tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/19th-century-literature-47052/articles19th century literature – The Conversation2023-12-07T13:28:49Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2176282023-12-07T13:28:49Z2023-12-07T13:28:49ZHow I identified a probable pen name of Louisa May Alcott<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563019/original/file-20231201-23-1y1dby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C46%2C3406%2C2692&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Louisa May Alcott took part in a 19th-century literary culture of anonymity and guessing games.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/louisa-may-alcott-american-novelist-portrait-1870s-news-photo/929104084?adppopup=true">Universal Images Group/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before Louisa May Alcott published the bestselling “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/514/514-h/514-h.htm">Little Women</a>” in two volumes – the first in 1868, the second in 1869 – she wrote melodramatic thrillers, selling these short stories to magazines to bring in cash for her impoverished family.</p>
<p>On a cold November day in 2021, I was rereading Madeleine B. Stern’s introduction to her 780-page edition of “<a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/louisa-may-alcott-unmasked-collected-thrillers/oclc/31971792">Louisa May Alcott’s Collected Thrillers</a>.” </p>
<p>In the 1940s, Stern, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=fueoOloYKugC&dq">with her research partner Leona Rostenberg</a>, helped reveal that Alcott had written many of these sensational tales <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.37.2.24293383">under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard</a>.</p>
<p>But Stern wondered if any other stories written by Alcott were still out there.</p>
<p>For example, in “Little Women,” Jo March – the character who most closely resembles Alcott – also writes short stories to support her struggling family. </p>
<p>“‘A Phantom Hand’ put down a new carpet,” Alcott writes, “and the ‘Curse of the Coventrys’ proved the blessing … in the way of groceries and gowns.”</p>
<p>Stern points out that there’s a related reference in Alcott’s journals – “not to ‘A Phantom Hand’ but to ‘A Phantom Face,’ for which she earned $10 in 1859.”</p>
<p>“But,” Stern adds, “neither the ‘Phantom Hand’ nor the ‘Phantom Face’ has been tracked down.” </p>
<p>At the time, I was a graduate student working on my dissertation. I was on the hunt for pseudoscientific short stories, so the mention of Alcott’s missing tales piqued my interest.</p>
<p>Where was this phantom “Phantom” story? Could I find it?</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Scan of old story titled 'The Phantom' in a periodical." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">‘The Phantom’ appeared in an 1860 issue of the Olive Branch.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Max Chapnick</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>After searching digital databases, I came across one such story, called simply “The Phantom,” with the subtitle, “Or, The Miser’s Dream, &c.” It had been published in the Olive Branch in early 1860, months after Alcott listed having written “The Phantom” in her journals. But the byline under the story read E. or I. – I couldn’t quite make out the first initial – Gould, which wasn’t a known pseudonym of Alcott’s.</p>
<p>So I went to sleep. Sometime later I awoke with the thought that Gould might be Alcott. What if, along with her several known pseudonyms – A. M. Barnard, Tribulation Periwinkle and Flora Fairfield, among others – Alcott had yet another that simply hadn’t been identified yet? </p>
<p>I cannot say for certain that Gould is Alcott. But I’ve encountered enough circumstantial evidence to consider it likely Alcott wrote seven stories, five poems and one piece of nonfiction under that name.</p>
<h2>More clues emerge</h2>
<p>The publication dates of Gould’s stories – and the outlets where they appeared – certainly suggest Alcott’s authorship.</p>
<p>From the mid-1850s onward, Alcott regularly churned out stories, and yet the record leaves a noticeable gap between spring 1857 and late 1858. In one of Alcott’s letters from the period, she wrote to a friend asking if the magazine Olive Branch would be interested in more of her work. Years earlier, in 1852, Alcott had published “The Rival Painters” in that magazine. Until now, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Louisa_May_Alcott_Encyclopedia/FTtaAAAAMAAJ">all scholars assumed</a> it was her only story published in the Olive Branch.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909300">In the course of my sleuthing</a>, I found several other pieces that were written by Alcott or had likely been written by her, including a 1856 Saturday Evening Gazette piece called “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909300">The Painter’s Dream</a>” and an anonymous Olive Branch story from 1857, “The Rival Painters: A Tale of Florence.” </p>
<p>The latter “Painters” was published in the exact period – and in the same magazine – as many of the Gould pieces. Several other outlets that published Gould also have connections to Alcott. For example, one of the Gould stories appears in the magazine Flag of Our Union, where Alcott later published under the Barnard pseudonym. </p>
<p>But to me, the clearest evidence connecting Gould to Alcott comes from the stories themselves. The name Alcott serves as the last name of the protagonists in two of Gould’s stories. Additionally, “The Wayside” – the name of one of Alcott’s homes – is the title of a nostalgic piece of nonfiction authored by Gould.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Large, old yellow house with big windows and a thick, tall chimney, flanked by trees." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Wayside, where Alcott lived with her family in Concord, Mass., was also the title of a piece of nonfiction by E.H. Gould.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-wayside-is-a-national-historic-landmark-lived-in-by-news-photo/545147518?adppopup=true">Joanne Rathe/The Boston Globe via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>The stories also resemble Alcott’s early fiction in important ways. As I argue in one of my dissertation chapters, Alcott pioneered the “sensation” genre. These stories combined elements of sentimental tales with melodramatic thrillers. Instead of taking place in European castles and British landed estates, they were set in the types of places that would have been familiar to the emerging American middle class, such as doctors’ offices and insane asylums. Alcott’s stories show how tensions of gender and class can make those mundane spaces fraught with danger and possibility.</p>
<p>At the same time, there are signs that Gould might not be Alcott. Gould was a common name, especially around Boston. Alcott also kept lists of her stories, and only one of the Gould pieces – “The Phantom” – shows up on those long lists.</p>
<p>However, evidence suggests that the lists aren’t exhaustive – some stories appear on one list but not another – and Alcott refers to stories in her diaries that don’t appear on any lists.</p>
<h2>Pseudonyms and guessing games</h2>
<p>Why would an author like Alcott use pseudonyms anyway? </p>
<p>For one, <a href="https://public.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/engl368/transoats.pdf">Alcott was poor</a>. So early in her career she wrote and published for money, and she might not have been particularly proud of everything she wrote. By disguising her name, Alcott could publish in less prestigious venues for a quick buck without worrying about tarnishing her literary reputation.</p>
<p>Even though she was poor, Alcott’s family had wealthy and cultured connections. Among them was Henry David Thoreau who, in “Walden,” <a href="http://thepersonalnavigator.blogspot.com/2012/02/thoreau-and-olive-branch.html">disparaged the Olive Branch</a> as one of the papers spreading “the gossip of Boston.” And while Alcott’s own mother often praised her writing, she did so only when the Alcott name was printed in more highly regarded venues, like The Atlantic.</p>
<p>Pseudonyms also allowed Alcott to write about topics she might not have felt comfortable attaching her name to. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Alternative_Alcott/PfOjRvcWHrQC">Many stories written under the Barnard pseudonym</a> depict drug use, reverse gender roles and discuss class conflict in ways that were radical for the late 1850s.</p>
<h2>A culture awash in authorial ambiguity</h2>
<p>Are there any other Alcott stories that remain unidentified? I would say there almost certainly are. As to whether Alcott used any pseudonyms in addition to the ones that have been identified, that’s less likely but possible.</p>
<p>However, I also hope that the identification of Gould restarts a conversation about authorship, especially for literary figures of the past.</p>
<p>Alcott found herself awash in authorial ambiguity. Her first Olive Branch story, “The Rival Painters,” appeared next to a short essay by the wildly famous and pseudonymous <a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=englishfacpubs">Fanny Fern</a>, who was a master at manipulating public perceptions.</p>
<p>After the blockbuster success of “Little Women,” Alcott published a novel, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Modern_Mephistopheles/_9oBAAAAQAAJ">A Modern Mephistopheles</a>,” as part of the “No Name Series.” Released by the publishing house Roberts Brothers, the collection featured books written anonymously by famous writers. Readers would try to guess the real authors, but Alcott didn’t reveal she wrote the novel until a few months before her death. </p>
<p>Alcott was deeply embedded in a culture of unknown, and yet guessable, authorship. Anonymity liberated Alcott, Fern and other writers – particularly women – by allowing them to tackle risky topics. But anonymity and pseudonyms didn’t stop people from sleuthing, now or then. Readers delighted in trying to figure out an author’s possible masks, just like I’m doing now with Gould. And it wasn’t just readers: Editors and writers withheld information while at the same time leaving clues. Everyone got in on the fun of hidden identities.</p>
<p>I’ll keep gathering evidence that may either prove or disprove Alcott’s authorship of Gould’s stories. But if I never know, that’s fine with me. </p>
<p>Alcott herself loved acting, and she loved wearing masks, both literally on the stage and figuratively in print. In the spirit of the masquerade, the Gould pseudonym adds to the allure of mystery – and the joy of discovery.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217628/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Max Chapnick first presented this research at the American Literature Association Conference in 2022, where he recieved funding from the Louisa May Alcott Society of which he is also a member. </span></em></p>By disguising her name, Alcott could publish in less prestigious venues without worrying about tarnishing her literary reputation.Max Chapnick, Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in English, Northeastern UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2077992023-10-06T16:38:14Z2023-10-06T16:38:14ZThe history of the Yellow Book – the 19th century journal that celebrated women writers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532049/original/file-20230614-19-uzv7a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C3%2C704%2C596&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Decadent Young Woman After the Dance by Ramón Casas (1899). </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/ramon-casas/68bc12880c76d4e30657d96ffecbbeba-1899">Musee de Montserrat</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the middle of the final decade of the 19th century, Britain was the most powerful and richest nation on earth, with the <a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/20342/peak-land-area-of-the-largest-empires/#:%7E:text=In%201913%2C%20412%20million%20people,of%20the%20world%27s%20land%20area.">largest empire ever known</a>. The nation might be thought to have had nothing of which to be frightened, yet frightened it was.</p>
<p>Many Britons of the time were steeped in an education in Latin and Greek in the classical tradition, so they knew what happened to great empires: they decline and fall. This was the atmosphere addressed by the Yellow Book, the most innovative journal of art and literature of the period, published between 1894 and 1897. It’s a topic I explore in my new book, <a href="https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/decadent-women">Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives</a>.</p>
