A Vision of Communism

The works of Bertha Thomas (1845-1918) continue to produce a crop of surprises. A while back I mentioned Maxwell Gray's excursion into post-apocalyptic SF, After the Crash; and now I find Bertha Thomas too moved into borderline SF/fantasy on occasion, as in her 1873 A Vision of Communism, which interested me for its strong similarities to a classic 20th century SF story.

The Primrose Way

Cross-posted from A Wren-like Note: Maxwell Gray's 1898 essay The Primrose Way. It's an interesting mix once you dig into the references: an evocative recollection of a lane (recognisably on the north of the Isle of Wight's downs); a treatise on flowers in 19th century poetry; an appreciation of the primrose; and an indictment of the despoliation of the flowers on the now-defunct 'Primrose Day' commemorating Disraeli's death.

Spindler's list

Sorry, more DWM - but I just found out more about the career of William Spindler, the German industrialist who figures large in the Isle of Wight Undercliff's 19th century social circuit. Ventnor was the final destination of a far darker story of the dangerous political climate of Bismarck's Germany.

Strange and wonderful propaganda

A spot of anecdote / folklore that was new to me:

Strange and wonderful news from Exeter: giving an account of the dreadful apparitions that was seen by Mr. Jacob Seley of Exeter on Monday, September the 22th, 1690, who gave the full account to the judges the next day, who were going the western circuit (published London : Printed by T.M 1690).

I can't find a transcript of this pamphlet online anywhere that's not behind a paywall or institutional password, but a couple of book accounts paraphrase it:

The traveller [Seley], going to Taunton, stopped at an inn and called for a pot of beer and a noggin of brandy. Proceeding on his way he met a country-like farmer, whom he was persuaded to accompany three miles, on the promise of good lodging. Presently the farmer and his horse vanished away, and immediately there appeared a hundred or two—men, women, and children; "some like judges, some like magistrates, some like clergymen, and some like country people." The last made at the stranger with spears, upon which he adjured them in the name of the Trinity. Of this they took no notice, but covered him with a net. Then he alighted off his horse, and when he let go the bridle the horse disappeared, and he never saw him more. In this plight he waited till four in the morning, and, being constantly attacked, thrust at his assailants with his sword, finding nothing but shadow, though he presently perceived a "man was cut, and his four fingers hung by the skin, and a woman was cut in the forehead, leaving blood upon the sword." After this came along ten funerals, one after the other; then two bodies were dragged along, both apparently just slain. In the morning the traveller got away, and happening to meet the Judges on their way to Wells, he gave them an account of his adventure.

If anyone wished to be satisfied of the truth of this story, he was to go to Mr. William Brown, next door to the Windsor Castle, Charing Cross.

Omitting to notice the consumption of beer and brandy, the narrator suddenly remembers, "'tis remarkable" that on the sign post of the inn one of Monmouth's men was hanged, and that about there several were buried who had been either killed or executed.
- p. 57, On some Somerset Chap-Books, Emanuel Green, Proceedings, Volume 24, Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, pub. F. May, 1879. 

And the second:

And now, to finish up with Exeter witchcraft while we are about it, we may as well relate the sad story of Mr. Jacob Seley, which set all the ever faithful city gossiping so long ago as .Monday, September 23rd, 1690, and is very worthy to be remembered even yet. Mr. Seley, it appears, set forth from his own home in Exeter on the day just named, with the full purpose and intention of riding to Taunton in Somerset. As far as we can gather he jogged along quite comfortably for a considerable distance, following the road through Hinton Clist to Blackdown, at which place there is a public-house called Cleston, "where the coach and waggons usually lodge on that road." Here Mr. Seley stopped some time, and refreshed the inner man. Perhaps he was a thought imprudent; for after he had called for a pot of beer, he had also a noggin of brandy ; but if there was excess, surely even rigid moralists will admit that his punishment was more than he deserved. For when he at last resumed his journey, (the quotation is from a tract entitled "Strange and Wonderful News from Exeter,") "he met with a country-like farmer, being about seven or eight at night; and in the country-like farmer persuaded Mr. Seley to ride back a mile and a half to lodge, telling him there was very good quarters, but at his return, he supposed it to be about three mile; and then he brought him to a plat of ground near the house, and the country-like farmer and his horse vanished away."

