton, therefore, answered his readers’ queries with the aid of an expert panel: the Athenian Society, comprising Dunton, a mathematician, a discretely anonymous and genteelly uncompensated physician, and a poetic clergyman, as well as several non-existent alter-egos.

The questions asked demonstrate the enduring nature of certain human fascinations, whilst the answers given read like little populist summaries of the zeitgeist of later Stuart London. This is the first in a series of posts drawing from The Athenian Oracle, an edited collection of highlights from the periodical, available in the public domain, here.

The Oracle divides its selections from the writings of the Athenian Society under three main headings: History and Philosophy, Divinity, and, of course, Love and Marriage. This post will be the first of several drawing on the selections classified as History and Philosophy, a fascinating amalgamation of casuistry on subjects we might describe variously as natural history, human and Church history, legal history, science, psychology, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and more.

Here are three of my favorites:

Schem. XXXIV – Of a Flea. Robert Hooke, Micrographia.

1. Why the anatomy of the flea is like the cruelty of a beautiful lady.
It’s okay to be curious about the World around you, as long as you don’t mind a hefty dose of condescension, flirtation, and misogynistic leg-pulling with your edification.

Quest. —A lady desires to know whether Fleas have stings, or whether they only suck or bite, when they draw blood from the body?

Ans.—Not to trouble you, Madam, with the Hebrew or Arabic name of a flea, or to transcribe Bochart’s learned dissertations on the little animal, we shall, for your satisfaction, give such a description thereof as we have yet been able to discover. Its skin is of a lovely deep red colour, most neatly polished, and armed with scales, which can resist anything but fate and your ladyship’s unmerciful fingers; the neck of it is exactly like the tail of a lobster, and, by the assistance of those strong scales it is covered with, springs backwards and forwards much in the same manner, and with equal violence; it has two eyes on each side of its head, so pretty, that I would prefer them to any, Madam, but yours; and which it makes use of to avoid its fate, and fly its enemies, with as much nimbleness and success as your sex manage those fatal weapons, lovely basilisks as you are, for the ruin of your adorers. Nature has provided it six substantial legs, of great strength, and incomparable agility jointed like a cane, covered with large hairs, and armed each of them with two claws, which appear of a horny substance, more sharp than lancets, or the finest needle you have in all your needle-book. It was a long while before we could discover its mouth, which, we confess, we have not yet so exactly done as we could wish, the little bashful creature always holding up its two fore feet before it, which it uses instead of a fan, or mask, when it has no mind to be known; and we were forced to be guilty of an act both uncivil and cruel, without which we could never have resolved your question. We were obliged to unmask this modest one, and cut off its two forelegs to get to the face; which being performed, though it makes our tender hearts as well as yours almost bleed to think of it, we immediately discovered what your Ladyship desired, and found Nature had given it a strong proboscis, or trunk, as a gnat or muschetto, though much thicker and stouter, with which we may very well suppose it penetrates your fair hand, feasts itself on the nectar of your blood, and then, Like a Little faithless fugitive of a lover, skips away, almost invisibly, nobody knows whither.

2. Is ignorance bliss, or is it hard to tell because everyone is stupid?

Quest.—Who are the most happy in the world, wise men or fools?

Ans. — Much may be said of either, but the manner very different. If the fool be the happier, the world is a very desirable place, there being such a quantity of happy men in it. The Supreme Being is essential happiness; those, therefore, that act the most like him are happiest. There is but one right line, and infinite crooked ones; one wisdom, but follies innumerable; one real goodness, but divers appearances of it; and but one best way to every thing, and to judge of everything that is reason, or understanding. Here only is the paradox; the fool’s happiness consists in a privation of grief, and the happiness of a wise man in possession of good; which, being a little considered, the result of this next question will answer the first; namely, which would be more miserable, a wise man that wanted his good, or a fool that had a sense of his grief? In this reverse the wise man would be more miserable; because he that wants his happiness wants every thing, but he that has a sense of grief may have a sense of happiness. Now this reverse, or contrary to the reverse, must necessarily make him happy; namely, his possession of good is preferable to the fool’s privation of grief.

Fashionable Contrasts; – or – the Duchess’s little shoe yielding to the magnitude of the Duke’s foot. James Gillray, 1792.

3. I hope you weren’t expecting medical advice from our in-house doctor…
…unless misogyny be the cure for corns.

Quest. — A lady who is extremely troubled with corns desires to know the reason?

Ans. —Alas, poor lady! There may be many weighty reasons assigned for this sore calamity. Perhaps her hard heart has infected her toes, and made them as obdurate as herself; or else the little wag Cupid is taking his vengeance upon her for having murdered some of his humble servants, and is turning her into stone for a flinty-hearted creature, as his cousin Apollo served Niobe; and she is now dying upwards as Daphne’s poor toes rooted in the ground, and if she appeases not the little angry god quickly, she must in a few days expect to be perfect plaster of Paris.

Had the Society set their conviction that all women were responsible for broken hearts over twelve bars of music, the blues might have been born somewhat earlier and in a very different place. Nevertheless, they attempted to curry favor with the sex they so mercilessly teased, and the Ladies’ Mercury became the first periodical to be aimed at women alone in 1693. Perhaps the constant jibes were not appreciated as the publication only lasted four issues.