<p>With its iconic <em>fin de siècle</em> designs (characteristic of the end of the 19th-century lethargy) and its showcasing of women writers, the Yellow Book gave its name to the decade. The period is now sometimes referred to as “<a href="https://1890s.ca/yellow-book-volumes/">the yellow nineties</a>” in <a href="https://0-go-gale-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/ps/navigateToIssue?u=ull_ttda&p=TTDA&mCode=0FFO&issueDate=119110810&issueNumber=39660&volume=&loadFormat=page">tribute</a>.</p>
<p>The Yellow Book was created by the brilliant young artist <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/aubrey-beardsley-716/story-aubrey-beardsley-five-artworks">Aubrey Beardsley</a> and energetic American writer <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095921402;jsessionid=AADD8DC289766EC7FC13ED9F50436F32">Henry Harland</a>. It considered the Victorian artistic ideal of morality as the highest quality in art to be prudish and lacking in a future.</p>
<p>The “Beardsley women” – perfectly stylised black illustrations featured both on the cover and throughout – received the most attention. One of <a href="https://archive.org/details/sim_the-national-observer-and-british-review-of-politics_1894-04-21_11_283/page/588/mode/2up?view=theater">Beardsley’s detractors claimed</a> that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>They resemble nothing on the earth, nor in the firmament that is above the earth, nor in the waters under the earth; with their lips of a more than Hottentot thickness, their bodies of a lath-like flatness, their impossibly pointed toes and fingers, and their small eyes that have the form and comeliness of an unshelled snail.</p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532052/original/file-20230614-20687-x2c2bd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The yellow Cover of The Yellow Book showing a woman in a cloak looking towards a lamp." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532052/original/file-20230614-20687-x2c2bd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532052/original/file-20230614-20687-x2c2bd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532052/original/file-20230614-20687-x2c2bd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532052/original/file-20230614-20687-x2c2bd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532052/original/file-20230614-20687-x2c2bd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532052/original/file-20230614-20687-x2c2bd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532052/original/file-20230614-20687-x2c2bd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The third edition of The Yellow Book, from 1894.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-yellow-book">British Library</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Yellow Book featured a significant number of women writers. One-third of its writers were women (47 out of 137 writers). An analysis of the poetry in the Yellow Book shows even more women’s work. Of the 116 poems across its 13 volumes, 44 were by women.</p>
<p>They were early modernists like <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp77738/george-egerton-mary-chavelita-dunne">Chavelita Bright</a> (who wrote sexually explicit stories under the pen name of George Egerton) and realist writer <a href="http://users.clas.ufl.edu/snod/D%27ArcyIntroductionNB.072315.pdf">Ella D’Arcy</a>. D’Arcy presented a sour view of women which was rather more complex than that proposed by feminists such as <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp78447/sarah-grand-frances-elizabeth-bellenden-mcfall-nee-clarke">Sarah Grand</a> and <a href="https://heritage.humanists.uk/mona-caird/">Mona Caird</a>, who were battling against male domination in marriage.</p>
<p>In D’Arcy’s world, the greater discourse between men and women which was permitted in the 1890s led only to deeper bewilderment and more disappointment on both sides, when compared to earlier decades.</p>
<h2>The Yellow Book’s ‘at homes’</h2>
<p>Central to women’s involvement in the Yellow Book were the “at homes” given by Harland and his wife Aline at their apartment in London. Women could attend these, unlike meetings held in pubs or men’s clubs.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.eltpress.org/PDFs/37.1.pdf">D’Arcy described it</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I see him [Harland] standing on the hearthrug or sitting on the floor, waving his eye glasses on the end of their cord, or refixing them on his short-sighted eyes, while assuring some ‘dear beautiful Lady!’ or other, how much he admired her writing, or her paintings, or her frock, or the colour of her hair. He would rechristen a golden red-haired woman ‘Helen of Troy’; he would tell another that her eyes reminded him of the ‘moon rising over the jungle;’ and thus put each on delightfully cordial terms with herself.</p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532050/original/file-20230614-21-k7vsby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Aubrey Beardsley in a grey suit with button hole flower." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532050/original/file-20230614-21-k7vsby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532050/original/file-20230614-21-k7vsby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532050/original/file-20230614-21-k7vsby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532050/original/file-20230614-21-k7vsby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532050/original/file-20230614-21-k7vsby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532050/original/file-20230614-21-k7vsby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532050/original/file-20230614-21-k7vsby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aubrey Beardsley by Jacques-Émile Blanche, (1895).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Beardsley#/media/File:Blanche_Beardsley.jpg">National Portrait Gallery</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Yellow Book suffered a blow in 1895 when the writer Oscar Wilde was arrested and imprisoned for homosexual offences. A tide moved against everything which was associated with decadence, which included the Yellow Book – even though Wilde had never written for it. </p>
<p>Some of the more puritanical writers for the Yellow Book’s publisher John Lane, insisted on the removal of Aubrey Beardsley as art editor and he was sacked.</p>
<p>Beardley’s departure certainly denied the journal his genius, but it was a gift for women illustrators who were now able to fill the space left by him and his almost all-male commissioning process of art. This included <a href="https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/mabel-dearmer">Mabel Dearmer</a> who designed the first post-Beardsley cover and <a href="https://1890s.ca/wp-content/uploads/syrett_M_bio.pdf">Nell and Mabel Syrett</a>, sisters who both drew covers.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532053/original/file-20230614-23042-ritl1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white illustration of a woman at a sink in an elaborate shawl." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532053/original/file-20230614-23042-ritl1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532053/original/file-20230614-23042-ritl1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532053/original/file-20230614-23042-ritl1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532053/original/file-20230614-23042-ritl1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532053/original/file-20230614-23042-ritl1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532053/original/file-20230614-23042-ritl1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532053/original/file-20230614-23042-ritl1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A ‘Beardsley’ woman illustration from The Yellow Book.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-yellow-book">British Library</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nevertheless, the Yellow Book went into a decline. There was now less to distinguish it, and though it had been innovative, now there were imitators. Soon it was no longer ahead of the field – it was just one publication among others. It was also costing too much to run as sales declined. The last issue was published in April 1897.</p>
<p>There was, however, a lingering sense that something important had happened with the publication of the Yellow Book and it was frequently reprinted in subsequent decades. </p>
<p>It had united young and old, women and men in defiance of an ossified literary and artistic establishment and in doing so, lit a beacon for future generations.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight,
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<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207799/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jad Adams has received funding for Decadent Women research from British Academy, Scouludi Foundation, Authors' Society</span></em></p>With its iconic designs and its showcasing of women writers, the Yellow Book gave its name to the decade.Jad Adams, Research Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2004842023-03-23T13:17:07Z2023-03-23T13:17:07ZWhy thousands of volunteers are transcribing the notebooks of the scientist who inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein<p>Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) is usually remembered as the inventor of a <a href="https://www.rigb.org/explore-science/explore/collection/humphry-davys-miners-safety-lamp">revolutionary miner’s safety lamp</a>. But his wild popularity came as much from his influence on popular culture as it did from his contributions to chemistry and applied science.</p>
<p>In the first few years of the 19th century, there was no hotter spectacle in London than Davy’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/sir-humphry-davy-used-poetry-and-theatre-to-bring-science-to-life-84391">lectures</a> at the Royal Institution. The carriage traffic jams caused by his keen audience led to the introduction of London’s first one-way street. </p>
<p>Hundreds of members of the public, many of them women, crowded into the lecture theatre to hear the charismatic Davy speak about his cutting edge research. They would watch demonstrations of his work, which often included elaborate explosions and other breathtaking displays.</p>
<p>In more recent times, Davy’s star has waned. Through <a href="https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/davynotebooks/">our work</a> on the <a href="https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/humphrydavy/davy-notebooks-project">Davy Notebooks Project</a>, we aim to change that. Thanks to the help of thousands of volunteers, we’re creating the first digital edition of Davy’s 83 manuscript notebooks, an exciting and important collection that we’ll soon be able to share with readers all over the world.</p>
<p>The first lecture Davy gave at the Royal Institution was on the subject of galvanism (the electricity generated by chemical actions). The force was thought at the time to be capable of <a href="https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/real-scientific-revolution-behind-frankenstein/">animating matter</a> – or of bringing something dead to life.</p>
<p>Davy was born in Penzance, Cornwall and despite a lack of formal education, he rose quickly from obscurity to become an important force at the centre of Britain’s scientific community. </p>
<p>As a young chemist, he spent several years in Bristol, where he experimented with new gases, including nitrous oxide (laughing gas) which he frequently inhaled himself to test its effect.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="a painting of the Royal Institution building in London with horse and carriages outside." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516367/original/file-20230320-1817-r24sy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516367/original/file-20230320-1817-r24sy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516367/original/file-20230320-1817-r24sy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516367/original/file-20230320-1817-r24sy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516367/original/file-20230320-1817-r24sy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516367/original/file-20230320-1817-r24sy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516367/original/file-20230320-1817-r24sy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Royal Institution by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (c. 1838)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Institution_Shepherd_TH.jpg">Wiki Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Moving to London, Davy eventually became director of the Royal Institution’s programme of chemical research and, later, <a href="https://royalsociety.org/blog/2022/11/davys-vaulting-ambition/">President of the Royal Society</a>. In his scientific life, he isolated more chemical elements than anyone before or since.</p>