This of itself was sufficiently startling to a tired man, and might serve to point the moral how rash it is to ride back upon your road with people whom you do not know. But mark the sequel. "Immediately near 100 or 200 appeared to him, men, women, and children, some like judges, some like magistrates, some like clergymen, and some like country people; and the country people had spears who made at him, and then he made use of Scripture, but they made him no answer. Then he did abjure them." We may pause to remark that it might have helped him more if he had abjured noggins of' brandy. "He did abjure them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; for it is written, the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." However, there seemed to be something wrong in the abjuration, for Mr. Seley did not succeed in bruising the serpent's head, though having laid about him with a hanger which he wore, he formed the conclusion that he had cut off some of its fingers. At any rate there was blood upon his hanger, and then the enemy hung over his head "something like a fishing net," with what purpose exactly does not appear, but no doubt it was a wicked one. All this went on by Mr. Seley's account in a plat of ground not above four yards square. "At last he lighted off his horse, and his horse laid his nose on his shoulder as if he had been a Christian." But even this sorry comfort poor Mr. Seley did not long enjoy; for the spirits gave his horse "something like treacle, and then he let go his horse and never saw him after."

There is a good deal more of this story, prepared doubtless for the consumption of Mrs. Seley when her lord returned. But where Mr. Seley really was all this time is a matter of pure speculation.

- pp46-47, Highways and Byways in Devon and Cornwall, Arthur Hamilton Norway, pub. Macmillan, 1898.

What a complete crock. The chiefly notable thing about this story is that it's timed precisely five years after the 'Bloody Assizes', retributory trials of Monmouth sympathizers conducted, in Taunton and elsewhere, in the aftermath of the Monmouth Rebellion. As such, there's more in it than merely (as the retellings suggest) some meaningless drunken hallucination; as an indictment of the establishment executioners as hostile apparations, it's clearly pro-Monmouth propaganda.

I ran into Mr Jacob Seley on the staff page of Dr Lucy Ryder of the University of Chester, author of the just-published The Historic Landscape of Devon, a write-up of her PhD at the University of Exeter. Her research area looks very interesting:

"the intersections between folklore and archaeology (evidence in published and forthcoming work), and my current research interests focus on the relationship between landscapes and folkloric traditions; using folk belief to examine how societies functioned in past".

I don't terribly trust folklore as having any clear meaning, because its agenda is highly malleable. Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain has a particular local example of how bonfire celebrations in southern England, such as that at Ottery St Mary, have clear-cut origins in anti-Catholic celebration, but have been reinvented as having vastly ancient pagan origin. But the thrust remains: the existence of traditions attached to a location seems to indicate that something was significant about the place.

- Ray

Standing room only

A minor enduring meme of the 20th century has been the idea that the entire population of the world would fit on the Isle of Wight. Depending on assumptions, population growth appears to have made this obsolete around 1970, hence the title of John Brunner's 1968 dystopian SF novel Stand on Zanzibar.  I haven't been able to trace the precise origin of the Isle of Wight version of the meme, but the earliest citation I can find at this instant is to 1886:

... when we remember that the whole human family, every man, woman, child  on earth this day, could comfortably stand on the Isle of Wight ...
The Three First Chapters of Human History, The Very Rev. H Martyn Hart, Dean of Denver, Colorado, The Quiver, p239, 1886

Any advances welcome!

A number of early 20th century citations stem from a source a decade later, in the address of Sir John Wolfe Barry on his assumption of the Presidency of the Institution of Civil Engineers:

One is apt to get lost with these figures of millions of our fellow-subjects, and to think for an instant that our own is the culminating epoch of the world's history, and that over-population stares us in the face. This is a merely parochial idea, the absurdity of which can be realised when we remember that the population of the world can stand upon the Isle of Wight.
- Sir John Wolfe Barry, Minutes of Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, Volume 127, Session 1896-97, Part 1. Speech given November 1896.

One particular expression of the meme was the rather odd fantasy novel All Moonshine (Richard Whiteing, 1907). The narrator of All Moonshine goes to sleep while obsessing about war and world population, particularly focusing on a statistic he has seen ...

" It has been calculated that, at four persons to the square yard, the entire population of the globe, standing shoulder to shoulder, could find room and to spare in the Isle of Wight."

... and wakes up to a strange phenomenon, the populations of the world coming to visit the Island and play out their conflicts in astrally projected form, the narrator meanwhile falling in love with one of the astral visitors, the South Sea woman Nykie. It's highly polemical, both anti-war, and dismissive of the dangers of overpopulation. The reviewer of the Boston-based The Independent (a journal whose religious roots gave it a mystical leaning) loved it ...

