Halloween horror

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Halloween, Vampires

OK, it’s not Halloween yet.  But when Sunday night comes, will the horrors in the darkened library tower come to life and flap their way between the bookcases and out into Cambridge alleyways? What horrors? Well, vampires, for a start. And not lean, mean and handsome ones either. 

Forget the haunted but handsome heroes of Twilight and Buffy the vampire slayer. These vampires have no redeeming features, and nineteenth century authors loved them that way.  There is blood and more blood,  an awful flapping Thing,  stifled screams of horror, a hideous head with – no, it’s too much. Read The Vampire Nemesis (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1905)  yourself – but not over lunch. 

What can you do to escape the attentions of a vampire at your Halloween party? According to Modern vampirism – its dangers and how to avoid them (Harrogate: Talisman, 1904) you should avoid sleeping in the same room with people born between 21st June and 21st July (when apparently the influence of the moon is strongest), avoid meat and alcohol (vampires like them too) and  when entering rough areas of a city, “picture a white mist forming a dense shell around you”.  But if that sounds like too much effort, you could always stay in with a good book …

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Piracy, Little Dorrit, and Miss Ternan

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Chapbooks, Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Martin Amis once wrote that Little Dorrit “revolves … on someone leaving money to his nephew’s lover’s guardian’s brother’s youngest daughter”. It’s a polite way of suggesting that the novel has what might be described as one of Dickens’s less memorable (or convincing) plots. A while ago, I came across a version of Little Dorrit which had been adapted into “a domestic drama, in three acts” for stage, the text of which takes up all of eight pages. Having read it in its Penguin edition (985 pages) and also watched the Andrew Davies television adaptation (452 minutes), I was intrigued: how ruthless would you have to be to in editing the book to reduce it to what was, presumably, quite a short play? Looking through the item in question, it soon became clear that you’d have to be very ruthless indeed. The unnamed dramatist has shelved all but a handful of characters (among those dropped were Fanny and Edward Dorrit, Flora Flinching, Miss Wade, and even the unscrupulous Mr. Merdle), apparently ignored most of the second half of the book, and finished the whole thing off rather abruptly with Mr. Dorrit – still alive and well in this version – being elevated to wealth and nobility. In most respects, it bears very little resemblance to the novel at all.

Stage version of "Little Dorrit" (CCC.7.60.23 - order in Rare Books Room)

So far, so standard; writers adapting novels for stage and screen have often had a somewhat cavalier attitude towards the original texts. It was only when I started cataloguing the play that I noticed the cast list on the front, which named the actress playing Little Dorrit as Miss Ternan. This was fascinating: was this Ellen Ternan, the young actress with whom Dickens fell in love? Or was it one of her sisters, Fanny or Maria? And if it was one of the Ternans, then was this before or after Dickens first encountered them, in 1857? The item in hand not only lacked any details as to who had done the adapting, but also when this version was written, and where it was staged (it merely claims to be “performed at the London theatres”).

I decided, therefore, to do a little research on this version of Little Dorrit. Some catalogue records have attributed it to a man named Frederick Fox Cooper. An industrious soul, who reworked several of Dickens’s novels for the stage, he apparently took it upon himself to write an adaptation of Little Dorrit in 1856, which ran for seventeen performances at the Strand Theatre in November of that year. The trouble was, in 1856 Little Dorrit was still in the process of being serialised (and, indeed, written), so Cooper only had the first half of the story to work with; he had to contrive an ending of his own. (Interestingly, his ending anticipated Dickens’s in some respects; it’s not clear whether this was because he was able to predict where Dickens was going with the plot, or because, as has been speculated, Dickens saw the play, and – consciously or unconsciously – incorporated elements of it into his own ending.)

However, Cooper’s version at the Strand starred a different cast from the one featured on the cover of the item I had in front of me – Little Dorrit was played by an actress named Emma Wilton, and Arthur Clennam by John Howard. Was this really Cooper’s play? I found an article by Malcolm Morley in The Dickensian (vol. L, no. 311, June 1954) which seemed to think otherwise: this was, instead, “a shockingly bad play” (I wouldn’t quibble with that), which was probably from “about the time of the Strand production or a little later”. Moreover, the Ternan connection, about which I was originally excited, turned out to be not a connection at all: the cast list was “a fanciful selection of the foremost players in London at that period”, and therefore it was no more than coincidence that one of the Ternans was being linked with Dickens’s work. (Which was so disappointing: there would have been something rather neat in the idea that Ellen Ternan once played Little Dorrit, whether it was before or after she met Dickens.) This, Morley concluded, was simply than “an item of curiosity”. My search might have ended there, had I not found one more reference to the play, this time in the Pilgrim edition of Charles Dickens’s letters, where the editors mention both Cooper’s version and its “ingenious conjectures” about the plot, and the item I was cataloguing: it seems that both Cooper’s version of Little Dorrit, and an adaptation of Dombey and Son by T.J. Taylor, which was staged at the Strand under Cooper’s management, were “pirated” in “drastically abridged” form, for provincial stagings of the play.

