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Monthly Archives: November 2010

Library Christmas cards on sale

29 Monday Nov 2010

Posted by Vanessa Lacey in Children's books, Illustrations

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Christmas cards

One of our favourite things in the Tower Project is finding pictures to share on this blog. The tower collections have great illustrations, some beautiful, some funny, some just weird!  And this year two of our favourite pictures are available as part of a new selection of Christmas cards available from the University Library entrance hall, during library opening hours.

As well as the wonderful ‘Judy magazine’ Christmas pudding illustration (UL classmark 1895.9.91) and the picture of a Canadian train stuck in snow, taken from the Train scrap book (UL classmark 1906.12.1)  there are two beautiful illustrations taken from UL manuscripts and finally ‘Waiting for crumbs’ (UL classmark Waddleton.b.1.438)

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The rules of engagement

26 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by Rebecca in Ephemera, Friday feature, Illustrations

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games, romance

From time to time, Tower Project cataloguers come across games which the Library received on legal deposit. This is less exciting than it sounds: their appeal can be somewhat … impenetrable, and their rules are often fiendishly complicated (or just baffling). I was thrilled, therefore, when I discovered Maricourt, a board game which suffers from none of these problems. A kind of snakes-and-ladders of courtship and engagement, it’s straightforward to play, and provides an insight into how a romance might have progressed – or, at least, might have been expected to progress – at the turn of the century.

The game, which consists of a 100-square board and cards, is played in teams: a lady and a gentleman pair up against another couple, and they take it in turns to throw the dice and move their counters forward. Some of the squares describe states of being (“approval”, “contempt”, “ill will”), and others describe the process by which they are reached: so, if you land on “wealth leads to admiration” (how very cynical!) you can advance to “admiration”; but if you land on “jealousy leads to despair”, you have to go back to “despair” (and take to drink, apparently). Woe betide anyone who indulges in flirtation: if you land on that square, you have to go back to the start of the board. There are also squares which reward you with a card if you land on them (“carriages: take card”, “Papa’s consent: take card”), which can be redeemed if you land on the corresponding “carriages required”; if you land on it without the card, you have to return to “carriages: take card”. The first team to reach square 100, and the church, wins.

Alas, the counters and cards have not survived with the board, so I’ve been thwarted in my desire to play the game. Curses. I’ll have to content myself with admiring the pictures …

    

Cock Robin and other hapless victims

22 Monday Nov 2010

Posted by Tower Project in Uncategorized

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Babes in the Wood, Cock Robin, Wicked uncles

Well, that about wraps it up for chapbooks  – I’ve just catalogued the  last one on my book trolley. The term chapbook was coined in the 19th century by bibliophiles to denote ephemera such as pamphlets, religious and political tracts, nursery rhymes, folk tales, poetry, ballads, children’s literature and almanacs, although to be honest, no one really knows what the definition of a chapbook is.

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When I started out cataloguing chapbooks I was fascinated by their smallness and their wonderful woodcuts, but the novelty soon wore off. I must admit that I won’t be disappointed if I never have to look at a copy of “Who killed Cock Robin?”/ “The death and burial of Cock Robin”/”An elegy on the death and burial of Cock Robin,” ever again. The variant titles of this children’s story in verse are self explanatory. I’m sorry to admit that the one aspect of this miserable tale that enlivened my mood was the woodcut illustrating Cock Robin himself lying flat on his back with his legs in the air, an arrow sticking out of his chest. I know it shouldn’t, but this made me smile.

However, the prevalence of Cock Robin in my book boxes was as nothing to the ubiquity of that  other chapbook staple  “The children in the wood,” popularly known as “The babes in the wood,” first published in Norwich in 1595. What a sorry little tale this is. For those of you mercifully unfamiliar with it, it relies on that stock villain, the wicked uncle. The parents of two small children both die at the same time (somewhat irresponsibly, in my view) and on their joint deathbed consign their helpless offspring to the clutches of their uncle. To be fair on the chap (now there’s an interesting thought – why has that abbreviated version of our hawker of cheap street literature evolved to convey an all round standard bloke?), he looks after them for a while until he reads the terms of the parents’ will and discovers that he would benefit to the tune of several hundred pounds on the occasion of the children’s untimely deaths. This is when things really start to go downhill for the eponymous babes. The uncle hires two “sturdy ruffians” to take them into the woods and kill them. One of the villains relents on hearing the innocent, lisping prattle of the two babes, and refuses to carry out the murder; a quarrel ensues and the “milder” cut-throat kills the other. He tells the babes that he will bring them some food, and, convincing himself that a passing traveller will discover them, leaves them alone in the woods, never to return. The children starve to death. It’s as stark as that. You will be glad to hear that all kinds of disasters befall the wicked uncle and he dies in prison.