We have had some very remarkable literary works published in England since I sent my latest article to The Independent. One of the most remarkable is the novel called "All Moonshine," written by Richard Whiteing and published by Messrs. Hurst & Blackctt, of London. I have called this book a novel because it presents itself to the reading world merely as such, but the name of novel would certainly not prepare the reader for such an extraordinary literary production as that which Mr. Whiteing has given to the world. It is at once a dream-story, a love-story, a poetic allegory in prose, and a rapturous anticipation of of a time soon to come when mankind is to be freed from the devastations of the war spirit. It is sometimes a satire, sometimes a prose-poem, sometimes a fairy tale, and the reader absorbed in its pages finds himself unable to say in which of these fields of literary production the author makes the greatest success. The love-story, which runs thru and keeps together the whole narrative, is in fact a continuation of a novel, “The Island,” written by Mr. Whiteing some years ago. For Mr. Whiteing's present purposes the gods annihilate both time and space, but not to make two lovers happy—rather to help them in the accomplishment of a magical work which is to make the whole world happy by reestablishing the reign of peace. The critic is spared all the trouble of raising questions as to possibilities or probabilities when dealing with the dream-story, which proclaims itself to be "All Moonshine". The reader will find  himself carried away by the story in all its moods and and will fancy many a time that he is actually looking on sonic of the marvelous scenes which the author causes to pass, panorama-like, before his eyes. All the brilliant peculiarities of Whiteing's style, peculiarities which have made for him a distinct reputation, are shining thru the pages of this book. The author is now humorous, now melancholy, now sarcastic. now grimly severe, and in each mood he seems to find the same felicities of expression. “All Moonshine" may, of course, be classed among what used to be called novels with a purpose, but in many even of the most successful and famous novels which used to be described by that name the reader sometimes found that the purpose over-shadowed or almost extinguished the story and that he was only reading a tract put into allegorical form. This fault cannot certainly be found with Mr Whiteing's new story, because we feel from first to last the deepest interest in the hero and the astral Nyleia [sic], notwithstanding the devotion which they both display to the promulgation of the arts of peace, and notwithstanding also the magical means by which the crusade for peace is supposed to make its way. Richard Whiteing has indeed long been recognized as a man not merely endowed with great talents, but with that gift which must be called genius, and I feel well convinced that "All Moonshine" will give the world of readers another reason for admitting him to that limited circle of living authors on whom such praise is fittingly bestowed.
- The Independent, Volume 63, page 1420, 1907

... but the NY Times Saturday Review was less impressed:

The first in point of importance is Richard Whiteing's " All Moonshine," published by Messrs. Hurst & Blackett, and distinctly a noteworthy book, though it must be confessed It is also an exasperating one. Mr. Whiteing in his typical manner of "No. 5 John Street" leads us through a story which obviously does not mean very much to him, and consequently cannot mean very much to us, for the sake of showing us his point of view on some serious Question and for the sake of teaching us some sort of lesson ... Who could hope to reconcile us to a book the action of which takes place almost entirely in a dream — and it is another relic of childish taste that we resent dream books nearly as bitterly as books with evident morals — the heroine of which is a South Sea Islander in her astral form, and all the rest of the characters astrals, too? Who could make us read with conviction thumb-nail sketches of all the world as seen by the dream-hero ...
- New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art, further citation details unfindable

All Moonshine (Richard Whiteing, pub. Hurst and Blackett, 1907, Internet Archive ID allmoonshine00whitgoog).

The Island, mentioned by the first reviewer, is Whiteing's 1888 satirical fantasy in which the narrator, disaffected with London life, flees civilization and is shipwrecked on Pitcairn Island. There, guided by Victoria, the Chief Magistrate's daughter (the same character who later appears as "Nykie" in All Moonshine) he compares the Edenic socialistic lifestyle with Western culture, and departs a wiser man. In the light of recent revelations about the culture and mores of Pitcairn, the book's idyllic picture makes horribly ironic reading. See The Island, Or, An Adventure of a Person of Quality (Richard Whiteing, pub. Tauchnitz, 1888, Internet Archive ID islandoranadven01whitgoog).

The Island has an immediate sequel, No. 5 John Street (1899, Internet Archive ID nojohnstreet00whitgoog) in which the situation is reversed. The narrator of The Island, Lord —, having died, his friend is asked to report back to the Pitcairn islanders on life in London, experiencing a deal of London low-life in the process.

- Ray

Bismarck fears the wurst

I seem to have known forever the apocryphal story about a proposed duel with sausages between the conservative German statesman Otto von Bismarck and his liberal/radical political antagonist (and groundbreaking biologist) Rudolph Virchow. The current edit of the Wikipedia article on Virchow (06:16, 16 July 2012) summarises it as follows ...