What are the clouds- The above extracts have been selected for their entertainment value but the philosophical and historical questions most typically sent to the Mercury resemble most closely, to modern eyes, the whimsical wonderings of a stoner. In my mind, I can’t help but imagine them being read by Keanu Reeves: What are the clouds? How is the dew produced? How does a nettle sting? What is the reason that, by applying the empty shells of some shell-fishes to your ear, you may therein perceive a noise like the roaring of the sea? Whether birds have any government? Whether the sky be of any colour? What think you of the Milky Way in the heavens? Wherefore is it that, having two eyes, we see nevertheless but one … image of the objects? Why men dream of things they never thought of? What is melancholy? What is death? Is it not better to die than to live? What becomes of smoke? How is the fire made betwixt the flint and the steel? And, of course, Whence have we our Opium?

Despite how these questions may sound to me, they are more accurately viewed in the context of the Scientific Revolution. Late seventeenth century London was a place where people were feeling their way towards a confidence that empirical observation and experiment (something like what we might call the scientific method) could increase their knowledge of the natural world and that such knowledge could be used for invention and innovation which might improve the material and spiritual lot of mankind.

This was a more radical way of feeling than we might imagine. The medieval sense of living in the ‘dark ages’, where man clung to scraps of wisdom from the ancients which could not be improved upon, had been gradually eroded by discoveries of new lands, their people flora and fauna, their technologies. Scholarship flourished, partially out of the simple need to catalogue and process all this new information. London, the seat of a monarch sympathetic to learning, presiding over a court where natural philosophy was fashionable, was near the forefront of European scholarship for the first time. The men of the Royal Society, giants like Boyle and Robert Hooke, were the Mercury’s heroes and a large part of the Athenian Society’s purpose was to make their discoveries accessible to the layman. In the case of the flea, a new-ish and fashionable technology was used to reveal a previously unknown microscopic world. The Athenians make their observations, laced with humor and divested of Latin. This was popular science for people who did not want to wade through Hooke’s Micrographia, a sort of seventeenth century Bill Nye, or Neil deGrasse Tyson, or, for my older, British readers, Johnny Ball.

Quest. — Whether the common notion of the world be true, that these latter ages, for some centuries past, have a less share of learning, judgment, and invention, than those which have preceded, because we find them deficient in finding out such advantageous arts as their forefathers have done?

Ans. — …See the inventions and experiments of the Royal Society, which will abundantly convince anyone that our age has as active and busy spirits for invention as any former age in the world.

Dr. John V.P. Jenkins

Source

The Athenian Oracle, available online here.

7 Comments Posted on May 25, 2017May 25, 2017 19th Century, Crime, Guest Posts, Law, London, Persons of Interest, Politics, Victorian

The Power of a Pen in the Hand of an Angry Woman: The Trials of Caroline Norton

Daniel Maclise, The Spirit of Justice (1847-9). Fresco. Caroline Norton was the model for Justice (center)

In an age in which English marriage law considered women not just less than equal, but absolutely nonexistent, Caroline Norton emerged as an unlikely hero. She is sometimes called an early feminist, but that is inaccurate. Pressured into marriage to a virtual stranger by her family’s financial problems, abused both physically and emotionally by her husband, object of general pity, falsely accused of adultery, separated from her children, and crippled financially by her manipulative husband, she fought back.

Caroline didn’t believe in woman’s equality with man, as did Wollstonecraft for example, and certainly never argued for it. What she did believe in was rule by law, laws that could be changed, and the obligation of the law to protect those dependent on others. She may have been without protection, money, or power, but she had two formidable weapons: she had influential friends and she could write.

Caroline’s early life is generally described one of poverty, and that is somewhat true. Her grandfather, the playwright Richard Sheridan, died in poverty, but in an age that knew true poverty, Caroline didn’t go hungry or lack shelter. However, her mother, who had been left with seven children to raise on a modest pension when her husband died suddenly, endured enormous financial insecurity and worried particularly for her three dowerless daughters throughout Caroline’s childhood. Still, her childhood cannot be called bleak. The Sheridans were an intellectually vibrant family with radical political leanings and a wide circle of friends. Her mother wrote novels, and Caroline was particularly fond of her uncle, Charles Sheridan, a noted if not particularly brilliant poet. She began writing and expressing herself at a very young age.

Once Caroline’s older sister made a successful marriage, Caroline didn’t question that it was her turn to do so, particularly because their youngest sister had begun to attract a number of suitors, and giving the family hope she might make a brilliant match. (So she did. Georgiana Sheridan became the Duchess of Somerset.) Caroline may not have wanted to stand in the way, may have desired to please her mother, or might simply have believed she would get no other offers. There had been none during her only London season. Whatever the reason, she agreed to marry Edward Norton, a man she had met only once three years before when she was sixteen. He had approached her mother at that time and been put off, apparently in hopes Caroline could do better. This time both mother and daughter agreed.

Portrait by Sir George Hayter, 1832

No one knows why Edward wanted Caroline, but his dissatisfaction with her surfaced early. The Sheridans were Whigs, if not outright radical, in their politics. Norton, a Member of Parliament and a staunch Tory, loathed much of what Caroline believed. Raised to argue her position, she must have been devastated when he kicked her for expressing views with which he disagreed. That kick early in the marriage was the first of extensive physical abuse. Various accounts describe Norton as “dull-witted” and indolent, the sort to be threatened by her wit, verbal dexterity, and vivaciousness. He wasn’t above using her social skills for political gain, however. He even encouraged her friendship with Lord Melbourne.

Money also caused trouble. Norton probably presented his financial status to Caroline’s mother otherwise, but he was in fact living on a barrister’s salary when he married. Though Lord Grantly’s heir, he received no allowance from the estate. He lost his seat in Parliament three years after they married. Extremely conscious of status, he refused work he considered beneath him, did little to help their situation, and pressured Caroline to convince her influential friends to get him an appointment, one he thought worthy of his rank. Eventually Melbourne gave him an appointment as a magistrate. Caroline, for her part, began to publish her writings, and he happily took the income from that.