<p>Davy’s famous lectures on the animating power of electricity at the Royal Institution may have inspired a young Mary Shelley as she came up with the idea for Frankenstein (1818), a novel that questioned the boundaries of creation using emerging scientific ideas.</p>
<p>Shelley may have even modelled aspects of the charming but reckless Victor Frankenstein on Davy himself. In fact, many of the things that Davy said in his lectures were <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-sunday-telegraph/20211031/281801402180672">borrowed word-for-word</a> to craft the fictional scientist’s dangerous experiments.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515884/original/file-20230316-18-fn1qvr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Mary Shelley looks at the viewer, with her black dress off her shoulders and hair tied back." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515884/original/file-20230316-18-fn1qvr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515884/original/file-20230316-18-fn1qvr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515884/original/file-20230316-18-fn1qvr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515884/original/file-20230316-18-fn1qvr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515884/original/file-20230316-18-fn1qvr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515884/original/file-20230316-18-fn1qvr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515884/original/file-20230316-18-fn1qvr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell (1831-1840).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/use-this-image/?mkey=mw05761">National Portrait Gallery, London</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But, as Mary Shelley probably would have known, Davy was also a writer himself with close ties to the leading authors of his day. </p>
<p>He was friends with poets Lord Byron and Robert Southey and had a hand in the creation of some of the greatest works of the Romantic period. This included editing the second edition of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/william-wordsworth-and-the-romantics-anticipated-todays-idea-of-a-nature-positive-life-196129">Lyrical Ballads</a> (1800).</p>
<p>And he wrote his own poetry – lots of it. The pages of Davy’s dozens of surviving notebooks are crammed full of poems, both published and obscure, which share space with the complex records of his scientific experiments, alongside the notes for Davy’s jaw-dropping lectures.</p>
<h2>Discovering Davy’s poetry</h2>
<p>Our project aims to make these notebooks – which have never been transcribed in their entirety – available in a free to read, online edition based on crowd-sourced transcriptions provided by nearly 3,000 volunteers. </p>
<p>Their hard work has enabled us to bring Davy’s fascinating work in the arts and sciences to a whole new generation.</p>
<p>Davy’s notebooks give invaluable <a href="https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/davynotebooks/category/dnp-blog/">insights into how his mind worked</a>. His firm conviction in the powers of the intellect, coupled with an unshakeable self belief, lay at the heart of his considerable success. As he declares in notebook 19E, containing drafts of lectures dating from around 1802:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Man is formed for pure enjoyments / his duties are high his destination / is lofty and he must then be / most accused of ignorance and folly / when he grovels in the dust having / wings which can carry him to the / skies.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These manuscript discoveries show how Davy influenced others, including Mary Shelley, through fantastical ideas rooted in scientific enquiry. While he may not be widely known today, his outsized achievements and towering public personality jump from their pages.</p>
<p>Whether influencing some of the greatest works of literature, or pioneering new modes of experimentation, Davy’s notebooks tell a fascinating story about the intertwined history of the arts and sciences in British history. </p>
<p>Understanding Davy’s legacy – and his possible influence as Victor Frankenstein’s role model – reminds us that these two arenas are much more closely, and importantly, linked to one another than we often hold them to be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200484/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The Davy Notebooks Project has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.</span></em></p>Davy’s famous lectures on the animating power of electricity may have inspired a young Mary Shelley as she came up with the idea for Frankenstein.Alexis Wolf, Research Associate on the Davy Notebooks Project, Lancaster UniversityAndrew Lacey, Senior Research Associate on the Davy Notebooks Project, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1863922023-03-21T19:11:57Z2023-03-21T19:11:57ZBram Stoker’s Dracula: bats, garlic, disturbing sexualities and a declining empire<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514118/original/file-20230308-3219-mzlumj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C17%2C3988%2C1976&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Frances Dade as Lucy in the 1931 film.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.</em></p>
<p>The London of the 1890s was a glamorous place – and a dangerous one. Observing the “teeming millions” in his professional role as manager of the London’s Lyceum Theatre, Bram Stoker’s view also included many celebrities, such as Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) and Oscar Wilde. </p>
<p>Close by the Lyceum’s grand doors are the markets of Covent Garden, where poor girls (like Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle) sold flowers to passing crowds. A little further on is the East End where the poor and despised could eke out a perilous living far from their birthplace in Ireland, Africa, India, Asia, and Eastern Europe (like Dickens’s Fagin). If Jack the Ripper no longer haunted the dark streets, then crime, alcoholism and unexplained epidemic disease still brought terror and sudden, brutal death. </p>
<p>The inspiration for Stoker’s classic tale was the Irish myths of vampires and banshees told to him by his mother when he was a sickly child. Yet Dracula’s hunting ground is London itself: the so-called “civilised” English are endangered by their own modernity, and made vulnerable because of their overconfident belief in rationality and the superiority of race and nation.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513867/original/file-20230307-28-rcopdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513867/original/file-20230307-28-rcopdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513867/original/file-20230307-28-rcopdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513867/original/file-20230307-28-rcopdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513867/original/file-20230307-28-rcopdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513867/original/file-20230307-28-rcopdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513867/original/file-20230307-28-rcopdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513867/original/file-20230307-28-rcopdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Claes Bang in a 2020 adaptation of Dracula.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hartswood Films, BBC, Netflix/idmb</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/frankenstein-how-mary-shelleys-sci-fi-classic-offers-lessons-for-us-today-about-the-dangers-of-playing-god-175520">Frankenstein: how Mary Shelley's sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Dracula’s guest</h2>
<p>Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dracula is an epistolary novel. Shelley’s classic is presented as a series of letters. But in Dracula, Stoker goes one better, combining the travel diary of a young lawyer, Jonathan Harker, with collected testimonies from many perspectives: letters, journals, newspaper reports, and patient observations recorded on newfangled wax cylinders and communicated via the typing skills of his wife, Mina.</p>
<p>Harker has been sent to the Carpathian mountains, “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe”, to help a client – Count Dracula – with his purchase of a London property. Imprisoned by his host, Harker is seduced by a trio of vampire women in a sexually charged encounter that ends only when Dracula intervenes. “This man belongs to me,” he declares. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513870/original/file-20230307-26-i4kwsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513870/original/file-20230307-26-i4kwsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513870/original/file-20230307-26-i4kwsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513870/original/file-20230307-26-i4kwsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513870/original/file-20230307-26-i4kwsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513870/original/file-20230307-26-i4kwsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513870/original/file-20230307-26-i4kwsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513870/original/file-20230307-26-i4kwsa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bram Stoker pictured circa 1906.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As Harker deteriorates, the Count grows younger and stronger, but the horrors which leave Harker physically and mentally traumatised and Dracula reinvigorated are never made explicit.</p>
<p>Dracula makes his way to England on a Russian sailing ship – which arrives crewless, its captain dead. A large dog is reported leaving it. In England, Dracula attacks Lucy Westernra, Mina Harker’s best friend.</p>
<p>As Lucy weakens, her suitors – Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming), John Seward (head of an insane asylum), and Quincey Morris (a rich American) – seek the advice of Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who recognises the work of a vampire. Lucy dies, and newspapers report a “Bloofer lady” (beautiful lady) attacking children on Hampstead Heath. Led by Van Helsing, the men confront and stake Lucy.</p>
<p>Reunited with Harker and Mina, the vampire-hunters turn to defeating Dracula, combining Van Helsing’s knowledge of folk superstition with modern technology. The vampire is dispatched, not with the required wooden stake and decapitation, but with two knives: is he dead?</p>
<h2>Sexual transgression</h2>
<p>Stoker uses the vampire to explore the cultural perils surrounding him. By the 1890s, Britain feared its empire was in decline – threatened by foreigners without and communities of migrants within. As London grew, diseases like cholera struck suddenly, and ravaged the metropolis. </p>
<p>And there were fears of moral contamination. Liberated “New Women” sought jobs, rights, and the vote. Homosexual scandals erupted in the press, culminating in the 1895 trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Dracula’s monstrosity threatens to uncover the frailty of Britain’s imperial mastery and – as with Harker – its masculinity.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513866/original/file-20230307-18-tikqn9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man and woman kiss." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513866/original/file-20230307-18-tikqn9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513866/original/file-20230307-18-tikqn9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513866/original/file-20230307-18-tikqn9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513866/original/file-20230307-18-tikqn9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513866/original/file-20230307-18-tikqn9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513866/original/file-20230307-18-tikqn9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513866/original/file-20230307-18-tikqn9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder in a 1992 film of Dracula.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">American Zoetrope, Columbia Pictures, Osiris Films</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>First published in 1897, Dracula is the best-known vampire story in English, and the one that invented many common tropes – transformation into a bat, the use of garlic and holy wafers. But it wasn’t the first British vampire story. Ken Gelder suggests in his book <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Reading-the-Vampire/Gelder/p/book/9780415080132">Reading the Vampire</a> that wealthy young Englishmen first encountered peasant folk tales about vampires while enjoying the Grand Tour on the continent in the 18th and 19th centuries (an early “gap year”). </p>