The Sausage Duel
As a co-founder and member of the liberal party (Deutschen Fortschrittspartei) he was a leading political antagonist of Bismarck. He was opposed to Bismarck’s excessive military budget, which angered Bismarck sufficiently to challenge Virchow to a duel in 1865. There are two versions of this anecdote: in one version, Virchow declined because he considered dueling an uncivilized way to solve a conflict. The second has passed into legend but was well documented in the contemporary scientific literature. It states that Virchow, having been the challenged and therefore entitled to choose the weapons, selected two pork sausages: a cooked sausage for himself and an uncooked one, loaded with Trichinella larvae for Bismark. His challenger declined the proposition as too risky.

... and at least the existence of the story is well-cited to an article in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (Rudolph Virchow, Myron Schulz, Emerg Infect Dis. 2008 September; 14(9): 1480–1481. doi: 10.3201/eid1409.086672).

I'll cut straight to the chase on this one. It needs going back to German primary sources, and Hella Machetanz did exactly that in 1978.

Die tödlichen Trichinen als von Virchow gewählte Waffen sind aber in keiner der zahlreichen deutschen Veröffentlichungen uber dieses Thema zu finden, auch nicht in den Briefen an seine Eltern noch in der Biographie von Ackerknecht. Die Duell-Förderung ist dagegen als gesichert anzusehen, wie aus den Stenographischen Berichten des Preußischen Landtags hervorgeht.

(The deadly Trichinella selected as weapon by Virchow is however to be found in none of the numerous German publications about this topic, nor in the letters to his parents still in the biography by Ackerknecht. The duelling challenge, to the contrary, is deemed to be verified, as appearing in the stenographic records of the Prussian Landtag.)

- Trichinen und die Duell-Forderung Bismarcks an Virchow im Jahre 1865, Hella Machetanz Medizinhistorisches Journal Bd. 13, H. 3/4 (1978), pp. 297-306 Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag

There's an English account of the Landtag dispute between Bismarck and Virchow in the foreign section of the Sydney Morning Herald for August 15th 1865: see the Germany section, columns 3/4, page 3. The duel challenge is there, but no sausages.

As to the English incarnation of the sausage variant, Google Books finds a particular crop of variously embroidered English repetitions of this story in the early 1900s, and tracking a litte back finds the first English citations in American medical journals in 1893. For example:

It is said that Bismarck once sent a challenge to Virchow because of some frank speaking on the part of the great pathologist. The latter instantly remarked that as the challenged party he had the choice of weapons, and held up two sausages apparently exactly alike, saying: "One of these is filled with deadly trichinae, and the other is perfectly healthy. Let Bismarck choose which of these he will eat, and eat it, and I will eat the other." The duel was not fought.
- uncredited anecdote, The American Lancet, p494, Volume 17, 1893

However, it goes back further, and at least one US newspaper carries this version of the story:

A Berlin journal relates that the famous Bismarck once challenged Dr. Virchow for offensive language used in parliamentary debate. The learned doctor was at that time engaged in investigations relating to trichinosis. He is said to have thus replied to the messenger who bore Bismarck’s challenge: “My arms; there they are—those two sausages. One of them is full of trichinae; the other is pure. Let his Excellency breakfast with me. We will eat the sausages; and he shall take his choice of them.
- The Hawaiian Gazette, August 5th, 1868.

A pity we're not told what "Berlin journal" this allegedly came from. The whole anecdote seems to be a cross-fertilisation between the real story of his political conflict with Bismarck leading to a duel challenge, and another real story arising Virchow's activism concerning trichinosis (in particular its association with raw sausages - i.e. not precisely raw, but ones for uncooked consumption made with very lightly cured pork). In Germany in the mid-1800s, this was highly controversial, as Virchow was challenging the safety of a highly-established food industry.

This circumstance seems to be the prototype for the sausage duel story.  The Lancet of February 1866 reports:

At Berlin, a meeting of town-councillors, butchers, doctors, and a sprinkling of the general public, was held shortly before Christmas. Professor Virchow addressed the meeting, and urged the necessity of instituting a microscopical examination of all pork. At the conclusion of his speech, he handed to the president a piece of smoked sausage, and a piece of meat from a pig which had been recognised as tricniuous. Thereupon a veterinary practitioner, of the name of Urban, rose and combated all that science has acquired during the last five years as an unfounded illusion. "Trichinae, he said, "are the most harmless animals in the world. It is only doctors without practice who make a noise about them, in order to create some occupation for themselves," &c. (Great interruption; the president is obliged to stop the veterinarian.) Drs. Virchow and Mason demand an apology from M. Urban. Dr. Mason challenges Urban to eat some of the sausage on the president's table. (Great applause.) Urban wishes to explain. The meeting calls upon him to eat. "He had not spoken of Berlin doctors (' Eat, eat!'); but of those at Hedersleben. ('Eat!') He would first see whether the sausage contained trichinae." (Great laughter, and continued shouts of "Eat! eat! eat!") Whereupon M. Urban suddenly seizes the sausage on the president's table, bites off a piece, eats it, and leaves the ball forthwith, amidst the applause and laughter of the assembly.