The birth of three children and her writing gave Caroline some joy. She was a devoted mother. The violence, however, never let up. When she was pregnant with her fourth child, he beat her so badly she miscarried. After such episodes Caroline would go to her family for refuge but always went back. Arguing and violence escalated until one day, when Caroline was out, Edward sent their three children to a cousin and ordered the servants to lock her out of the house. He had, in essence, thrown her out.

Norton then brought suit against Melbourne for “Criminal Conversation,” or adultery, a first step in obtaining a divorce. He also hoped to milk money out of Melbourne. He lost. The jury didn’t even have to leave the courtroom; he was laughed out of court. The case had several results. Melbourne’s reputation and political position were upheld. Caroline was labeled a “scandalous woman” for the rest of her life. There could and would be no divorce. Only a man could sue for divorce, and she was a faithful wife. They were stuck with each other.

Worst of all he kept the children from her. Her only recourse was to attack the law that let him do it. Caroline rallied her friends and contacts. She finally convinced a member of parliament to introduce a bill to give mothers the right to appeal to the Court of Chancery for custody of children less than seven years of age. She continued to write, but now she wrote pamphlets brilliantly arguing for the rights of women to their children. It took two years, but in 1839 parliament passed The Infant Custody Act enabling women sue for custody of children under seven as long as they were not adulteresses. The act made married women visible in the law for the first time. Edward countered by moving her children to Scotland where the law didn’t apply. Three years later one of her sons died there before she was able to get to him.

Edward also denied her a home and refused to support her. Another woman might have been crushed under all that, but Caroline Norton was made of sterner stuff. She continued to write. She could support herself with her published works. Edward quickly claimed her income as his right.

Yes, he could do that.

She proceeded to send her bills to him, bills he was obligated to pay. Years of conflict followed eventually culminating in another court case in 1853. This time Edward won on a technicality because the particular creditor in question had presented his bill before Norton withdrew support.

Detail from a painting by Frank Stone, 1845

Again Caroline fought back with her pen. Since her husband was entitled to all her income from writing, she dedicated that writing to one topic, marriage and property laws that enabled him to profit from her labor. She never argued for the equality of women. She focused entirely on the non-existence of women in marriage law.

A movement to change the laws was already underway and a number of women including Barbara Leigh Smith, Emily Davies, Elizabeth Garrett and Dorothea Beale, were lobbying for change. Caroline threw herself—and her pen—into the fray. NON-EXISTENT became a kind of rallying cry for her. Among other things, she wrote an open letter to Queen Victoria about the position of women in regard to divorce. When the Matrimonial Causes Act passed in 1857 it had 68 clauses, four of which came from Caroline’s pamphlets. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a step forward. It created a Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes removing divorce from both civil and ecclesiastical courts, and provided women recognition in law.

In later years Caroline continued to write. Her poetry and novels enjoyed some success, but today they are far less well known than her political writing. Edward Norton died in 1875. Two years later Caroline married a long time friend and supporter, Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. They died within months of each other later that year and are buried next to each other. Sadly, her oldest son predeceased her, and her only remaining son died within weeks of Stirling-Maxwell.

Caroline Norton never joined the earliest feminist circle, The Ladies of Langham Place, who had lobbied for the Matrimonial Causes Act, nor devoted herself to such women’s issues as education, the vote, or equality in employment. Still, her influential writing helped put the first cracks in the wall separating women from recognition under the law. She used her pen to stand up for herself and in doing so stood up for others who had no voice.*

Further Reading:

There are many pieces about Caroline Norton in print and on the Web. These three are particularly rich and well documented:

“Caroline Norton,” on Spartacus Educational.

Diniejko, Andreij, Contributing editor, “Caroline Norton: A Biographical Sketch,” on The Victorian Web.

Ockerbloom, Mary Mark, editor, “Caroline Norton (1808-1877)” on A Celebration of Women Authors, University of Pennsylvania Digital Library, 1994-2017.

Caroline Warfield has been many things (even a nun), but above all she is a romantic. Having retired to the urban wilds of eastern Pennsylvania, she lets her characters lead her to adventures while she nudges them to explore the riskiest territory of all, the human heart. She is a regular contributor to History Imagined and to The Teatime Tattler, a blog in the shape of a fictional nineteenth century scandal sheet.

Her current series, Children of Empire, is set in the late Georgian/early Victorian era and focuses on three cousins, driven apart by lies and deceit, who must find their way back from the distant reaches of the empire—and the women who help make them whole. The second book in the series, The Reluctant Wife, set in India and England, was just released.

Website | Amazon | Pinterest

*Editor’s Note: Caroline Norton’s influence on modern matrimonial and custody laws cannot be understated. As a lovely (and telling) tribute, Daniel Maclise used her as the model for Justice in his fresco The Spirit of Justice in the House of Lords (top). See The Transfigurations of Caroline Norton for more on her influence on art and literature. -JC

18 Comments Posted on May 11, 2017May 16, 2017 Medieval History, Religion, The Occult, Vice

The Joy of Confessing: “Women’s Vices” and Burchard’s Decretum of 1003

Some people think medieval history is boring—all religion, suppression, and marrying for alliances—but we know better, don’t we? Medieval history is a Pandora’s box of surprises, and the deeper you go, the stranger they get. Case in point, penitentials. Yes, I’m going to get into sources here with you for a minute, but bear with me, it’s worth it.