<p>It was John Polidori whose 1819 story (reportedly composed the same night as Shelley’s Frankenstein) introduced British readers to “The Vampyre”. As Gelder notes, his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Ruthven_(vampire)">Count Ruthven</a> reproduces the dangerous influence of the poet, Lord Byron. But while Byron’s infamous sexual magnetism is embedded in the vampiric Ruthven, his bisexuality is not. </p>
<p>Homosexual transgression enters the vampire story through Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem Christabel and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. In these tales, vampiric women deceive unsuspecting fathers to contaminate pure English maidens. The early vampires are, from the beginning, associated with sexual deviance. </p>
<h2>Between myth and parody</h2>
<p>Arriving at roughly the same time as early experiments with film, Dracula quickly became synonymous with horror films. First played by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, Dracula is endlessly adapted. The vampire is <a href="https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/04/a-field-guide-to-24-cinematic-draculas/">now ubiquitous</a> in popular culture.</p>
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<p>The uncanny – familiar objects behaving in unfamiliar ways – lies at the heart of horror. But today’s Dracula narrative is often diluted by its familiarity. Sanitised versions of the vampire abound. Children meet “Drac” through Sesame Street’s The Count, or the character voiced by Adam Sandler in Hotel Transylvania. These vampires’ obsessions are maths and domestic fatherhood – nary a drop of blood in sight. </p>
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<p>Comic and campy versions have repositioned Dracula as part of the harmless family fun of Halloween – from Grandpa in The Munsters, to Nandor the Relentless in the mockumentary, What we do in the Shadows. If the best way to deal with our worst fears is to render them ridiculous, then perhaps these parodies still speak to the power of Stoker’s original vision, and the unconscious fears it taps.</p>
<p>For every spoof, there is another story of the vampire as the predator in the darkness or the monster inside our home – including the genuinely unsettling vampire film, Let the Right One In. </p>
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<p>And Dracula continues to be an effective allegory for our worst social and cultural fears. In the 1980s, the vampire’s association with blood and sexual transgression made it perfect for exploring the AIDS crisis. More recently, in series like True Blood, vampire stories have explored the demonisation of social minorities and difference.</p>
<h2>The gothic revival</h2>
<p>Gothic stories emerged in the tumult of the late 18th century. But, as gothic critic, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/gothic-body/834B835259BBFA4D3CA68122F63236D9">Kelly Hurley observes</a>: “the Gothic is rightly, if partially, understood as a cyclical genre that reemerges in times of cultural stress.” </p>
<p>At the turn of the 20th century, the British were gripped by cultural uncertainty. Literary scholar Stephen Arata has <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794">identified a fear of enervation</a> at this time: “the sense that the entire nation – as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power – was in irretrievable decline.” </p>
<p>This led to the gothic revival, during which our most popular (and persistent) gothic stories emerged: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the return of the vampire in Dracula. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-rebecca-by-daphne-du-maurier-gender-gothic-haunting-and-gaslighting-146573">Guide to the classics: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — gender, gothic haunting and gaslighting</a>
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<p>Gothic stories excite the senses, relying on our preconditioned responses to common textual elements: castles, ruined abbeys, storms, uncanny doubles to evoke terror. Stoker uses these gothic tropes to heighten expectation. For example, when Jonathan Harker first arrives at Dracula’s castle, it is midnight, dogs are baying, there is a ghostly figure, and a wolf attack.</p>
<p>As Harker realises he is a prisoner, Dracula’s uncanny animal qualities are revealed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If the story lingers on events which can only be supernatural, the novel’s structure with its compilation of letters, diaries, and cuttings insistently locates the text in the “real” world, demanding readers receive it as fact. Events are carefully dated to between May 3 and November 10. Harker says in his epigraph:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within range of knowledge of those who made them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet the gothic instability produced by a book of fragments also undermines its own assertions of authenticity. Indeed, by the end of the book, Harker declares “in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting.”</p>
<h2>The monster as warning: anti-semitism</h2>
<p>Scholar <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3828327">Jack Halberstam has described</a> Dracula as an “aggregate of race, class, and gender […] Dracula is otherness itself.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513872/original/file-20230307-26-dtmfte.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513872/original/file-20230307-26-dtmfte.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513872/original/file-20230307-26-dtmfte.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513872/original/file-20230307-26-dtmfte.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513872/original/file-20230307-26-dtmfte.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513872/original/file-20230307-26-dtmfte.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1287&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513872/original/file-20230307-26-dtmfte.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1287&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513872/original/file-20230307-26-dtmfte.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1287&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The Harkers describe Dracula as “a tall thin man with a beak nose and black moustache and pointed beard”. Dracula’s body marks him as Jewish and criminal, interrelated concepts in the medical language of the 1890s. “Scientific” experiments of the time – thoroughly disproved since – linked criminality to (commonly racialised) physical features.</p>
<p>Similarly, Dracula’s desire for blood aligns him with blood libel (a false allegation made about Jewish people murdering Christian boys to use their blood in their rituals). So does the taking of children by both Dracula and Lucy.</p>
<p>Halberstam connects the novel’s anti-Semitism with the increased migration of Ashkenazi Jews to the East End of London around the time Stoker was writing his novel. </p>
<h2>Technological change</h2>
<p>Victorian inventions like the typewriter, the telegram and the railway now seem slow and outdated. But they were the cutting-edge technologies of Stoker’s day. </p>
<p>Van Helsing declares to his fellow vampire-hunters:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[W]e have sources of science; we are free to act and think; and the hours of the day and the night are ours equally. In fact, so far as our powers extend, they are unfettered, and we are free to use them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dracula relies on the old ways – carriages, sailing ships, and letters. His pursuers use shorthand, wax cylinders for voice recordings and the typewriter, enabling them to collate and share information: the power of mass media. Ultimately, it is technology that defeats Dracula.</p>
<p>But if modernity is their greatest weapon, it’s also their greatest weakness. For example, Dracula gains access to Lucy through her mother’s ignorance of folklore: she removes Van Helsing’s protective garlic flowers and throws open the window. </p>
<h2>Threatening sexuality</h2>
<p>Lucy becomes the focus of Dracula’s attention because she is a modern woman. It is her unconventional views that make her a target for Stoker.</p>
<p>In Dracula, female sexual desire is more than a simple metaphor: it’s unnatural. The sexual aggression of Dracula’s three vampire “wives” proves irresistible to Harker. They are monstrous as much for their overt sexuality as their fangs. And Lucy crosses an important line by venturing out at night (albeit by sleepwalking) – the street at night is the realm of the prostitute.</p>
<p>Lucy also frankly enjoys the courtship of three men: Arthur Holmwood, John Seward, and Quincey Morris. She questions traditional English monogamy, asking “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men?” </p>
<p>Sexual excess is foreshadowed when Lucy requires blood transfusions from four men. And realised in the “voluptuous wantoness” she displays as a vampire, which hardens her by-now husband, Arthur, to the violent necessity of staking her. </p>
<p>Lucy’s independence aligns with the New Woman’s first-wave feminist demands for education, suffrage, and financial self-sufficiency. Dracula’s other victim is Mina, the schoolmistress with a “man’s brain […] and a woman’s heart”, whose typing skill links her to emerging areas of women’s employment. </p>
<p>Stoker positions his women ambiguously. They are both valued beyond measure and disposed toward monstrosity. Possibly the most disturbing moment in the novel is when Mina is forced to drink Dracula’s blood as a kitten laps milk from a saucer. It is the women who are the weakest links in the nation’s armour. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513881/original/file-20230307-247-xqlq9k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513881/original/file-20230307-247-xqlq9k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513881/original/file-20230307-247-xqlq9k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513881/original/file-20230307-247-xqlq9k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513881/original/file-20230307-247-xqlq9k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513881/original/file-20230307-247-xqlq9k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1184&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513881/original/file-20230307-247-xqlq9k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1184&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513881/original/file-20230307-247-xqlq9k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1184&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Poster for the 1931 movie.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>English fears of homosexuality peaked with the trials of Oscar Wilde, who Stoker knew well. Indeed, author and scholar Talia Schaffer <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/11248">argues</a> Stoker’s passionate admiration for Walt Whitman displays a homoerotic intensity.</p>
<p>Lurking in the novel’s shadows is the question of what happened between Harker and Dracula in Carpathia? Harker’s experiences leave him shattered in mind and body. Sister Agatha reports, “the traces of such an illness as his do not lightly die away.” </p>
<p>Dracula’s at-arms-length condemnation of homosexuality is almost certainly influenced by the timing of its composition, so close to Wilde’s <a href="https://www.famous-trials.com/wilde/327-home">conviction for gross indecency</a>. Perhaps, like many of Wilde’s former friends and associates, Stoker wanted to signal his distance from Wilde and his scandalous lifestyle. </p>