So, what I was looking at was a pirated version of an already unauthorised dramatisation of the novel. Which would explain why it is so vague about its origins, why it has an illustrious cast list (presumably, they thought that nobody in the provinces was going to check), and why it feels so far removed from Dickens. Dickens himself was profoundly irritated by the various unauthorised stagings of his works: he was apparently so appalled by a performance of Oliver Twist that he attended that he spent most of it lying on the floor of his box. Goodness only knows what he would have made of this …

The forgery exterminator

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forgeries, Joseph William Palmer, Moustache, philately, stamp dealers

See-saw

This is the law

And I am its vindicator

Imprison the scamp

Who sells a forged stamp

And bless the exterminator

 This variant on a well known nursery rhyme was penned by Joseph William Palmer, a stamp dealer who had an obsession with forged postage stamps and wanted (if you will pardon the pun) to stamp out the trade in them.  As well as “Nursery Rhymes revised” [1885.4.199], from which the above is taken, he wrote and published a number of other small booklets containing poems of a fanciful nature.

 A typical example [The Spirit of Christmas, 1885.4.210] starts with the author reclining beside a warm fire after a hearty dinner and as he sinks into sleep he is visited by the Spirit of Philatelee.  They fly away together and after seeing various groups of people involved with forgeries there is a flagrant advertisement for Palmer, the honest dealer.

 “The happy land, or, Through time and space” [1886.4.190] again begins with the author sitting around at Christmas, this time musing on the death of friends (a jolly Yuletide subject) the plight of the poor and human misery in general before his spirit soars away to a Utopian land where everyone loves their neighbour, politicians make wise laws, there are no thieves or scamps and (surprise, surprise) no forged stamps and a perfectly functioning Post Office.  He then ends with several verses promoting his own virtue and diligence in trying to combat fraud.

 His poetical offering for 1890 was entitled “Through fifty years, the romance of the postage stamp, 1840-1890” [1889.4.185].  This time it is a random policeman doing the musing as he stands outside Palmer’s shop in the Strand.  While it does give some history of British stamps, there are also side excursions into Palmer’s marriage, the death of his mother and frequent references to the imminent widening of the Strand (which ultimately led to the demolition of his shop).  Inevitably though, the last few verses are again about forged stamps and how Palmer is battling against the trade in them.

 I became intrigued by these rather quirky Christmas offerings and set out to discover a little more about Palmer.  I quickly found that he published a monthly periodical called Bric-a-Brac, which promoted itself as “A collection of curiosities, old and new, and various articles from the newspapers.”  Glancing through a copy [1885.7.1096] it soon became apparent that this is yet another vehicle for some flagrant self-promotion.

 Cautionary tales about forged stamps abound and Palmer himself is mentioned in almost every article.  Clearly he is particularly proud of his part in formulating a clause in the 1884 Post Office Protection Act which made it illegal to make, own or deal in any forged stamp, on pain of a £20 fine.  References to this crop up in most of his publications. To quote another of his rhymes:

“Dickory, Dickory Dock

The forgery-monger’s stock

The police strike one

Down they come

And it’s ho for the prisoner’s dock!”

My final discovery was a booklet entitled “Romance in reality, or, The story of an eventful life” [1885.7.1121].  Written by Francis Neale (more of him later) it is the biography of Palmer.  It begins with a brief history of stamp collecting, but is soon describing Palmer as “the father of philately.”  We go on to learn that he was born in Hackney in 1853 and at the tender age of seven sold his first stamp for sixpence.  As he picked up the stamp from the street, this was all profit and in true entrepreneurial style, he invested it in more stamps to sell.