However, perhaps I do the purveyors of this sensationalist literature a disservice. I was interested to see that one of the many 19th century copies of this grim children’s tale that I have catalogued is entitled “The children in the wood, or, The Norfolk tragedy.” Apparently local folklore has it that the events told in “Babes in the Wood” originally happened in Wayland Wood, reputedly the third oldest wood in England, dating back to the Doomsday Book, in which the Wayland Hundred is referred to as Wane-lond. Various theories have been advanced as to how the legend of the babes came to be associated with Wayland Wood, one being that there used to be a carved wooden overmantel in the nearby Elizabethan manor house Griston Hall, where the uncle is said to have lived, which depicted the story of the babes. Apparently the tale of the babes in the wood has never been associated with any other place during its long folkloric career, so perhaps we have a real Elizabethan crime which morphed into legend. Inevitably local tradition has it that the ghosts of the murdered children haunt Wayland Wood, hence the popular name “Wailing Wood.” The village signs at both Griston and nearby Watton depict the story. When in 1879, the tree that the babes had reputedly been left under was struck by lightning and destroyed, the popularity of the legend had grown to such an extent that people visited the site, hoping for souvenirs (of the tree, presumably).

 

If it seems to stretch our credulity that two small children should be lost for so long that they starved, this arresting account by a local may bring home to us the desperate plight of the children:

Having known this wood all my life I can remember my father taking me to the keeper’s cottage when I was about seven and asking the keeper if he would show us the tree under which the babes were reputed to have been found, buried by a robin covering them with leaves. He escorted us far in­ to the wood and stopping by the stump of a large tree, informed us that this was where they died, the tree having been destroyed by lightning in August 1879. As we made our way back to the road I realised how difficult this would have been without our guide, with so many overgrown paths criss­ crossing each other in all directions. At this time it was not unknown on shooting days for one of the beaters to get lost in the wood during the last “drive” of the day, with darkness falling fast. Occa­sionally it meant he had to wait until morning light to find his way out. This would not happen today, as one can hear the continuous roar of traffic passing along the road and head towards it. None the less 30 years ago, when “birding” in the wood with a naturalist friend, we came upon an elderly man whom 1 knew very well, but owing to his dishevelled appearance did not recognise at once. He had grown a beard, was painfully thin and obviously so weak he could hardly stand. Although he manag­ed a slight movement of his lips, no sound was forthcoming and we realised he was in a very serious condition. Informing the police, we were surprised to learn that he had been missing for three weeks and that they had spent many hours searching for him … It appeared that he had strolled far into the wood one afternoon and was unable to find his way out again … http://www.historyofwatton.org.uk/wattonttages/053.htm

So perhaps this unpleasant little tale has its origins in history rather than in some warped imagination. Nevertheless, the fact is that Victorians loved this kind of sensational, sentimental tabloid storytelling. The fact that I have had to plough through so many copies of this dismal tale testifies to its assimilation into the popular imagination. Indeed, the expression “babes in the wood” survives to this day as shorthand for inexperienced innocents making their way in a wicked world.

It’s interesting to speculate on this “evil uncle hires two murderers to despatch troublesome children” story – how far back in the mists of time does its folk tale origin reach? It almost certainly pre-dates the Norfolk version, having its roots in inheritance struggles, whether for money or power. Did the stock character of the wicked uncle just happen to be borne out by a real crime in Norfolk some time in the 16th century? And for those of us troubled by a nagging sense of familiarity, could the existence of such an archetype lend credence to those Richard III advocates out there who claim him as a victim of Tudor propagandists? Could those canny Tudors have been tapping into folk imagination to besmirch the Plantagenet’s name? Just how far back do wicked uncles trace their heritage? But I digress …

Previously, in Wayland Wood …

Still, it’s not all bad news. Imagine my delight when I came across the following antidote to all this misery, with the stirring title:

“Perfidy detected! or, The children in the wood restored, by Honestas, the hermit of the forest”

with the following explanatory subtitle further down the title page:

 “who were supposed to have been either murdered or starved to death, by order of their inhuman uncle ; being the continuation of The history of the children in the wood.” (my italics).