<p>Dracula’s defeat promises resolution. But the birth of baby Quincey Harker, whose “bundle of names links all our little band of men together”, reminds us of Mina’s exclusion from the band. It recalls her sharing blood with Dracula – and echoes Lucy’s promiscuous desire for three husbands. Questions of racial contamination and England’s fate are left open. </p>
<p>Dracula, as gothic monster, represents turn-of-the-century fears of immigrants, of modern technology, of Jews, of women’s rights, of homosexuality. Yet, 125 years later, Stoker’s creation continues to target our deepest fears.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186392/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sharon Bickle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>First published in 1897, Dracula is the best-known vampire story in English. It has been endlessly adapted for screen, but today’s stories tend to dilute the horror at the novel’s heart.Sharon Bickle, Lecturer in English Literature, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1859312022-07-01T12:16:54Z2022-07-01T12:16:54ZHow 19th-century literature spread the archetype of the ‘evil abortionist’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/471950/original/file-20220630-22-tsi6p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Equating abortion with infanticide has a long history. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/an-anti-abortion-picket-with-protestors-holding-placards-news-photo/1287672315?adppopup=true">Peter L Gould/FPG/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>After <a href="https://theconversation.com/roe-overturned-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-supreme-court-abortion-decision-184692">the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade</a>, one aspect of the abortion debate stayed the same: lurid sensationalism. </p>
<p>GOP firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene extolled the court for outlawing “<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-abortion-isnt-over-you-can-still-murder-babies-1719040">mass genocide</a>,” though anti-abortion activists nonetheless warn of Planned Parenthood already organizing an “<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/roe-wade-abortion-rights-supreme-court-1374276/">illegal abortion enterprise</a>.” </p>
<p>On one side are allusions to dead babies. On the other, dead mothers, dystopian images of state-regulated bodies, and the terrifying loss of power and control.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Female-Physicians-in-American-Literature-Abortion-in-19th-Century-Literature/Jessee/p/book/9780367228439">In my book</a> about the literature of abortion, I trace this rhetoric to the 19th century, when popular media described female physicians as villainous, untrained abortionists who committed infanticide. It was an easy way for publishers of <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520229457/american-sensations">dime novels and tabloid newspapers to make a quick buck</a>. Yet it seems that the discourse connecting abortion to murder and evil really hasn’t changed much since then.</p>
<h2>‘Murderesses’ and ‘she-devils’</h2>
<p>Women in the U.S. were <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/65/1/197/785162?redirectedFrom=fulltext">barred from medical schools and the professional practice of medicine</a> until the end of the 19th century, despite the fact that women had been practicing family medicine and gynecology as healers and midwives <a href="https://www.feministpress.org/books-n-z/witches-midwives-nurses-second-edition">for centuries</a>. Many women continued to practice without formal training in the 19th century by giving themselves the title of “woman physician.” The most notorious of these advertised abortive medicines and procedures <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/08/history-of-contraception-19th-century-classified-ads-for-abortifacients-and-contraceptives.html">in popular newspapers</a>.</p>
<p>Largely because these women placed advertisements in cheap papers, the woman physician became associated with the idea of the smarmy, greedy and untrained abortionist. As archivist <a href="https://beckerexhibits.wustl.edu/mowihsp/articles/practitioner.htm">Martha R. Clevenger</a> explains, in the 19th century, “the term ‘female physician’ was a derogatory epithet used to describe untrained female abortionists.” Historian <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807848906/sympathy-and-science/">Regina Morantz-Sanchez</a> also notes that “by far” the most common accusation made against female physicians was that they performed illegal abortions for profit. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/471433/original/file-20220628-14635-1ulbhp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Woman looming over a winged demon eating a baby." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/471433/original/file-20220628-14635-1ulbhp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/471433/original/file-20220628-14635-1ulbhp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471433/original/file-20220628-14635-1ulbhp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471433/original/file-20220628-14635-1ulbhp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471433/original/file-20220628-14635-1ulbhp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471433/original/file-20220628-14635-1ulbhp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471433/original/file-20220628-14635-1ulbhp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A drawing of abortionist Ann Lohman – also known as Madame Restell – in an 1847 edition of the National Police Gazette.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_Police_Gazette_Restell.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Infamous 19th-century women with no official training who performed abortions like <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/madame-restell-the-abortionist-of-fifth-avenue-145109198/">Madame Restell</a> made national headlines because of unfounded accusations of infanticide, selling babies and killing women. </p>
<p>These headlines then became fodder for plots in popular dime novel fiction, further linking the image of an abortionist with a melodramatically drawn picture of “<a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780208021830">an atrocious woman</a>.”</p>
<p>Because she was so sensationalized in the popular press, Restell became the figure on which fictional accounts of female abortionists were based.</p>
<p>For example, in his 1854 novel “New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million,” the popular 19th-century novelist and social reformer <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57785">George Lippard</a> creates a female abortionist character named Madame Resimer, who helps in a plot to murder an innocent woman. </p>
<p>Other 19th-century abortionist characters proliferated, variously characterized as “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57785">murderess</a>,” “<a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100862810">hag</a>,” “<a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100862810">she-devil</a>” and “<a href="https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-28420870R-bk">the instrument of the very vilest crime known in the annals of hell</a>.”</p>
<h2>Abortion as infanticide</h2>
<p>Perhaps the most insidious link these sensational novels and press reports made was the one between abortion and infanticide. </p>
<p>Andrew Jackson Davis’ 1869 novel “<a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007655371">Tale of a Physician</a>,” for example, tells the story of an evil female physician abortionist named Madame La Stelle, who gives her “entire attention to obstetrical cases and infanticides.”</p>
<p><a href="https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/12400642">In a mid-19th-century novel by an anonymous author</a>, the ironically named “Mother Higgins” is an untrained abortionist hired by wealthy men with pregnant mistresses to perform surgical abortions. She also commits infanticide after the children are born, and she helps the protagonist kidnap, rape and kill adult women. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Engraving of woman being tossed from carriage with text 'The Abortionist and Seducer Thrusting their Dying Victim into the Street, at Lausingburg, N.Y.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/471944/original/file-20220630-13-80vy5w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/471944/original/file-20220630-13-80vy5w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471944/original/file-20220630-13-80vy5w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471944/original/file-20220630-13-80vy5w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471944/original/file-20220630-13-80vy5w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471944/original/file-20220630-13-80vy5w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/471944/original/file-20220630-13-80vy5w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 19th-century literature, abortionists didn’t just carry out medical procedures – they were also accessories to murder.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/cph/3b30000/3b31000/3b31400/3b31491r.jpg">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Narratives like these exposed readers to the idea that if reproductive agency goes unregulated, greedy abortionists would even go so far as to callously murder newborns.</p>
<p>Today, greed is still commonly ascribed to abortion providers like <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/374044-the-greedy-abortion-industry-vilifies-pro-life-centers/">Planned Parenthood</a>. You’ll see anti-abortion activists like the Family Policy Alliance’s Stephanie Curry <a href="https://familypolicyalliance.com/issues/2019/05/24/black-babies-matter-truth-behind-attacks-pro-lifers/">incorrectly claiming</a> that Planned Parenthood has a long history of maliciously “exterminating” Black babies in America for profit.</p>
<h2>Innocence shattered</h2>
<p>While these sensational tales depict the abortionist as swarthy and ugly, the women they harm reflect 19th-century Anglo-American feminine ideals. </p>
<p>The pregnant women had usually been tricked into affairs by sex-obsessed men, who then forced them to go to a place like Mother Higgins’ lair. Sometimes these characters are killed by an abortionist – which is exactly what happens in a novel written by one of the 19th century’s most popular sensationalist writers, <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100862810">Ned Buntline</a>. </p>
<p>Buntline fictionalized the true story of Mary Rogers, <a href="https://strandmag.com/product/the-beautiful-cigar-girl-mary-rogers-edgar-allan-poe-and-the-invention-of-murder-2/">a noted beauty and “respectable” girl</a> from Connecticut found dead near the Hudson River in 1841. She was rumored to be the victim of a botched abortion by an unnamed abortionist whom Buntline calls a “she-devil.”</p>
<h2>American terror</h2>
<p>Literature has a very long history of turning <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/659247/women-and-other-monsters-by-jess-zimmerman/">powerful women into monsters</a>. Witches, sirens, shrews and masqueraders all depict female power as supernaturally given or surreptitiously used. </p>
<p>By the time abortion became <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Abortion_in_America.html?id=0moyq1cxDV0C">illegal in every state in the late 19th century</a>, the <a href="https://www.gale.com/binaries/content/assets/gale-us-en/primary-sources/newsvault/gps_newsvault_19thcentury_usnewspapers_immigration_essay.pdf">United States was embroiled in fears</a> that women, including nonwhite women, would gain power and control through access to voting and jobs.</p>
<p>Female physicians embodied all of these terrors.</p>
<p>And so debates over abortion law in America have never been contained to disputes over medical procedures or questions of federal versus states’ rights. Instead, for over two centuries, narratives about abortion have been stitched to American anxieties concerning <a href="https://reproductiverights.org/supreme-court-case-mississippi-abortion-ban-gender-equality/">gender</a>, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/abortion-and-class">class</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2077654">race</a> and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/17/religious-freedom-the-next-battleground-for-us-abortion-rights">religion</a>.</p>