 From this his business grew to occupy the large premises at 281 Strand, where he had a huge warehouse and a stock of millions of stamps, valued at a total of £25,000.  In his 1874 catalogue [1874.7.736], at the age of 21, he is already thanking his customers for eight years of loyalty.  Pictures of the shop in the Strand show it displaying his proud claim to be the “oldest established stamp merchant in the world.”

Joseph William Palmer - another Victorian gentleman with a carefully cultivated moustache

 He was clearly an obsessive man, working all hours on his business from the age of seven onwards and barely even taking time off to get married, which he did in 1880.  His wife would appear to have been his assistant in the shop and was whisked back there straight after the marriage ceremony.  Somehow, he did find time to have two children, “a bright little girl and an intelligent little boy.”

As I read this biography, it struck me that it is again full of overblown praise for Palmer and I began to wonder whether he had in fact written it himself.  Then I discovered the name of his wife: Frances Mary Neale.  Surely not a coincidence?  So, was the author his brother-in-law, or was it in fact Palmer himself using a pseudonym?  For a man so full of self-promotion, I know where my suspicions lie.

So, to finish, another of his “new improved” nursery rhymes:

“Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, where have you been?”

“I’ve been to the Strand and PALMER I’ve seen”

“Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, what did you there?”

“I saw that his dealings were honest and fair”

“Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, is PALMER the man

Who fought single-handed the forgery clan?”

“PALMER it was who strengthened the law”

“Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, give me your paw”

Headless wedding horror?

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Chapbooks



Some weddings are chilling occasions but none more so than this picture of Cinderella’s wedding with a not-so-happy ending, featuring a headless bride!

London: S & J Fuller, 1814.

(Classmark CCE.7.1.12. Order in Rare Books)

So how did Cinderella lose her head? Another book in the collection provides the answer. “The history and adventures of little Henry, exemplified in a series of figures” includes a paper head and and several sets of clothes to attach to the head. Little Henry has a difficult start in life when he’s stolen by gypsies, but in true model Victorian style progresses in his career from boy drummer to ship’s cabin boy and then to midshipman. For each career move he is provided with a dazzling new outfit, including an impressive range of hats. 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

  

“The history and adventures of little Henry, exemplified in a series of figures”. London: S & J Fuller, 1810.

(Classmark CCE.7.2.57. Order in Rare Books) 

It’s clear that the paper head was the most essential part of each book, and so it seems that the head for the Cinderella book must have been lost. But there’s no need to despair: we found that the heads in all the books were identical – the same head was used for Little Henry, Little Fanny, etc.… so anyone wanting to restore Cinderella’s head and the happy ending to her wedding picture can simply borrow a head from Henry/Fanny.

The Amazing Zancigs!

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magic, magicians, mind reading, Zancigs

1907.7.1388

 Julius and Agnes Zancig were Danish stage magicians who were billed as “Two minds with but a single thought”. Born Julius Jorgenson and Agnes Claussen, they were childhood sweethearts who were reunited and married later in life. They took their mind reading act on the road and toured the world before eventually settling in America.

Agnes would roam the audience blindfolded whilst her husband would stare at an object, number or word in a book. She was seemingly able to read his mind and tell the audience exactly what he was looking at any given time.

The act led to a minor scientific controversy and so in 1906 the Daily Mail set the couple a series of tests. The reporters became convinced that what they were witnessing was true telepathy and the couples fame spread. The couple were further tested by the Society for Psychical Research and the British College of Psychic Science who both proclaimed them the real deal.  The Zancigs went on to publish several books under the names Prof. and Mdme. Zancig.  The stage act continued until Agnes died in 1916. Julius tried to continue the act with various others, including the fantastically named Syko the Psychic, but never managed to achieve the same level of success that he had with Agnes.

The secret to their act was revealed by fellow magician ‘Alexander the Crystal Seer’ in 1921. The Zancigs had devised an extremely complex verbal code which allowed them to communicate what Julius was seeing whilst leaving the audience clueless. It had taken them many years of practice to perfect the code and this perhaps explains why Julius was never able to replicate his success with another partner. The code was considered by many mentalists to be one of the most complex two-person code systems ever used and books are still published today which describe the method.

Although this does somewhat ruin the fun of the act, there is something interesting about finding out how the seemingly impossible was pulled off!

Thought reading through the gramophone

How to eat a grapefruit

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Grapefruit

Many of the Tower Project books are handbooks and manuals of some kind,  but until I came across a small pamphlet entitled “The forbidden fruit” (1905.7.3395) I had never seen a manual for any kind of food before. Cookbooks, yes, plenty of those. Manuals, no, not really.