What’s to continue? you might ask, with everyone dead …

The logistics of this reworking are a bit hazy; not only do the babes survive, but even the dead parents aren’t dead after all. No matter, someone else had obviously had enough of this wretched story and decided to set everything to rights again, even if it meant glossing over minor technicalities of logic and plot integrity.

Postscript

I had one of those satisfying connection moments, when I read that it was a robin who covered the children’s bodies with leaves – could it have been Cock Robin himself? Before he was brutally murdered, obviously.

The charms of Saint Catharine

19 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by Margaret Kilner in Friday feature, Oddities

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Charms, Saint Catharine's Day

This is especially for all the unmarried maidens out there who are longing to know whom they will marry.  This ritual is to be carried out on the 25th November, which is Saint Catharine’s Day, so (as I post this) you still have a few days to gather the necessary ingredients and find at least two like-minded friends.  Then, carefully follow these instructions, which have been taken verbatim from Mother Bunch’s golden fortune teller, published around 1830 [CCD.7.56.127]

 Ready?

 “Let any number of young women, not exceeding seven, or less than three, assemble in a room, where they are sure to be safe from interlopers ; just as the clock strikes eleven at night, take from your bosom a sprig of myrtle, which you must have worn there all day, and fold it up in a bit of tissue paper, then light up a small chafing dish of charcoal, and on it each maiden throw nine hairs from her head, and a pairing of each of her toe and finger nails ; then let each sprinkle a small quantity of myrtle and frankincense in the charcoal, and while the odoriferous vapour rises, fumigate your myrtle (this plant or tree is consecrated to Venus) with it, go to bed while the clock is striking twelve, and you will be sure to dream of your future husband, and place the myrtle exactly under your head.  Observe, it is no use trying this charm if you are not a real virgin, and the myrtle hour of performance must be passed in strict silence.” 

Sweet dreams!

Horrid murders!!!

12 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by Tower Project in Friday feature

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Crime, Sensationalist literature

Did this headline get your attention?  It certainly got mine when I opened a fairly battered box to find a pile of papery pamphlets. Oh no, I thought, this is going to be very dull. I couldn’t have been more wrong, however, because on closer inspection the box proved to be full of sensationalist literature. Here were details (fictional and factual) of the acts of murderers, robbers and brigands, of prison escapes, executions, women going mad, and compacts with the devil himself.

The pamphlet entitled Horrid murders!!! (three exclamation marks – the sure sign of a juicy tale or an evil megalomaniac mastermind CCD.7.50.27) gives details of what became known as the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, which took place in Wapping in December 1811. Seven people, one an infant of 3 months, were killed in two separate attacks, both of which took place inside the victims’ own homes and business premises. Most of the victims were killed with the proverbial blunt instrument to the head. A female servant was spared simply because she had gone out to buy oysters. The others were not so lucky and the author takes great pleasure in giving all the bloody details:

The shop-boy … had made more resistance than the rest … for the counter which extends the whole length of the warehouse was found bespattered with blood & brains from one end of it to the other; and the body of the unfortunate youth lay prostrate on the floor, weltering in his gore.

In the second attack the lodger escaped by knotting his sheets into a rope and climbing out of the window to safety (the knotted sheets seem to be a staple in 19th century fiction – nice to see them being used in real life on this occasion, see also further down for another time when they assisted an escape of an altogether different nature).  A perpetrator with connections to the first set of victims was found, but he hanged himself in prison only days after his arrest, so unfortunately, no fully satisfying motive ever came to light. A second man seen at the scenes of these very violent crimes was never found.