<p>Whether it is the drawing of Madame Restell with a devil eating a baby or the baseless accusations that Planned Parenthood <a href="https://www.liveaction.org/what-we-do/investigations/child-sex-trafficking-cover-up/">abetted the sex trafficking of young girls</a>, media and activists have long linked abortion to horrific imagery. </p>
<p>Sensationalism, it seems, is ingrained in any conversation about abortion because the issue can reflect the country’s deepest fears.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/185931/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Margaret Jay Jessee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Sensationalism is ingrained in any conversation about abortion because the issue has long stood in for the country’s deepest fears.Margaret Jay Jessee, Associate Professor of English, University of Alabama at BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1715572021-11-23T13:31:11Z2021-11-23T13:31:11ZThe lessons ‘Moby-Dick’ has for a warming world of rising waters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432989/original/file-20211121-17-6nslk2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C27%2C1002%2C697&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Moby-Dick' inspired the Warner Brothers film starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab – and perhaps can inspire readers today amid the climate crisis. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-cast-and-crew-of-the-warner-brothers-film-moby-dick-on-news-photo/2669615?adppopup=true">Fox Photos/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/296307/the-humboldt-current-by-aaron-sachs/">an environmental historian</a> and <a href="https://history.cornell.edu/aaron-sachs">scholar of the 19th century</a>, I spend a lot of time thinking about how the past can help us confront our current crises – especially climate change.</p>
<p>And there’s a lot of help to be found in the 1800s, from <a href="https://theconversation.com/thoreaus-great-insight-for-the-anthropocene-wildness-is-an-attitude-not-a-place-113146">the appreciation of wildness</a> in Henry David Thoreau’s famous “Walden,” to the rise of ecology, the science of interdependence. “We may all be netted together,” Charles Darwin scribbled <a href="http://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/published/1960_Notebooks_F1574a.html">in his notebook</a>.</p>
<p>But my nomination for the most helpful climate manual ever written might be a surprise: “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm#link2HCH0078">Moby-Dick</a>.”</p>
<p>Herman Melville’s epic novel about life aboard a wayward whaling ship, published 170 years ago this month, does not have a reputation for being particularly pragmatic, unless you’re looking for tips on swabbing the decks or hunting creatures of the deep. And no, I’m not suggesting
that we go back to <a href="https://www.britannica.com/story/how-did-the-sperm-whale-get-its-name">burning sperm oil</a>. </p>
<p>What makes “Moby-Dick” especially relevant right now is that it offers <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-solidarity-during-coronavirus-and-always-its-more-than-were-all-in-this-together-135002">a spur to solidarity</a> and perseverance. Those are qualities societies may need to stock up on as we face the overwhelming threat of climate change. The novel has no straightforward moral, but it does remind readers that we can at least buoy each other up, even as the water swirls around us. </p>
<h2>Existentialists at sea</h2>
<p>Climate change touches on time scales and planetary systems that humans <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2017/09/18/why-the-wiring-of-our-brains-makes-it-hard-to-stop-climate-change/">aren’t wired to fathom</a>. But at the same time, it can be seen as just another challenge we’ve brought upon ourselves through societal failings. </p>
<p>Perhaps it’s more helpful, then, to think about climate change not as a brand-new “existential threat,” but as the kind of age-old crisis that is tailor-made for existentialism – <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/existential-america">a philosophy</a>, as the scholar Walter Kaufmann put it, that is all about “dread, despair, death, and dauntlessness.” The basic idea is to recognize how treacherous and unknowable your path is, and then to continue on anyway.</p>
<p>“Moby-Dick” is clearly an existentialist text, though it was published almost a century before the term was coined. One of the founders of modern existentialism, Nobel Prize winner <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-albert-camus-the-plague-134244">Albert Camus</a>, explicitly <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/23457/lyrical-and-critical-essays-by-albert-camus-translated-by-ellen-conroy-kennedy/">acknowledged Melville</a> as an intellectual forebear. And two of the main characters in “Moby-Dick” are near-perfect existentialists: the narrator, Ishmael, and his friend, Queequeg, a harpooner from the fictional isle of Kokovoko.</p>
<p>From the beginning of his tale, Ishmael makes clear his obsession with the horror of the human condition. He’s bitterly depressed, angry, even suicidal: “it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” he says on page one, and he finds himself “pausing before coffin warehouses.” He hates the way modern New Yorkers seem to spend their days “tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” All he can think to do is go to sea. </p>
<p>Of course, it’s not long before he has a near-death experience on the open water. He and a few crewmates get chucked out of their small boat in the midst of a squall after failing to nab the whale they were after. Queequeg signals with their one faint lantern, “hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.” </p>
<p>Immediately after they’re saved, Ishmael interviews the most experienced of the crew and, confirming that this sort of thing happens all the time, goes below decks to “make a rough draft of my will,” with Queequeg as his witness. The “whole universe” seems like “a vast practical joke” at his expense, but he finds himself able to smile at the absurdity: “Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white illustration depicts a whale attacking men in a small boat." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433171/original/file-20211122-27-14p0f8y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433171/original/file-20211122-27-14p0f8y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433171/original/file-20211122-27-14p0f8y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433171/original/file-20211122-27-14p0f8y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433171/original/file-20211122-27-14p0f8y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433171/original/file-20211122-27-14p0f8y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433171/original/file-20211122-27-14p0f8y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Whaling was rife with danger for whales and whalers alike.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://archive.org/details/incidentsofwhali00olmsrich">From 'Incidents of a Whaling Voyage,' by Francis Allyn Olmsted.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>No man an island</h2>
<p>Again and again, “Moby-Dick” forces readers to confront despair. But that doesn’t make it a grim read, or a paralyzing one – in part because Melville himself is such an engaging companion, and much of the book imparts a powerful sense of fellowship.</p>
<p>Literary critic <a href="https://www.amherst.edu/people/facstaff/gsanborn">Geoffrey Sanborn</a> <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/value-of-herman-melville/7C7DF7A67F6D55D5917C6F95E768F382#:%7E:text=Book%20description,means%20of%20enriching%20our%20experiences">writes that</a> Melville meant for “Moby-Dick” “to make your mind a more interesting and enjoyable place.”</p>
<p>“It’s about the effort,” he writes, “… to feel, in the deepest recesses of your consciousness, at least temporarily unalone.”</p>
<p>When Ishmael stops by the Whaleman’s Chapel before his fateful journey, “each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.” But once aboard his ship, he finds all the crew members suddenly “welded into oneness,” thanks to their shared sense of purpose and their awareness of the dangers ahead. And he sees the same kind of unity in “extensive herds” of sperm whales, as though “numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection.” </p>
<p>That’s the sense of interconnectedness human nations need today. When I picked up “Moby-Dick” earlier this month, I almost immediately thought of the climate change negotiations in Glasgow – and Queequeg’s small island home. I could easily imagine the harpooner as an eloquent representative of a nation in danger of being swallowed up by rising waters. </p>
<p>“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians,” Ishmael imagines Queequeg saying at one point in the novel. “We cannibals must help these Christians.” That’s a startling line, emphasizing Melville’s suggestion that Queequeg, whom many characters dismiss as a “heathen,” is actually the most ethical character in the book.</p>
<p>But in Glasgow, it seems, wealthy nations’ recognition of the need for mutual aid <a href="https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/cop26-climate-outcomes-successes-failures-glasgow">fell short</a>. Though their <a href="https://theconversation.com/inequality-and-climate-change-the-rich-must-step-up-119074">disproportionate greenhouse gas emissions</a> are largely to blame for poorer countries’ disproportionate suffering, their funding for developing nations to weather the storm is far below what’s needed – and eventually, that may come back to bite everyone. </p>
<p>Queequeg’s interdependent relationship with Ishmael is at the very center of “Moby-Dick.” Their fates are interwoven; Queequeg is Ishmael’s “inseparable twin brother.” In one scene, the harpooner dangles over the water, attached by a cord to Ishmael, so that “should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more,” our narrator would go tumbling into the sea as well. </p>
<p>At the end of the novel, all the whalemen except Ishmael sink to rise no more. The narrator is saved by a coffin Queequeg had carved for himself, then given to the First Mate to replace a lost lifebuoy. Much about “Moby-Dick” will always remain murky, but this symbolism is clear: To ponder death and prepare for the worst are age-old survival strategies.</p>
<p>Queequeg’s culture led him to confront the hardest realities of life. As Ishmael notes admiringly, the harpooner had “no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits,” no tendency toward denial. He had thoroughly enjoyed carving his coffin, and when he lay down in it to check the fit, while suffering from a life-threatening fever, he had shown a perfectly “composed countenance.” “It will do,” he murmured; “it is easy.” </p>
<p>Queequeg’s existentialist determination in the face of dread, his willingness to sacrifice, his caring forethought, made all the difference. And maybe that could be an inspiration. The key to addressing climate change won’t be some abstract injunction to save the planet; it will be about acknowledging interdependence and commonality and accepting responsibility. It will be about returning Queequeg’s favor.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171557/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aaron Sachs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Melville’s epic novel about life aboard a wayward whaling ship holds lessons for the climate crisis today.Aaron Sachs, Professor of History and American Studies, Cornell UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1274382019-11-21T19:33:44Z2019-11-21T19:33:44ZFriday essay: George Eliot 200 years on - a scandalous life, a brilliant mind and a huge literary legacy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302778/original/file-20191120-547-gfkb17.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C68%2C1226%2C1305&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A portrait of George Eliot at 30 by Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade. Her masterpiece Middlemarch is often claimed to be the greatest novel in the English language.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mary Ann Evans took the pseudonym “George Eliot” because she wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. </p>
<p>Other female authors had penned work under their own names, but Evans feared that if her identity was discovered her books would be dismissed as “light” and “sentimental”.</p>
<p>Astonishingly, in an age of patriarchy, this was not the case. </p>