About five days later (on 23rd December) the Oelkszeitung [sic] reported that the veterinarian, Urban, was ill. He was confined to his bed, and his arms and legs were paralysed. A hope was expressed that the illness was not caused by trichinae contained in the sausage of which he had been badgered to swallow a piece. Vain hope!

- The Trichina Disease, Dr Thudichum, The Lancet, February 1866, reprinted as pp18-19, The half-yearly abstract of the medical sciences, Volume 43, 1867

This has an urban myth flavour - the poetic justice is just a little too apt. A more reliable summary of events is contained in this dissertation by Lars Harald Feddersen: Die Darstellung Rudolf Virchows in der Vossischen Zeitung im Zeitraum vom 1. Januar 1844 bis zum 31. Dezember 1865 (The Representation of Rudolf Virchow in the "Vossische Zeitung" during the Period of 1st of January 1844 until the 31st of December 1865).

Mr Feddersen's detailed examination of Virchow coverage in the Vossische Zeitung (a prestigious liberal Berlin-published newspaper) confirms that there was a heated meeting at which the veterinary surgeon Urban - a trichina denier - was heckled into eating a suspect sausage. However, there was no report of his subsequently getting ill. The follow-up was that Virchow issued a statement saying the sausage, being four weeks old and heavily smoked, contained only dead trichinae. The newspaper shortly after denied this, saying it was contaminated, but not with trichinae.

Nach diesen Ausführungen sah sich V[irchow] groben Anschuldigungen des ebenfalls anwesenden Tierarztes Dr. Urban ausgesetzt: Dieser warf V neben Oberflächlichkeit und Schwindel vor, er würde die Angst vor den Trichinen schüren. Urban verleugnete, dass eine Trichinenproblematik existierte. Das aufgebrachte Publikum strafte den Tierarzt mit beleidigenden Zwischenrufen.  Dieses veranlasste Urban schließlich, von der mitgebrachten Wurst zu essen. Es kam zum Eklat. V erklärte enttäuscht, dass er die Versammlung nicht ein zweites Mal besuchen wolle. (vgl. VZ 17.12.1865-Nr. 296)

Wenige Tage darauf ging V anlässlich eines Vortrags im „Berliner Handwerkerverein“ erneut auf die Trichinenfrage ein: Er erklärte, dass die Wurst, von der Tierarzt Urban in der „Schlächterversammlung“ gegessen hatte, nur bereits tote Trichinen enthielt. Die Wurst, so V, war bereits vier Wochen alt und stark geräuchert. (vgl. VZ 21.12.1865-Nr. 299)

Zwei Tage später dementierte die VZ diesen Bericht: Die Wurst, von welcher Urban in der Versammlung gegessen hatte, sollte zuverlässigen Meldungen zufolge bei der Untersuchung durch V nun doch nicht trichinös verseucht gewesen sein. (vgl. VZ 23.12.1865-Nr. 301) 

If any fluent German readers can confirm/correct my reading of this, I'd be grateful.

Ray

Phillpotts censorship drama!

Cold Comfort Watchett Hill Farm, setting of The Secret Woman

Kevin Dixon, at the always interesting Torquay's Other History section of The People's Republic of South Devon, recently mentioned Eden Phillpotts' 1912 spat with the Lord Chamberlain over the dramatisation of his Dartmoor-based tragic melodrama The Secret Woman: Torquay’s Other History: Eden Phillpotts upsets the Censors.

I'd heard about this before, but never bothered to chase up the details. A spot of background: inthe UK, censorship of theatre by the Lord Chamberlain's office came about with the Licensing Act 1737, a piece of political gaming to suppress criticism of Robert Walpole's government. The Lord Chamberlain's power were reduced in the Theatres Act 1843 to censorship of plays not " fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace", and this was the situation that still applied in 1912.

 Anyhow, the Lord Chamberlain refused permission for the staging of The Secret Woman unless a few sentences were altered; Phillpotts, on a point of principle, refused to give in. Most accounts describe it thus far, but don't elaborate. However, I just found the details in the 1924 book The Place of Eden Phillpotts in English Peasant Drama by Charles William Meadowcroft.