The account of the execution of Robert Bignal, a smuggler, poacher, thief, footpad and murderer, who was executed at Horsham Assizes in 1807, makes for a more amusing and slightly less bloodthirsty read. His execution was the talk of the area for many years afterwards, as he very publicly repented all his sins at the eleventh hour by composing a poem that warned against all sin – and foretold damnation for those who did not heed his advice.

The swearer and the liar too, Till they their ways forsake, May sure expect an angry God, Will cast them in the lake.

He recited this poem (doggerel?!) from the scaffold to a large and rapt crowd of spectators, having been taken to the place of execution in a cart where he insisted upon sitting on his own coffin. It was generally agreed to have been one of the most dramatic executions the Horsham Assizes had ever seen. His poem was later published in aid of his family (CCE.7.50.2)

Mary, the maid of the inn (CCE.7.50.13), is the fictional account of a girl whose lover, Richard Jarvis, murders a man for his money. He and his accomplice are discovered by Mary before they can dispose of the body and flee before she can see who they are. However, Mary finds Richard’s hat at the scene of the crime and takes it home as evidence. There she discovers his name inside it, and so is the means of ensuring his conviction and subsequent hanging. In a typical piece of early 19th century melodrama, she goes mad with grief and guilt, and eventually dies, cold and starving, in a snow-drift.

Jack Sheppard, much like Robert Bignal, was a “most notorious housebreaker & footpad” (CCD.7.50.17). He was less well-known for his crimes however, than for his ingenious escapes from several different prisons. To escape one prison, he managed to remove his fetters, detach one iron and one oaken window bar, attach sheets and blankets to the remaining bars (knotted sheets again!) and escape with a female co-prisoner, into the prison yard of the prison next door, where he constructed a scaling ladder to get over the 22 foot prison wall of this second prison. The prison guards admired his extraordinary escape and kept the tools of his escape on display for years thereafter. Sheppard seems to have been quite foolhardy, as he repeatedly sought out his habitual haunts (“[he] returns like a dog to his vomit” as the pamphlet states – charming picture!), in spite of them being known to the authorities. He was arrested (and escaped) numerous times before eventually being executed in 1724, at the age of just 22. Even to the last he hoped to escape – a pen-knife with which he hoped to cut the cord tying his hands was removed from his person just before he was taken to the scaffold, and

[he] had still another project in his head. He earnestly desired some of his acquaintance, that after his body was cut down, they would, as soon as possible, put it into a warm bed, and try to let him blood; for he said, he believed, if such care was taken, they might bring him to life again.

Sadly for this very enterprising character, his body, on being cut down, was most definitely dead.

While Jack Sheppard relied on his ingenuity to make himself immune to reprisals for his criminal acts, the Spanish tale The infernal secret (CCD.7.50.10) tells of a bandit who made himself invulnerable through a pact with the devil. This bandit needs to marry a “spotless Catholic” every century or forfeit life and soul to the devil. Isidora, the virtuous widow of his choice, refuses to marry him once she finds out about his supernatural powers for which he had bartered the flesh of his right arm (though not the bones, which were still attached). Her refusal, in spite of all threats to herself and her infant son, results in his eventual death, as the clock strikes midnight – when else?!  All that remains of him is “the skeleton arm and hand grasping a poniard.” The devil, one presumes, had made off with the rest of him.

The final pamphlet in my small selection of sensationalist literature tells the true (though possibly exaggerated and very dramatic) tale of Jack Mansong, an escaped slave turned robber in Jamaica. Mansong was greatly feared by the slaves who believed him to have magical powers, and by the white landowners, as he made government officials and slave owners the main targets of his robberies and violence.  By all accounts he was an imposing man, being very tall and strong, and having only three fingers on one of his hands. 

Accounts of his life vary considerably, and my (possibly apocryphal) version sees him neary killing a young Englishman called Captain Orford on two occasions when this young man comes too close to Mansong’s secret cave in the mountains. On the second occasion Orford is taken captive and his fiance, Rosa Chapman, in a very Pirates of the Caribbean twist to the plot, disguises herself as a man and goes to search for him. In spite of being captured by the robber, she manages to free Orford and escape with him.