This particular manual is for the grapefruit or Citrus paradisi, related, though not identical to, the shaddock and pomelo. The English name alludes to the clusters of fruit upon the tree, while the botanical name indicates the Biblical forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Book of Genesis.

Today, grapefruits can be found in any supermarket, and love of the fruit has even spawned particular instruments for their prepartion and consumption. Grapefruit knives, anyone? Serrated on both sides, tip curved upwards, always blocks the cutlery drawer…

In 1905, however, the grapefruit was a new and exotic fruit to most ordinary British families and people did not know what to do with them. In those days, most grapefruit exported to Britain were of the white, extremely sour variety. So imagine you buy one, you expect it to taste like an orange – and it just doesn’t. In fact, it puckers your mouth and puts your teeth on edge. Even your greengrocer cannot tell you how to eat it.  What do you do with it?

According to Mrs. John Lane, the author of “The forbidden fruit”, the right way to prepare a grapefruit is to cut it in half, remove the pips and the core, loosen each triangle of pulp with a knife, then pour a lot of sugar over the fruit and leave to stand for a few hours. If you wished, you could add liqueur to the fruit to make it more interesting. So, take a very healthy fruit and make it very unhealthy indeed… Alternatively, as a starter you could eat the grapefruit with oysters and cayenne pepper, or on lettuce with a French dressing.

Since 1905, many more varieties have been cultivated, so that it is no longer nessary to drown the fruit in sugar (or alcohol) to make them edible. So there is no need to ask your greengrocer what to do with them. You can just enjoy them. If you can open the cutlery drawer to extract the knife, that is…

Cupid’s code

This pamphlet Cupid’s code for the transmission of secret messages by means of the language of postage stamps by Bury George caused a good deal of amusement in the Project Office.

The code uses the position and orientation of the stamp – with eight positions and eight orientations there are 64 basic messages – or 128 if two stamps were used. The messages are printed in perforated strips, and can be re-arranged, giving according to the author “close upon 270,000 different ways, so that no attempt to discover any particular combination could possible succeed.” The code books were sold in pairs,and it was even possible to buy a specially arranged duplicate code “guaranteed non-existent elsewhere” for the bargain sum of 6 shillings.

It doesn’t strike me as the most secure and reliable communication method. If someone was in the habit of opening their wife or daughter’s post, they might be suspicious if she started receiving letters with stamps scattered about the envelope!

The success of the code depended on a very reliable postal service – Murray’s Handbook to London as it is (1879)  states that there were hourly collections and deliveries in Central London between 7.00 am and 7. pm,  and up to six daily deliveries in the suburbs. It was certainly possible to exchange three or four letters a day.  These days, if you put the stamp in the wrong place, the letter will probably sit in the sorting office for a week.

The author describes the code as a “charming and unique birthday or engagement present” but many of the messages are far from charming, and others are just weird.

So the next time you get a letter with the stamp in a strange position someone may be trying to tell you something – here are a few to look out for:

Do you love me? (right hand top corner diagonally face upwards)

Explain your conduct (right hand top corner diagonally face upwards)

Shall I bring my bicycle? (right hand bottom corner reversed diagonally face downwards)

Do not expect me if it rains (right hand top corner reversed diagonally face downwards)

Our letters are being tampered with (left hand middle reversed diagonally face downwards)

Beware your dearest lady-friend (bottom middle reversed diagonally facing downwards.

Trouble is approaching. Beware (right hand bottom corner diagonally, facing upwards)

Matrimony is my object (bottom middle straight)

Weird fiction, full of wonder – Part the Final

Tags

Edwardian era, Fiction, Strange fiction

And so to conclude our look at the weird and wonderful writers/tings of the early twentieth century… 

The Worm Ouroboros (1922) / Eric Rücker Eddison

“In publishing these pages I obey an inward conviction which tells me that the days of crass materialism are over, in which everything that was not quite patent to the commonest mind was ridiculed and called into question. There are now thousands and tens of thousands sufficiently advanced in thought to admit of a possible intercourse with an unseen world, and there are hundreds of thousands who are eager and intelligent inquirers into the conditions, hitherto wrapped in mystery, which would enable the dwellers upon this world to communicate with their friends upon the hitherto silent shore.” 