What were these passages to which the Chamberlain objected? It was impossible to find out without writing to Mr. Phillpotts and he has kindly furnished me with the passages in dispute. These thoroughly support Mr. Phillpotts in the position he took at the time.

The censored passages in The Secret Woman show, as Phillpotts says, that only principle was involved and that the passages themselves were nothing out of the way except in the pudding mind of the authorities.

The passages are as follows:-

p. 31
"I saw the two of them thicken into one" [deletion]

p. 36
"The way of a man's body
My flesh and blood's a bit too much for you"—to—"a bit too much for me sometimes."

Act IV p. 72 (bottom)
"I only nursed my flesh" to end of sentence [I only nursed my flesh an' kept it plump an' sweet for him]

It all seems pretty trivial even by the standards of the time, but Phillpotts digging his heels in turned it into a Cause. The allegedly controversial nature of the content was countersunk by the cryptic references to it in a House of Commons question:

Mr. LYNCH asked the grounds on which leave was refused to Mr. Eden Philpotts to produce a play entitled "The Secret Woman"?
Mr. McKENNA [Home Secretary] Leave has not been refused to produce the play "The Secret Woman." On consideration, and after consulting his Advisory Board, the Lord Chamberlain licensed this play to the manager of the Kingsway Theatre on the 5th instant, subject to the elimination of five short passages, which were considered objectionable.
Mr. LYNCH Will the right hon. Gentleman, for the benefit of the Members of this House, kindly read those passages which were struck out as objectionable?
Mr. McKENNA I shall be very happy to show the passages in question to any Member of the House privately, but I should be most unwilling to read out in public passages of so objectionable a character.
- Hansard, HC Deb 19 February 1912 vol 34 cc286-7 286

A group of respected writers wrote a letter to Times, of which the gist was the following:

"We, Mr Phillpotts's fellow-writers, have read this play, and find it to be the conscientious work of an artist doing his best in his own way. . . . To our mind the play is worthy work, such as a stage of high aims should ever be ready to welcome, and we feel a warm indignation over the stigma cast by the Lord Chamberlain upon an author whom his fellow-writers and the English-speaking world generally have for many years held in admiration and esteem. Never in all these years of novel- writing has a word been breathed by any responsible person or paper against his fair fame ; but the moment he has the ambition to write a play in the same spirit that inspired his novels he is at the mercy of an official who knows no better than to serve him thus. "

Mr Phillpotts is the victim to-day, but of course it may be any of us to-morrow. Many of us have never written plays, though most of us would like to do so. There is not perhaps another field so fine in the England of to-day for a man or woman of letters, but all the other literary fields are free. This one alone has a blind bull in it.

" We who sign this letter may be otherwise engaged ; some of us may be old and done, and no longer matter. Our chance has gone by. But there are men and women who are coming — are they also to be warned off? Can we strike no blow for the young ?

William Archer. Henry James.
J. M. Barrie. Jerome K. Jerome.
R. C. Carton. George Moore.
Joseph Conrad. Gilbert Murray.
Arthur Quiller-Couch. John Masefield.
W. L. Courtney. Alfred Noyes.
Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur Wing Pinero.
John Galsworthy. Elizabeth Robins.
Frederic Harrison. G. Bernard Shaw.
Anthony Hope Hawkins. Alfred Sutro.
Maurice Hewlett. H. G. Wells.
W. H. Hudson. I. Zangwill."

- quoted from Censorship in England (Fowell, Frank; Palmer, Frank, 1913, Internet Archive ID censorshipinengl00foweuoft)

Thomas Hardy, interestingly, declined to be a signatory. Michael Millgate says in his 2001 book Thomas Hardy's Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, And Miscellaneous Prose: "He thought The Secret Woman undistinguished as a play, the changes demanded by the Lord Chamberlain easy to accommodate, and the letter of protest overstated". Nevertheless, the play attracted attention as a data point in an ongoing censorship debate at the time, and a telling one because when it was staged uncut as a free performance, nobody could even pinpoint the problem.