A bounty of £300 was levied on Mansong’s head, and any slave that captured him was promised freedom. Mansong was later pursued in a concerted effort by the authorities to rid the island of this bandit, and was killed by three slaves in a suitably gruesome way. His head and three-fingered hand were taken as proof of his death so that the £300 reward for his death – and freedom for the slaves who killed him – could be claimed. According to the pamphlet the head and hand “are now preserved in spirits for the satisfaction of the curious.”

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The war at home

11 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by Vanessa Lacey in Uncategorized

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Give your invalid his freedom

Today is Armistice Day, a good day to visit the  Sassoon exhibition in the Library, which ends on 23rd December.  After seeing Sassoon’s First World war diaries and poems in the exhibition I was curious to look at contemporary ‘popular’ writing – novels, magazines, books for children, even advertisements – and see how they described the war.  I found this was a rather naive idea. Of course there was no single attitude to the war, any more than there was a single experience of the war or a single way of writing  about it. 

But what surprised me was how the war coloured every single aspect of life in the books published between 1914 to 1918 and after. I had an idea that the First World War scarcely touched the civilian population, but when I looked at the advertisements in magazines, for example, they all included war-related text or pictures. However, only about half of them featured men in uniform (nearly all officers). 

The rest were aimed at women and others left at home. There were advertisements for invalid foods –  “indispensable in the home sickroom, and for feeding wounded soldiers”, for labour-saving appliances for invalids, and this one for a wheelchair.

Many of the advertisements showed women in uniform. Evans’ throat pastilles declared themselves essential for “Waacs and Wrens”. Women could choose a coat made from khaki drill, or a waterproof trench coat, “a most essential garment for nurses abroad” or even “overalls for lady workers”.

The popular fiction of the period includes colourful dustjacket illustrations of women wearing these clothes. “Munition Mary” wears the famous blue “frock  overalls” to make shell cases at the local armaments factory. (Munition Mary / Brenda Girvin. London: Milford, 1918).  In contrast the dustjacket illustration for “A girl munition worker” seems to  deliberately emphasize the parallels between women workers in the cordite factory and soldiers at the front, placing the heroine next to a barbed wire fence and dressing her in a khaki overall that bears an odd resemblance to an officer’s uniform. This image may owe more to the artist’s imagination than reality. However, it’s clear that many women must have looked very different in wartime. It must have been a startling and unsettling change, bringing the war to people’s homes and families in a way I had never appreciated.

A girl munition worker / by Bessie Marchant. London: Blackie, [1917?]

Zoetrope, or, Wheel of the Devil

05 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by Tower Project in Friday feature

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Chapbooks, Optical toys, Zoetropes

Recently while cataloguing chapbooks I came across a series of large, folded sheets with strange sequences of images on them and became intrigued to see what they were.

It turned out they were templates for a zoetrope, a type of Victorian optical toy. The zoetrope was used to create the illusion of motion. By viewing a series of images or frames on the inside of a spinning drum, through slits on the outer side, a form of animation was created. It was invented in 1834 by William George Horber, originally dubbed the “Daedalum” or Wheel of the devil; however it didn’t really become popular until 1867 when it was patented in the UK and USA and was renamed the Zoetrope (or Wheel of life). The zoetrope’s popularity though, was fairly short lived. It was one of many Victorian optical toys, such as the thaumatrope and phenakistoscope (a 2D spinning disk of images and slots which were held up to a mirror) and was soon replaced by the sharper view praxinoscope in 1877, which used mirrors within its drum. These developments in making still images appear mobile were soon followed by magic lanterns, flexible photographic film and the emergence of modern cinema in 1895. In the 21st century new linear zoetrope designs emerged and were used to create novelty advertising campaigns in underground systems across the US, Asia and Europe.

While many zoetrope pictures were colourful, detailed, pretty and entertaining, the ones I had unearthed were dark, weird and a little unnerving. My Clarke’s wheel of life series offered delights such as ‘blowing bladders’, ‘Monkey and dog’, ‘Man swallowing rats’ and the unexplained ‘head off!’. Luckily we haven’t yet found those ones so instead I include some of the less disturbing (ish).

To see them in action youtube has a couple of offerings, as does the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

 Or for the more practically minded, you can design and build your own. Clarke suggests colouring in outlines consistently with bright red and green .. . so a most marvellous illusion is produced! though perhaps you may go for one a little less creepy.

   

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