When studying the Middle Ages, the temptation is to stop at Canon Law, that is, the rules and guidelines set by the Church. The mistake is in assuming everyone lived by it; even prominent people within the Church disagreed with each other on many key points, and the laws they reached by consensus were laws for an ideal world where everyone lived perfect Christian lives according to the standard of whichever pope they happened to have at the time. As you can imagine, not everyone lived the way Rome wanted them to. To get a more accurate picture of medieval life, we need to consider other sources like court documents, medical texts, and even popular literature. The source we’re going to be looking at today is a personal favorite of mine: pentitentials.

When I get busy with dragons, I never forget my crown

What, pray tell, is a penitential? It’s every bit as exciting as it sounds. Penitentials were confessional literature compiled by monks as guides to the theory and application of confession. Spanning hundreds of pages and multiple volumes, penitentials listed every sin imaginable in separate categories and advised punishments for each. Penitentials are fantastic sources for those studying the Middle Ages, but proceed with caution: while many of the sins do give us a better idea of the ways in which common people could misbehave, it is impossible to say how often some of the sins came up (or how many were products of a bored monk’s imagination. See also marginalia, below).

With that disclaimer firmly in place, we are going to take a look at the Decretum of Burchard of Worms.

Apart from having the best name ever, Burchard served as the bishop of Worms from 1000 until his death in 1025. During his tenure, he wrote his Decretum, a massive twenty-book list of every sin conceivable to the medieval imagination, drawing on a combination of earlier penitentials and things actually heard in confession at that time. Some of the penitentials he used as sources dated back to the seventh century, and this may help to explain some of the stranger sins below.

A wolf dressed as a monk. Why not?

The nineteenth book of Burchard’s Decretum has a section dealing in sickness of the soul, including magic, divination, and “women’s vices.” It is worth noting that many of the “diabolical practices” mentioned here could be forgiven with a fairly light penance, as opposed to the death sentences handed out like candy four hundred years later with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum. Many of these are framed as questions a priest would ask his penitent. I have included some of my favorites here, but if you want to read this in its entirety, you can also find it here.

As relevant art from these period is sadly limited, I have added some marginalia to our…erm…margins. Enjoy.

***

“Have you violated a grave, by which I mean, after you see someone buried have you gone at night, broken open the grave, and taken his clothes? If you have, you should do penance for two years on the appointed fast days.”

I mean, not since college. Is that bad?

“Have you refused to attend mass or prayers or to make an offering to a married priest, by which I mean have you not wished to confess your sins to him or receive the Body and Blood of the Lord from him because you thought he was a sinner? If you have done so, you should do penance for one year on the appointed fast days.”

That’s right. Married priest. At this point, priests were still allowed to marry or have concubines. Clerical marriage wasn’t condemned by the pope until Leo IX in 1049, but the ban didn’t take hold until well into the twelfth century after the Lateran councils in 1123 and 1139. The more you know!

“Have you tasted your husband’s semen in order to make his love for you burn greater through your diabolical deeds? If you have, you should do seven years of penance on the appointed fast days.”

Okay, oral sex has magical properties. So far, so sensible. What next?

“Have you done what some women are wont to do? They take their menstrual blood, mix it into food or drink, and give it to their men to eat or drink to make them love them more. If you have done this, you should do five years of penance on the appointed fast days.”

That poor fish.

How’s that for a binding spell? If that doesn’t work:

“Have you done what some women are wont to do? They take a live fish and put it in their vagina, keeping it there for a while until it is dead. Then they cook or roast it and give it to their husbands to eat, doing this in order to make men be more ardent in their love for them. If you have, you should do two years of penance on the appointed fast days.”

Wait, what?

“Have you done what some women are accustomed to do? They lie face down on the ground, uncover their buttocks, and tell someone to make bread on their naked buttocks. When they have cooked it, they give it to their husbands to eat. They do this to make them more ardent in their love for them. If you have, you should do two years of penance on the appointed fast days.”

Bread…on my butt?

“Have you done what some women are wont to do? They take a man’s skull, burn it, and give it to their husbands to drink for health. If you have, you should do one year of penance on the appointed fast days.”

Who hasn’t? Next…

See what happens when you don’t have your burnt skull potion?

“Have you believed what many women turning back to Satan believe and assert to be true: you believe that in the stillness of a quiet night, with you gathered in your bed with your husband lying at your bosom, you are physically able to pass through closed doors and can travel across the span of the earth with others deceived by a similar error? And that you can kill baptized people redeemed by Christ’s blood without using visible weapons and then, after cooking their flesh, can eat it, and put straw, wood, or something like this in place of their hearts, and, though you have eaten them, you can bring them back to life and grant them a stay during which they can live? If you have believed this, you should do penance for forty days (that is, a quarantine) on bread and water with seven years of penance subsequently.”

Do any women believe that? Show of hands, please.

“Have you done what some adulterous women do? As soon as they find out that their lovers wish to take lawful wives, then they use some sort of evil art to extinguish the men’s sexual desire so that they are useless to their wives and unable to have intercourse with them. If you have done this or taught others to, you should do penance for ten days on bread and water.”

Baking some magic butt bread

Sure. Someone put a “spell” on you. Right.

“Have you done what some women are accustomed to do? They take off their clothes and smear honey all over their naked body. With the honey on their body they roll themselves back and forth over wheat on a sheet spread on the ground. They carefully collect all the grains of wheat sticking to their moist body, put them in a mill, turn the mill in the opposite direction of the sun, grind the wheat into flour, and bake bread from it. Then they serve it to their husbands to eat, who then grow weak and die. If you have, you should do penance for forty days on bread and water.”