When the play was actually produced at a private performance in February 191 2, it met with a good reception, and the critics were unable to discover what the objectionable lines might have been. The Times wrote : " No one who obtains an invitation in the hope of finding prurience or blasphemy will be paid for his trouble '; and another journal stated, absolute truth, " that the average playgoer, after hearing the piece, would admit that he failed to guess which were the passages in question, or to recollect any one of them." There are in the play passages of healthy passion and of broad farmyard humour, without which the characters could not possibly have been true to life, and the Censor probably took offence at these passages because they were not couched in drawing-room periphrases. After all, to expect an author to put the double-entendres of Mayfair into the mouths of Dartmoor is no more absurd than forbidding him to use the word " thighs," as Colman did, on the ground of indecency.
- Censorship in England [ibid]

Steve Nicholson's The Censorship of British Drama, 1900-1968 - Volume 1: 1900-1932 (University of Exeter Press, 2005) sheds further light on the background. It seems heels were being dug in on both sides of the debate, as Sir Douglas Dawson, Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain's Department (who seems to have been a military-aristocratic control freak) viewed it as part of a conspiracy by disgruntled authors to bring down the whole censorship system. He'd advised the pro-censorship MP Sir Edward Carson, for instance:

There are four or five authors whose plays have been rejected in the last ten years, and four or five MPs who I hear are disappointed authors. These eight or ten people are on the warpath to abolish the censor.
- Censorship in England [ibid]

Dawson's no-compromise view prevailed. But the ban was rescinded in 1922, when the then Lord Chamberlain, the 8th Duke of Atholl, found nothing to worry about. His view on the "thicken into one" sentence, for instance, was:

Any one who has been in the mist on a hill and has seen two objects making towards each other and meeting can easily understand this phrase, and I do not for one moment accept the interpretation which appears to be put on it.
- quoted in The Censorship of British Drama, 2005, ibid.

The whole institution of stage censorship in the UK was abolished under the Theatres Act 1968.

The Secret Woman (Eden Phillpotts, New York / Macmillan, 1905, Internet Archive ID secretwoman01philgoog).
The Secret Woman; a play in five acts (Eden Phillpotts, New York / Brentano's, 1914, Internet Archive ID secretwomanplayi01phil).

I've had a quick skim, and it seems "loam and lovechild" melodramatics of exactly the type satirised by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm. I'm coming round to the conclusion that Phillpotts, though he tends to be idolised in this part of the country as a regional author, was really not that good a writer. He's a bit like a Thomas Hardy clone, but in comparison to Hardy, I find his descriptive prose uncomfortably dense, his characters unmemorable, and his style overall rather impersonal, in a way that fails to engage my interest in either landscape or story.

- Ray

The works of Theodosia Garrow Trollope

Further to the previous post about Villino Trollope and its occupants,the works of Theodosia Garrow Trollope may be of interest. The entry from Dictionary of National Biography indicates the major sources:

TROLLOPE, THEODOSIA (1825–1865), authoress, born in 1825, was the only daughter of Joseph Garrow (d. 1855), by his wife the daughter of Jewish parents, and the widow of a naval officer named Fisher. Her father was a grand-nephew of Sir William Garrow [q. v.], and a son of an Indian officer who had married a high-caste Brahmine. From her mother she inherited skill as a musician, and she became an excellent linguist. By Landor's encouragement she became a contributor to Lady Blessington's annual, entitled ‘The Book of Beauty,’ and later she wrote for Dickens's ‘Household Words,’ and for the ‘Athenæum’ and other papers. The delicate state of her health prevented any extended literary toil, but she translated some of Dall' Ongaro's patriotic poems, and in 1846 produced a skilful metrical translation of Giovanni Battista Niccolini's ‘Arnaldo da Brescia.’ On 3 April 1848, at the British legation in Florence, she married Thomas Adolphus Trollope [q. v.], and as his wife she created at the Villino Trollope one of the best known salons in Italy. In 1861 some twenty-seven of her papers to the ‘Athenæum’ were reprinted as ‘Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution;’ at the time of their appearance these letters were thought to have rendered good service to the cause of Italian freedom. In the same year she contributed to the ‘Victoria Regia’ (‘A Mediterranean Bathing-place,’ Leghorn), and in 1864 she commenced a series of essays upon the Italian poets for the ‘Cornhill Magazine.’ She died at Florence on 13 April 1865, leaving one daughter, Beatrice. She was buried in the English cemetery at Florence.
[Gent. Mag. 1865, i. 670; Athenæum, 1865, i. 555; Atlantic Monthly, December 1864; authorities cited under art. Trollope, Thomas Augustus.]

- Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 57, Theodosia Trollope, by Thomas Seccombe

Theodosia Garrow showed her writing talents from girlhood, writing ambitious poems at 13, when Walter Savage Landor called her the "new Sappho" and predicting that she would eclipse the fame of other poets.