<p>Eliot’s reputation has grown steadily in the 200 years since her birth. And her Middlemarch (1871-2) is often claimed to be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/28/middlemarch-george-eliot-martin-amis-as-byatt">the greatest novel in the English language</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302780/original/file-20191120-515-1kxbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302780/original/file-20191120-515-1kxbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302780/original/file-20191120-515-1kxbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302780/original/file-20191120-515-1kxbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302780/original/file-20191120-515-1kxbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302780/original/file-20191120-515-1kxbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302780/original/file-20191120-515-1kxbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302780/original/file-20191120-515-1kxbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>Eliot’s “incognito” was shattered shortly after her first bestselling novel, Adam Bede, was published in 1859. Critics were left marvelling not only that the author they collectively imagined to be a kindly country clergyman was a woman, but also that she was an atheist living openly with another woman’s husband.</p>
<p>In an age in which few women were educated or owned property, and few middle class women engaged in paid employment, Eliot overcame every obstacle. </p>
<p>She lived a scandalous life by Victorian standards. But she was <a href="https://www.rct.uk/collection/1008496/adam-bede">one of Queen Victoria’s favourite writers</a>. </p>
<p>And in the thousands of words that were to spill across the pages of the literary quarterlies about Eliot’s books, there was far less interest in salacious gossip than in the question of whether she had drawn a picture of the world as it “really” was. </p>
<p>No matter how much these 19th century - mostly male - critics attacked Eliot’s novels for their political and cultural heresies, it was obvious – indeed, astonishing – that they took them seriously as fundamentally important works.</p>
<h2>A ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’</h2>
<p>Born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, on November 22, 1819, the third daughter of Robert and Christiana Evans, Eliot was afforded the sort of education not usually granted to women in this period. She was not considered physically attractive, and her father believed this would severely limit her prospects of marriage. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302825/original/file-20191121-547-mzypnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302825/original/file-20191121-547-mzypnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302825/original/file-20191121-547-mzypnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302825/original/file-20191121-547-mzypnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302825/original/file-20191121-547-mzypnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302825/original/file-20191121-547-mzypnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302825/original/file-20191121-547-mzypnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302825/original/file-20191121-547-mzypnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eliot’s father believed her looks would limit her marriage prospects.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1850, Eliot – then calling herself Marian Evans – moved from Coventry to London, determined to become a writer. </p>
<p>Just a few years before, she had published her English translation of David Strauss’s <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/life-of-jesus-critically-examined/7CFC7D36D837AB1D997D97DFDB1020CE">The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined</a>. Notoriously, Strauss argued that the “miracles” of the New Testament were myths and fabrications. The Earl of Shaftesbury promptly castigated Eliot’s translation as “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell”. </p>
<p>Eliot took up residence in the house of the radical publisher John Chapman, who appointed her assistant editor of the Westminster Review. She was deeply influenced by John Stuart Mill, particularly his groundbreaking essay on gender equality, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subjection_of_Women">Subjection of Women</a>. </p>
<p>She sympathised with the 1848 revolutions on the continent. She held great hopes for women’s education. She supported female suffrage. </p>
<p>At this time, Eliot formed a series of attachments to married men, including Chapman and Herbert Spencer, before meeting the critic George Henry Lewes, with whom she shared a committed, life-long relationship. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302782/original/file-20191120-479-1rmzeof.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302782/original/file-20191120-479-1rmzeof.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302782/original/file-20191120-479-1rmzeof.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302782/original/file-20191120-479-1rmzeof.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302782/original/file-20191120-479-1rmzeof.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302782/original/file-20191120-479-1rmzeof.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302782/original/file-20191120-479-1rmzeof.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302782/original/file-20191120-479-1rmzeof.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Henry Lewes (1817-1878)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lewes was married to Agnes Jervis, with whom he had three children. Unlike other unconventional literary liaisons of the period, Lewes and Eliot did not keep their relationship a secret. </p>
<p>Like so many other men, Lewes was drawn to the luminosity of Eliot’s intelligence. She had an awesome curiosity, an endless appetite for ideas. </p>
<p>Henry James famously characterised her as “magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous”.</p>
<p>And yet in his snarky, entitled way he also marvelled at his reaction to the force of Eliot’s personality. “Behold me, literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking!” </p>
<h2>Her practical humanism</h2>
<p>In 1854, Eliot translated Ludwig Feurerbach’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/148488.The_Essence_of_Christianity">The Essence of Christianity</a>, in which he declared God to be a figment of the human imagination. Instead, he wanted to think about what he called “species being” – that is, to consider what it means to think from the standpoint of being human, of being part of the wider social fabric. </p>
<p>Feurerbach’s ideas were fundamental in shaping the practical humanism that forms the beating heart of Eliot’s novels. </p>
<p>Eliot’s social consciousness, her vivid critiques of capitalism, are keenly displayed in her 1861 novel about a linen weaver, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_Marner">Silas Marner</a>, and her 1876 masterpiece Daniel Deronda - a sprawling tale about a fatally self-absorbed heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, and the easy, ingrained prejudice of British society against the Jews.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TGDWRBnBQ9E?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for the television adaptation of Daniel Deronda.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But it is their capaciousness - perhaps - that is the real theme of Eliot’s books. Her novels are held together by elaborate patterns of imagery, threads of gossip, networks of feeling and connection, linking character to character.</p>
<p>Background scenes of the social world are interwoven with the deeper dimensions of private life and even the fabric of human consciousness, so the novelistic structure reflects the fragile, web-like ties that hold society together. </p>
<p>Her characters’ motivations may be ego-satisfying, self-deceiving, or concealed, even from themselves, or all of these at once. And the tangled paradoxes they encounter as they journey through their novelistic worlds force readers to reassess themselves and their perspectives.</p>
<p>Nobody, in short, does honesty or frailty quite like Eliot. If you read her work, and really pay attention, you will likely find out things about yourself you didn’t know, and maybe would rather not.</p>
<p>As Virginia Woolf famously declared of Middlemarch, it is “one of the few English novels written for grown up people”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302777/original/file-20191120-479-1ufb452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302777/original/file-20191120-479-1ufb452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302777/original/file-20191120-479-1ufb452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302777/original/file-20191120-479-1ufb452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302777/original/file-20191120-479-1ufb452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302777/original/file-20191120-479-1ufb452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302777/original/file-20191120-479-1ufb452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302777/original/file-20191120-479-1ufb452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A photographic portrait (albumen print) of George Eliot circa 1865.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Middlemarch - the greatest novel in the English language</h2>
<p>Middlemarch was published serially in eight parts at two monthly intervals from December 1871. It went on sale in December 1872 as four volumes for two guineas, selling 8,500 copies. But it was only when the cheap edition went on sale in 1874 that the novel found its real audience, selling another 31,000 copies by 1878.</p>
<p>The story - like those found in all Eliot’s novels - is multifaceted. It revolves mostly around Dorothea Brooke, an heiress who makes a terrible marriage to Edward Casaubon, a dusty clergyman, and the character of Tertius Lydgate, a London-trained doctor who wants to bring modern medicine to the Midlands, but chooses an unsuitable wife. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9MU4bB9uE4c?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the deeper theme of Middlemarch is the moral drama around the interaction between character and social environment that is fundamental to contemporary appreciations of 19th century realism – but was often merely puzzling to Victorian critics. </p>
<p>They loved the scale of the novel’s social panorama, “like a portrait gallery” that has been “photographed from the life”; they even came to see that it had, as the Times put it, a “philosophical power”. But they did not immediately grasp that it was Eliot’s most important book. They bemoaned it was not as “delightful” as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Bede">Adam Bede</a>, her earlier bucolic tale about - among other things - seduction, infanticide, class and education. </p>
<p>In Middlemarch, Dorothea has money; unlike in Austen, there is no threat of penury hanging over her head. Indeed, there is no need for her to marry at all. And yet she does. </p>
<p>She has freedom, up to a point. But her largeness of soul is circumscribed by narrowness of opportunity. Nor is provincial society entirely to blame. Dorothea yearns to do something; to achieve something; but she knows not what. This is her - and our own - tragedy.</p>
<p>When Dorothea, in all her married misery, is confronted by an extraordinary vision of a suffering human society, we encounter one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful passages in Eliot’s ouevre. She writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the anguish that lurks in dark corners of Eliot’s novels – it is the measure of her greatness, and of our struggle to read her. </p>
<p>Dorothea’s quest for a substantial and meaningful life has resonated with the sensibilities of successive generations of feminists. How is she to achieve something? Where should she put her energies? How can she affect the lives of others? </p>
<p>We are all of us “Dorotheas”; all tragically yearning for something. As Virginia Woolf put it, Dorothea and the rest of Eliot’s heroines feel “a demand for something — they scarcely know what — for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127438/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Camilla Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1206472019-08-01T12:35:53Z2019-08-01T12:35:53ZAs Herman Melville turns 200, his works have never been more relevant<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286496/original/file-20190731-186805-1j854yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An 1870 portrait of Herman Melville painted by Joseph Oriel Eaton.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Herman_Melville_by_Joseph_O_Eaton.jpg">Houghton Library</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Outside of American literature courses, it doesn’t seem likely that many Americans are reading Herman Melville these days. </p>