Is this a sin or a recipe? And hang on, only forty days for murdering a spouse with magic bread?

Also included under “women’s vices”, for some reason:

“Have you eaten any food from Jews or from other pagans which they prepared for you? If you have, you should do penance for ten days on bread and water.”

BURCHARD. What. The. Heck? I guess there wasn’t a chapter for xenophobic culinary guidelines.

As batty as these sound, some of them are nevertheless revealing of superstitions and pagan rituals that had survived until the eleventh century through confessional literature, if not in real life. We do need to take these with a pinch of salt, however; while some of them could be indicative of real practice, others are just as likely to have been imagined or embellished by the monks painstakingly copying these manuscripts and doodling madness in the margins.

You can find this section translated here.

Jessica Cale

3 Comments Posted on May 4, 2017May 4, 2017 17th Century, Crime, Death, Disease, France, London, Sex, The Occult, The Renaissance, The Restoration, The Southwark Saga, Vice, Violence

A Field Guide to Historical Poisons

[From the archives]

The Long Way Home takes place in the court of Louis XIV during the Affair of the Poisons. During this period, many people from all walks of life were employing poison to dispatch with rivals and even family members to improve their fortunes or standing in court. As you can imagine, poison plays a large part in the plot of The Long Way Home. Here are three that are featured in the book along with symptoms so you’ll be first to know if your enemies have dosed your wine.

You know, just in case.

Arsenic (also known as Inheritance Powder)

Arsenic was the most commonly used poison at this time, and was used alone or to add extra toxicity to other lethal concoctions. It was the primary ingredient in Inheritance Powder, so called because of the frequency with which it was against relatives and spouses for the sake of inheritance.

Tasteless as it was potent, arsenic usually went undetected in wine or food, although it was also added to soap and even sprinkled into flowers. It could easily kill someone quickly, but was more commonly distributed over a long period of time to make it appear that the victim was suffering from a long illness. The symptoms begin with headaches, drowsiness, and gastrointestinal problems, and as it develops, worsen into convulsions, muscle cramps, hair loss, organ failure, coma, and death.

Unusually for a poison apart from lead, arsenic has had many other common uses throughout history. It was used as a cosmetic as early as the Elizabethan period. Combined with vinegar and white chalk, it was applied to whiten the complexion as a precursor to the lead-based ceruse popular in later centuries.

Ad for Arsenic Wafers, 1896. Arsenic was a common complexion treatment until the early 20th century.

By the Victorian period, arsenic was taken as a supplement to correct the complexion from within, resulting in blueish, translucent skin. Victorian and Edwardian doctors prescribed it for asthma, typhus, malaria, period pain, syphilis, neuralgia, and as a nonspecific pick-me-up. It was also used in pigments such as Paris Green, Scheele’s Green, and London Purple, all of them extremely toxic when ingested or inhaled. A distinctive yellow-green, Scheele’s Green was a popular dye in the nineteenth century for furnishings, candles, fabric, and even children’s toys, but it gave off a toxic gas. It may have even played a part in Napoleon’s death. While it took nearly a century to discover the dangers of the pigment, it was later put to use as an insecticide.

A Glass of Wine With Caesar Borgia. John Collier, 1893. From left to right: Cesare, Lucrezia, their father, Pope Alexander VI, and a young man with an empty glass. The implication is that the man doesn’t know if it will be poisoned.

Cantharides (also known as Cantarella or Spanish Fly)

Cantarella was a poison that was rumored to have been used by the Borgias (among others). Although it appeared in literature as something that could mimic death, cantarella was probably made from arsenic, like most of the common poisons of the era, or of canthariden powder made from blister beetles, and was highly toxic. Cantharides are now more commonly known as Spanish Fly.

Although it was only rumored to have been used by the Borgias, it was definitely 8fda6-cantharides associated with the Medicis. Aqua Toffana, or Aquetta di Napoli, was a potent mixture of both arsenic and cantharides allegedly created by an Italian countess, Giulia Tofana (d. 1659). Colorless and odorless, it was undetectable even in water and as little as four drops could cause death within a few hours. It could also be mixed with lead or belladonna for a little extra f*** you.

In case you’re wondering how one would catch enough blister beetles to do away with one’s enemies, cantharides were surprisingly easy to come across. They were also used as an aphrodisiac. In small quantities, they engorge the genitals, so it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. In larger quantities, however, they raise blisters, cause inflammation, nervous agitation, burning of the mouth, dysphagia, nausea, hematemesis, hematuria, and dysuria.

Oh, and death.

The powder was brownish in color and smelled bad, but mostly went unnoticed with food or wine. More than one character in The Long Way Home has come in contact with it, and it even plays a part in the story.

Ad for Pennyroyal Pills, 1905.

Pennyroyal

Pennyroyal was not often used to intentionally poison anyone, but I’m including it in this guide because of its toxic effects. Usually drunk as tea, is was used as a digestive aid and to cause miscarriage. Is was also used in baths to kill fleas or to treat venomous bites.

Although this is the least toxic of the bunch, the side effects are much more worrying. Taken in any quantity, it may not only result in contraction of the uterus, but also serious damage to the liver, kidneys, and nervous system. It’s a neurotoxin that can cause auditory and visual hallucinations, delirium, unconsciousness, hearing problems, brain damage, and death.