TO THEODOSIA GARROW

Unworthy are these poems of the lights
That now run over them, nor brief the doubt
In my own breast if such should interrupt
(Or follow so irreverently) the voice
Of Attic men, of women such as thou,
Of sages no less sage than heretofore,
Of pleaders no less eloquent, of souls
Tender no less, or tuneful, or devout.
Unvalued, even by myself, are they,--
Myself, who reared them; but a high command
Marshalled them in their station; here they are;
Look round; see what supports these parasites.
Stinted in growth and destitute of odor,
They grow where young Ternissa held her guide,
Where Solon awed the ruler; there they grow,
Weak as they are, on cliffs that few can climb.
None to thy steps are inaccessible,
Theodosia! wakening Italy with song
Deeper than Filicaia's, or than his,
The triple deity of plastic art.
Mindful of Italy and thee, fair maid!
I lay this sear, frail garland at thy feet.

True estimation or not, this networking led her to a correspondence with the Countess of Blessington, who was then editor of a popular annual of poetry and fiction, Heath's Book of Beauty, and the publication of her poems The Gazelles and On Presenting a Young Invalid with a Bunch of Early Violets (both 1839, when she was 14), Song of the Winter Spirits (1841), and On a Portrait of Her Majesty (1842). A similar annual, The Keepsake, published more of her early poems: Imagine's Reward: A Legend of the Rhine (1841), The Doom of Cheynholme (1842), and The Lady of Ashynn (1843) and Lethe Draught (1847). Critical commentary on these early poems was very favourable - see UK Red - and to the effect that it was the best content of a couple of journals that critics otherwise viewed as collective aristocratic vanity anthologies (see the bitchy summary, A Batch of Annuals, in The Spectator, Nov 21, 1840).

Theodosia Garrow seems to have been interested in the Italian language and Italy from an early age, but as she got into her 20s, that interest took an increasingly political spin. In 1846, she contributed to The Keepsake a polemical poem called She is not Dead, but Sleepeth that argued for the unification of Italy, and in the same year had published Arnold of Brescia: A Tragedy, her translation of Giovanni Battista Niccolini's 1846 epic about Arnold of Brescia, a 12th century cleric who failed in an uprising to break from the Papacy to form a Roman republic. Her 1847 The English Heart to the Roman Pontiff (in the short-lived ex-pat periodical Tuscan Athenaeum) is in the same vein, praising Pope Pius IX for his then progressive stance.

Her hoped-for revolution actually came in 1859 - the external and internal wars of 1859-1861 that led to the establishment of Victor Emmanuel II as king of a united Italy. She described its progress in her letters to the London Athenaeum - see pages 86-88, Beyond the Traveller's Gaze: Expatriate Ladies Writing in Sicily (1848-1910) for an account of their general style and context. The letters were collected as The Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution, in a Series of Letters from Florence: With a Sketch of Subsequent Events up to the Present Time (Theodosia Trollope, London, Chapman and Hall, 1861 - Internet Archive socialaspectsit00trolgoog).

Various obituaries mention other works, of which I've tracked down some. The Cornhill Magazine series appears to be the uncredited essays under the banner Contemporary Italian Poets: No 1 — Giovanni Prati, No. 2. — Giuseppe Giusti (I haven't found No. 3). She's also reported as having written for Charles Dickens's Household Words and "papers on home topics" for All the Year Round. For instance, Kate Field's Atlantic Monthly article English Authors in Florence refers to an "exceedingly charming" poem - "Baby Beatrice, a poem inscribed to her own fairy child, that appeared several years ago in Household Words". It's uncredited, but the description fits Baby Beatrice, pp378-379, Household Words, Volume 31, 1855. This, and A Mediterranean Bathing-Place (1861) a nice piece of travelogue about "Leghorn" (Livorno) in the arts magazine Victoria Regia, show her work wasn't all politics. She also wrote a series, Notes on the most recent productions of Florentine sculptors, for The Art-Journal: see No I, No II (Hiram Powers) and No IV (Romanelli).

Thomas Trollope's 1887 autobiography What I Remember (Internet Archive whatiremembervo00trolgoog) devotes a chapter to her - see Chapter XVIII - with a few of her poems. There's also an extended analysis of her poetry and its relation to her political and social stance in Alison Chapman's 2003 essay collection Victorian Women Poets, particularly the chapter The Expatriate Poetess: Nationhood, Poetics and Politics.

To conclude: a bibliographic puzzle. As I mentioned previously, Theodosia Garrow was born in Torquay, and in the course of researching this post, I found this:

... last year All the Year Round contained a few chapters — reminiscences of her own early days passed in Devonshire.
- obituary, page 191, The Art-Journal,Volume 27, 1865

This sounded interesting. But All the Year Round is fully accessible online - see Archive - and unless the details are so unspecific that they're not recognisable, I can find no such articles.

- Ray