Not my own thoughts, but rather the beginning of Colloquies with an unseen friend (1907), the collected (by the intriguing Walburga, Lady Pageta) automatic writings of one Fidelio, a rather well-informed spirit (friends with Plato dontcha know!); a book I catalogued the other day and one which evinces the mindset of the potential audience for these strange fictions we’ve been meeting.    

So is it, as one modern commentator (call them A) on the period believes, that this strain of fantasy was to the mainstream literature of the day what psychic research is to science (capital S)? That is to say, if you are said modern commentator, that it produced nothing but “debased or sentimentalized supernaturalism, things that go bump in the night.” Bit dismissive there, A. Or maybe there is a more positive reading? Well, here comes commentator B who has this to suggest, that these works might represent “the most concrete, if somewhat vulgarized, manifestation of definitive trends in the major fiction of Lawrence, Joyce, Conrad, Hardy and Woolf: the fascination with darkness and irrationality, the focus on unorthodox states of consciousness and perception, the projection of apocalypse and chaos, and above all the preoccupation with the timeless ‘moments’ and ‘visions.’”       

The Worm Ouroboros (1922) / Eric Rücker Eddison

Well, to show my hand and start wrapping things up, I’ll borrow from Commentator B again, who posits a paradoxical positive feedback loop sort-of-thing by deciding that “what is sought after – the otherworldly – makes us realize how much we need the worldly; but the more we know of the world, the more we need to be rid of it.” And after all, this was a time when people’s feelings towards the world around them does seem to get pretty confused. It’s the anxious transitional period at the start of the new century, a period of social and political change as another siècle is fin. And while there are Belle Époques and Gilded Eras being lived, England and a large slice of the world will soon move from this era of relative peace and prosperity through to the horror of two great wars and into a modern world beyond.      

One final note to ring out though, and that is how unfortunate it is that both commentators agree to class these works as debasements and vulgarisations of something apparently finer, the implication of which is to ascribe them a throw-away nature. Alright, so some of them may be tosh, but to subordinate them  all, to ignore wholesale the ‘vulgar’, would be to miss the chance to get a better idea of a historical people, not to mention you’d miss a cracking yarn or two. Where would we be without such popularist material to study? he cries. Well, I’d be out of a job, but luckily the collection in the Tower with its odds and non-academic ends – including many of these works, waiting, their wyrd worlds trapped forever in their pages – gives us that chance. And me a job!       

The End…..? 

Yup. Finally.    

       

Starring:         

As Modern Commentator A:       

Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (London : Pimlico, 1991).        

and as Modern Commentator B:         

Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares (Athens, OH : Ohio University Press, 1978).

All teeth and hair like a rat-catcher’s dog.

Prior to finding this book entitled ‘Snippets from Surtees’ I knew nothing about Robert Smith Surtees and so these aphorisms were out of context and well, just peculiar:

 There was a lot about ‘unting and ‘osses (hunting and horses I guessed)…

‘The man wot does much dancin’ will not do much ‘unting.’

‘Racing is only for rogues.’

But then what did these mean? …

‘Puss-‘untin’ is werry well for … those that keep donkeys.’

‘“Vot next?” as the frog said when his tail dropped off.’

‘All teeth and hair like a rat-catcher’s dog.’

‘This is not a good genuine home-brewed grievance frothin’ up at the bung’-ole of discontent, but a sort of seakaley, hothouse forced thing.’

‘Mischievous! Poopeys and buoys never good for nothin’ unless they are.’

 And of course some warnings:

 ‘No one knows how ungentlemanly he can look until he has seen himself in a shocking bad hat.’

‘It’s all very well at home to stuff and eat, but nothing disgusts men so much as a guzzling girl.’

 

For a little more context, these are the words of Robert Smith Surtees (1805-1864), an editor, novelist and general country gentleman type who was a great hunting enthusiast. In 1828 he began writing articles for the Sporting Magazine and then went on to found and edit its rival, the New Sporting Magazine (both held by the UL). He later moved on to fiction writing, though continued to publish these works in a serials format. He is best known for his comic character John Jorrock whose blunt words, high spirits and general misdemeanours featured in Handley Cross and Jorrock’s Jaunts & Jollities. His work was not greatly popular in his time and only really developed acclaim after his death. This is probably due to its being too specialist for those who didn’t hunt and too critical of those who did, for Surtees’ works often commented on how the once inclusive and community focused hunting scene was becoming an increasingly socially exclusive pursuit of the higher classes.

 For more information and illustrations by John Leech try Glasgow University Library.