Along with Inheritance Powder and Cantarella, Pennyroyal also appears in The Long Way Home and causes some interesting complications for a few of our characters.

All of these poisons were common and easily obtainable in much of Europe during the time this book takes place and as you can see, continued to be commonly used for a variety of purposes until very recently. The use of Inheritance Powder in particular is very well-documented and it played a huge part in the Affair of the Poisons as well as commanding a central position in The Long Way Home.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Leave a comment Posted on April 27, 2017April 27, 2017 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, Reviews, Sex, The Regency, Victorian

Review: A History of Courtship by Tania O’Donnell

51Iv62jqdOL._SX345_BO1,204,203,200_ Tania O’Donnell, A History of Courtship: 800 Years of Seduction Techniques (Pen & Sword; Barnsley, 2017).

Have you ever wondered why we give flowers to people we like? About the origins of the rhyme ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’? How people in the past dressed to catch the eye? Why the girls in costume dramas always have to have an older lady in tow? Or generally how our forebears went about signalling their intent and making a move? If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’, then Tania O’Donnell’s History of Courtship may be the book for you.

O’Donnell focuses on, mainly British, sometimes American, and certainly Western, courtship, from the development of courtly love in the twelfth century up to (and including) the nineteenth century. The twentieth century is avoided on the basis that its sweeping technological and social changes made courtship a very different game, which is perhaps true, but I would have loved to see the story taken from Tristan and Isolde to the early rock’n’roll which retold their tale so many times.

Nevertheless, A History of Courtship leaps nimbly between periods, from the court poets and troubadours of Europe in the Middle Ages to the dangers of Tudor England, and from the grubby London of the Restoration to the more familiar romantic settings of Regency ballrooms and Victorian studies. The book gives only a superficial sense of how courtship may have changed between these periods but this is understandable given its thematic, rather than chronological, organization. It may even be justified given O’Donnell’s awareness that people themselves change rather less than customs over time and that even some of these have a cyclical existence.

Thematically, A History of Courtship illustrates an impressive range of romantic tropes (love at first sight, childhood sweethearts, kidnapping, elopement, proposal, marriage, scandal) using an equally impressive range of sources (clothing, cosmetics, legislation, letters, songs, poems, plays, diaries, sermons, gifts). The book is well illustrated with apposite selections, which speak to the depth of the author’s immersion in, and the breadth of her knowledge on, her subject. Although this is a slender, accessible volume, these provide something unique the more academic reader can appreciate as readily as the more casual. I found the intricate “lover’s knot” created by a hapless nineteenth century Pennsylvanian Quaker for the unrequiting object of his affections particularly intriguing.

O’Donnell, however, does not concentrate purely on the sweeter side of courtship at the expense of its, sometimes more visceral, reality. Regular readers of this blog will be quite satisfied with the quantities of scandal, prostitution, venereal disease, and ‘Vinegar’ Valentine’s cards in evidence. There is even a lengthy extract from the works of our late patron, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Whilst not entirely alleviating the biases of the more traditional sources, O’Donnell’s approach also helps to draw out some of the leaner evidence on illiterate, poor or gay courtships.

Finally, O’Donnell offers a way of looking at the past that might help shed some light on our own lives. With the benefit of a little perspective, she seems to suggest, perhaps we should not rush to judgement in the present. Certainly, we should be grateful for the relative freedoms we enjoy today and should be cautious of viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Above all, we should celebrate our courtships and not let them end at marriage. Seductive arguments.

Dr. John V.P. Jenkins

5 Comments Posted on April 20, 2017 18th Century, 19th Century, Death, Disease, Georgian Britain, Guest Posts, Victorian

Bones, Blood, Barbers, and Butchers: Surgeons in the 18th Century

In the eighteenth century, the record for the fastest amputation at the thigh was nine seconds, start to finish, including sawing through the bone. Are you impressed yet? Even the average, thirty seconds, was pretty damned fast.

And speed was of the essence. Let’s face it. If you needed surgery in the eighteenth century or the first half of the nineteenth, you’d better be strong and brave, because it wasn’t a doddle. Not for the surgeon, and not at all for the patient.

Patients faced three major killers

They’d solved one of the major issues that killed people who needed surgery, reinventing ligatures to tie off blood vessels so the patient didn’t bleed out on the table. Before the sixteenth century, they’d used cautery—burning—to seal any gushers, vastly adding to the pain. And, of course, closing up the wound as fast as possible helped.

And pain was the second issue. No effective anesthetics. Not until the mid-nineteenth century. The patient was awake for the entire operation, which was the main reason why speed (and some strong helpers to hold the patient down) mattered.

The biggest killer was factor number three. Germs.

Not that they knew that, of course. The prevailing opinion was that wound infections were caused by air, though how nobody quite knew. They had no way of knowing that the surgeon’s hands and clothes, the bed sheets, the surgical instruments, the dressings, and a myriad of other surfaces that would come into contact with the patient were covered with organisms too tiny to see, but that would infect the wound. Most people sickened. More than half died.

Keep out the air to keep out the contagion

Some hospitals did pretty well. Their theory was that the infective element was carried in noxious fumes; that is, if it smelled like bad air, it would be bad for their patient. Alexander Monro (Primus and Secundus), a father and son team who headed the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, must have run a clean operation. They managed to get the death rate for amputations down to eight percent. Given that other hospitals of the time managed rates of 45 to 65 percent, that’s truly impressive.

Most surgeons relied on speed to limit the amount of time the wound was exposed to the air, thus—they hoped—cutting down on the damage the air did to the tissues.

More butchery than medicine

So a fast surgeon was far more likely to be a successful surgeon for three reasons: less blood flow, a shorter time of acute agony, and (they thought) less contagion. No wonder that, to the rest of the human race, surgery seemed more a matter of butchery than medicine.

Naturally, as they thought at the time, physicians did not perform surgery. Physicians had, since medieval times, been university trained. They were gentlemen’s sons with a medical doctorate, highly educated and knowledgeable about the humours of the body and the appropriate ways to balance them. In theory, their superior knowledge made them the only proper people to practice medicine and oversee surgery. They did not involve themselves in physical labour, but expected rather to command those who distilled the medicines they prescribed (apothecaries) or who carried out operations they deemed necessary.

Surgeons, barber surgeons and apothecary surgeons

Specialist surgeons learned their craft on the job, working as a surgeon’s mate in the navy or the army, or as the apprentice to a barber surgeon or an apothecary surgeon.

Barbers were good men with a blade, so an obvious choice for removing some part that shouldn’t be there or performing a beneficial bloodletting. The familiar red and white barber’s pole dates from the time of the barber surgeon, representing the rod the patient held tightly during the operation and the bloodied and clean bandages used. When washed and hung to dry, they would twist together in the wind, forming the spiral we see today.

Apothecary surgeons had won a landmark case in the first decade of the eighteenth century, when an apothecary was taken to court by the Guild of Physicians for compounding and administering medicines without the benefit of a physician’s advice. The Physicians won, but the Society of Apothecaries appealed to the House of Lords, who were unimpressed with the argument that allowing apothecaries to care for the sick would:

“Deprive the gentry of one of the processions by which their younger sons might honourably subsist and be a great detriment to the Universities.”

The Lords reversed the judgement.

The rise of a profession

By the eighteenth century, surgeons were giving physicians a run for their money, some attending university as well as learning their craft by apprenticeship. However, they seldom had any formal qualifications before the Royal College of Surgeons was founded in London in 1800. They were ‘Mister’ compared to the physician’s more prestigious ‘Doctor’, though the brilliant work of a plethora of eighteenth century surgeons raised their status and the work of medical teaching hospitals such as the Royal Infirmary mentioned above raised their knowledge.

By the time Victoria ascended the throne, the confidence of surgeons, and the income they could command, had risen to the point that the cheeky surgeons made the former insulting honorific into a badge of honour. In the UK, Eire and New Zealand to this day, surgeons are called ‘Mister’ rather than ‘Doctor’.

Jude Knight’s writing goal is to transport readers to another time, another place, where they can enjoy adventure and romance, thrill to trials and challenges, uncover secrets and solve mysteries, delight in a happy ending, and return from their virtual holiday refreshed and ready for anything.

She writes historical novels, novellas, and short stories, mostly set in the early 19th Century. She writes strong determined heroines, heroes who can appreciate a clever capable woman, villains you’ll love to loathe, and all with a leavening of humour.

A Raging Madness is out May 9th. Stop by our sister blog today to see surgery in action in a new excerpt and enter two giveaways!

Leave a comment Posted on April 14, 2017 16th Century, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, Disease, English Civil War, Georgian Britain, literature, London, Medieval History, The Restoration, The Southwark Saga

On The Famous Voyage: Finding London’s Lost River

The Fleet River. Samuel Scott, 1750.

London’s major river is, of course, the Thames but, as the capital’s antiquarians will tell you, there are more than a dozen ancient tributaries hidden beneath the surface of the modern metropolis. The largest of these smaller rivers is the River Fleet, which flows from the largest stretch of common green in London, at Hampstead Heath, to Blackfriars Bridge, where it enters the Thames. This is a journey, not just from North London to the River, but also through the history of the City from Ancient to Modern times, marking some colourful characters and encompassing some bewildering changes along the way.

Cities are typically built along rivers to provide drinking water, transport, defense, and sewage removal. The Fleet has served all of these functions over London’s long history. As place-names along its banks (Brideswell, Clerkenwell) suggest, many wells were built along the Fleet in Roman and Saxon times, although, as we shall see, the purity of its waters were not set to be a defining feature as London grew.

The Fleet (‘tidal inlet’ in Anglo-Saxon) initially provided a waterway which served London from the North and, in a later incarnation as the New Canal, was part of the network which brought coal from the North of England to fuel the rapidly industrializing London of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even after the canals were superseded by road and rail and entirely covered over in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the valley carved by the Fleet continued to form the basis for some of London’s modern arteries, such as Farringdon Road and the Metropolitan Railway line (although it resisted having an underground railway line–that which would become the Jubilee Line–lain beneath it by repeatedly flooding tunnels).

Defensively, the Fleet has a rather inglorious history. It is unclear how the Fleet was utilized by the Romans and it seems rarely to have been called upon subsequently. A second century boat carrying ragstone (possibly intended for building the city wall) was discovered in 1962, sunk at the mouth of the river.

Much later, the Fleet’s banks were built up into earthworks during the Civil War, when London was very much a Parliamentarian (‘Roundhead’) stronghold. The Royalist armies, however, never threatened the capital, with Charles II’s return to the City being by invitation rather than by conquest. During one of the great crises of the restored king’s reign in 1666, desperate Londoners were hopeful that the Fleet would provide an effective break against the Great Fire as it reached its third day. Here the Fleet proved as ineffective as the civic defenses and the Fire jumped the Fleet ditch, ultimately allowing it to claim St Paul’s Cathedral.

Of course, the most serious modern military threat to London came from the air in the form of the Luftwaffe. The old river beneath Fleet Street could offer no protection when Serjeant’s Inn, one of the oldest legal precincts in England, was destroyed during the Blitz.

It is with the removal of sewage and other waste, or at least with its failure to do so effectively, with which the Fleet is most famously associated. As London grew, the Fleet increasingly became a repository for whatever the city’s inhabitants wanted to get rid of. The medieval meat markets which grew up to feed the expanding population soon became problematic and in 1290 the Carmelite monks complained that the offal deposited in the river by butchers at a nearby market (the delightfully-named Shambles, at Newgate) was constantly blocking what was, at this point, a stream.

The southern end of the Fleet, 1550s.

Although all manner of industries poured waste into the Fleet, it was the offal and dead animals in various forms which seemed to catch the imagination of early modern satirists of the capital. Ben Jonson’s (c. 1612) mock-epic poem which lends its title to this article was a litany of classical references intertwined with toilet humour and social satire and described the diverse pollutants of the river with considerable gusto:

Your Fleet Lane Furies; and hot cooks do dwell,
That, with still-scalding steams, make the place hell.
The sinks ran grease, and hair of measled hogs,
The heads, houghs, entrails, and the hides of dogs:
For, to say truth, what scullion is so nasty,
To put the skins, and offal in a pasty?
Cats there lay divers had been flayed and roasted,
And, after mouldy grown, again were toasted,
Then, selling not, a dish was ta’en to mince them,
But still, it seemed, the rankness did convince them.
For, here they were thrown in with the melted pewter,
Yet drowned they not. They had five lives in future.

Jonson’s influence and the continued assault of the Fleet upon the senses continued into the eighteenth century: Jonathan Swift’s “Drown’d Puppies” and “Dead Cats” of 1710’s A Description of a City Shower, floating amongst the offal and turnip-tops, were echoed by Alexander Pope’s “large tribute of dead dogs to the Thames” in 1728’s Dunciad.

The enthusiasm of these men for describing the sewage, of which the Fleet’s waters seemed largely comprised, was hardly less. Jonson’s ‘voyage’ was taken down a river where “Arses were heard to croak, instead of frogs”. His Fleet contained the contents of every ‘night-tub’ from an overcrowded metropolis, where “each privy’s seat/ Is filled with buttock” and the very “walls do sweat Urine”. This state of affairs is compounded by the diet of a city where “every clerk eats artichokes, and peason, Laxative lettuce, and such windy meat”. In 1700, Thomas Brown has his narrator, an ‘Indian’ revealing the strange “Manners, Customs, and Religions” practiced by the various “Nations” of London to his readers, shove an impudent rag-seller into the kennel [1] in the centre of the street with the words:

Tho’ I want nothing out of your Shops, methinks you all want good Manners and Civility, that are ready to tear a New Sute (suit) from my Back, under pretence of selling me an Olde one; Avant Vermin, your Cloaths smell as rankly of Newgate and Tyburn, as the bedding to be sold at the Ditch-side near Fleet-Bridge, smells of Bawdy-House and Brandy.

Brown’s tone is lighthearted and playful, but some of the associations he makes are telling. The visceral nature of these accounts certainly reflected a literal reality but they also had a metaphorical dimension in which it was the excesses and vices of London itself which were clogging up its abused waterways. The writers were playing, not just on the Fleet’s role in waste disposal, but also on the reputation of those who occupied its banks. In Jonathan Swift’s A Description of a City Shower, in particular, a storm washing through London links the different areas and strata of the city together through its flow.

The Fleet flowed past Bridewell and the Fleet prisons and through areas such as Clerkenwell, notorious for sheltering heretics, thieves, and prostitutes from the arms of the law. Here the bodies floating downstream alongside the unfortunate cats and dogs might be human. The industries around the river were messy and disease was known to cling to its slums. The Dunciad plays on the Fleet’s use as an open sewer by having the hack-writers, who are one of the principal subjects of Pope’s ire, swim in it. The implication was as clear as Pope’s Fleet was ‘muddy’. Much later, Charles Dickens’ child-warping pick-pocket, Fagin, would have his den alongside the Fleet.

From the early attempts by the Carmelites to keep the river unblocked to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century attempt to make it serve as a canal, the smell and the constant need for dredging could not be overcome. So impossible was it to contain the flood of effluent that, even after the river was paved over during the later part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, the build-up of trapped gas exploded near Blackfriars in 1846, taking out three posthouses and a steamboat in the process. It must have seemed as though the truth would not be hidden beneath the streets. Eventually, however, the Great Stink of 1858 preceded a concerted effort to enclose the city’s sewers and a London more familiar to us today emerged.

Dr. J.V.P. Jenkins is a historian and freelance editor from London. He earned his BA, Master’s, and Doctorate at Swansea University. He is the new co-editor of Dirty, Sexy History and sometimes tweets @JVPolsomJenkins.

Sources

Brown, Thomas. Amusements serious and comical, calculated for the meridian of London (1700)
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist (1839)
Jonson, Ben. On The Famous Voyage (c.1612)
Pope, Alexander. Dunciad (1728)
Swift, Jonathan. A Description of a City Shower (1710)
Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography (Anchor; New York, 2003)
Brown, Laura. Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Cornell U.P., 2003)
Gray, Robert. A History of London (Taplinger; New York, 1979)

[1] An open gutter, running down the middle of the street. The 1671 Sewage and Paving Act had prescribed moving the kennel from the center of the street to an open side drain set off by a raised pavement. The main thoroughfares were also to be cambered (built up in middle for drainage and paved) but these measures were not instantly applied to all streets.

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