<p>But with Melville turning 200 on August 1, I propose that you pick up one of his novels, because his work has never been more timely. This is the perfect cultural moment for another Melville revival.</p>
<p>The original Melville revival started exactly a century ago, after Melville’s works had languished in obscurity for some 60 years. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=i0AsRZRwYjEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">scholars found his vision of social turmoil to be uncannily relevant</a>.</p>
<p>Once again, Melville could help Americans grapple with dark times – and not just because he composed classic works of universal truths about good and evil. Melville still matters because he was directly engaged with the very aspects of modern American life that continue to haunt the country in the 21st century. </p>
<h2>Finding fellowship</h2>
<p>Melville’s books deal with a host of issues that are relevant today, from race relations and immigration to the mechanization of everyday life.</p>
<p>Yet these aren’t the works of a hopeless tragedian. Rather, Melville was a determined realist. </p>
<p>The typical Melville character is depressed and alienated, overwhelmed by societal changes. But he also endures.</p>
<p>Ultimately, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=XV8XAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Moby-Dick</a>” is about the quest of the narrator, Ishmael, the story’s lone survivor, to make meaning out of trauma and keep the human story going. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In ‘Moby Dick,’ Ishmael seeks communion and adventure outside the stultifying confines of a capitalist economy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://no.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ishmael goes to sea in the first place because he’s feeling a particularly modern form of angst. He walks the streets of Manhattan wanting to knock people’s hats off, furious that the only available jobs in the new capitalist economy leave workers “tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” The whaling ship is no paradise, but at least it affords him a chance to work in the open air with people of all races, from all over the world. </p>
<p>When the crewmen sit in a circle squeezing lumps of whale sperm into oil, they find themselves clasping each other’s hands, developing “an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling.” </p>
<p>Then there’s Melville’s novel “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=7sh2-5vM7mYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Redburn</a>,” one of the author’s lesser-known works. It’s mostly a story of disillusionment: A young naïf joins the merchant marine to see the world, and in Britain all he finds are “masses of squalid men, women, and children” spilling out from the factories. The narrator is abused by the ship’s cynical crew and swindled out of his wages. </p>
<p>But his hard experience nonetheless broadens his sympathies. As he sails home to New York with some Irish families fleeing the famine, he remarks: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores; let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God’s right to come…. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world.” </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Melville’s fall and rise</h2>
<p>In November 1851, when “Moby-Dick” was published, Melville was among the best-known authors in the English-speaking world. But his reputation started to decline just months later, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=MLpSGShP-hcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">when a review of his next book</a>, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Pierre_Or_The_Ambiguities.html?id=JXK7HN62EcQC">Pierre</a>,” bore the headline, “Herman Melville Crazy.” </p>
<p>That opinion was not atypical. By 1857, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Melville.html?id=tGsCgkhkq2QC">Melville had mostly stopped writing</a>; his publisher was bankrupt; and those Americans who still knew his name may well have thought he’d been institutionalized. </p>
<p>Yet in 1919 – the year of Melville’s centennial – scholars started returning to his work. They found a writer of grim, tangled epics delving into the social tensions that would ultimately lead to the Civil War. </p>
<p>It just so happened that <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=a7UMG78Z9i0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">1919 was a year</a> of labor strife, mail bombs, weekly lynchings, and race riots in 26 cities. There were crackdowns on foreigners, privacy, and civil liberties, not to mention the lingering trauma of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic.</p>
<p>Over the ensuing three decades – an era that included the Great Depression and World War II – Melville was canonized, and all of his works were reprinted in popular editions. </p>
<p>“I owe a debt to Melville,” <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Van_Wyck_Brooks_Lewis_Mumford_letter.html?id=TFpaAAAAMAAJ">wrote critic and historian Lewis Mumford</a>, “because my wrestling with him, my efforts to plumb his own tragic sense of life, were the best preparations I could have had for facing our present world.”</p>
<h2>Why Melville still matters</h2>
<p>America is now dealing with its own dark times, full of foreboding over climate change, extreme class divisions, racial and religious bigotry, refugee crises, mass shootings, and near-constant warfare.</p>
<p>Go back and read Melville, and you’ll find apt depictions of white privilege and obliviousness in “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15859/15859-h/15859-h.htm">Benito Cereno</a>.” Melville paints consumer capitalism as an elaborate con game in “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21816">The Confidence-Man</a>,” while excoriating America’s imperial ambitions in “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1900/1900-h/1900-h.htm">Typee</a>” and “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4045">Omoo</a>.” He was even inspired to break his silence at the end of the Civil War and <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Civil_War_World_of_Herman_Melville.html?id=-R1bAAAAMAAJ">write an earnest plea</a> for “Re-establishment” and “Reconstruction.” </p>
<p>“Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity,” he wrote, “gladly we join the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.” But now it was time to find ways for everyone to get along. </p>
<p>His 1866 book “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=UOEIAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Battle-Pieces</a>,” though full of bitter fragments, has a final section dominated by idealistic nouns: common sense and Christian charity, patriotic passion, moderation, generosity of sentiment, benevolence, kindliness, freedom, sympathies, solicitude, amity, reciprocal respect, decency, peace, sincerity, faith. Melville was trying to remind Americans that in democracies there is a perpetual need to carve out common ground.</p>
<p>It’s not that society doesn’t or shouldn’t change; it’s that change and continuity play off each other in surprising and sometimes bracing ways. </p>
<p>In dark times, the rediscovery that human beings have almost always had to confront terrible challenges can produce powerful emotions. </p>
<p>You might feel like knocking someone’s hat off. But you might also feel like giving the Ishmaels of the world a gentle squeeze of the hand. </p>
<p>And in doing so, you might help to keep the human story going.</p>
<p>[ <em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=youresmart">You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/120647/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aaron Sachs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While clear-eyed about the country’s injustices, Melville never succumbed to cynicism. On the author’s bicentennial, American readers could use a dose of his ability to fuse realism with idealism.Aaron Sachs, Professor of History and American Studies, Cornell UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/954482018-04-30T04:53:56Z2018-04-30T04:53:56ZJohn Stuart Mill’s marginalia tells us much about the great thinker’s mind<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216622/original/file-20180427-175077-su6fv9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Stuart Mill</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3044429.pdf">The Man of the Year Million</a>, originally printed in the Pall Mall Gazette on November 6 1893, then-journalist H. G. Wells imagines the descendants of humanity as “enormous brains” with bodies “shrivelled to nothing, a dangling, degraded pendant to their minds”. Wells’ facetious vision of an explicitly cerebral future may be scientifically suspect, but it is accurate with respect to the reputation of pre-eminent 19th-century logician, liberal, and cultural and social critic John Stuart Mill.</p>
<p>Remembered principally by philosophers for his <a href="https://archive.org/details/anexaminationsi06millgoog">System of Logic and Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy</a>, by political scientists for his <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP.html">Principles of Political Economy</a> and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5669/5669-h/5669-h.htm">Considerations on Representative Government</a>, and by literary scholars for his <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.com/millauto/">Autobiography</a> and for <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/one.html">On Liberty</a>, Mill’s carefully cultivated image of himself as a mind – exhaustively educated, disinterestedly logical, and meticulously organised – persists nearly 150 years after his death.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=674&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=674&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=674&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spines of books in JS Mill’s personal library, all transcribed in Mill Marginalia Online.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And yet, Mill’s humanity ought to count for more than a degraded pendant to his place in intellectual history. An anxiously precocious child, he grew into a complicated, endearing – and sometimes amusing – adult. These less well-remembered features of his prodigious intelligence have recently begun to reemerge from the title pages, endpapers, flyleaves and textual margins of his personal library.</p>
<p>Donated to <a href="https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/">Oxford University’s Somerville College</a> in 1905, Mill’s book collection from his house in Blackheath has history – including Mill’s personal history – literally inscribed on thousands of its pages. Like many serious readers, Mill read with pen or pencil in hand, marking passages he found interesting, protesting against premises and conclusions he judged facile, and sometimes summarising his own thoughts in annotations on unprinted pages.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=187&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=187&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=187&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=236&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=236&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=236&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Somerville College Oxford.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mill Marginalia Online home page.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Collectively known as marginalia, these unfiltered records of Mill’s original reactions to his books are the subject of an international collaboration between Somerville College and the University of Alabama. The digital component of this effort, <a href="http://millmarginalia.org/">Mill Marginalia Online</a>, aspires to digitise all handwritten marginalia in Mill’s library and, in doing so, to reconstruct the sometimes messy process of reading, the initial gut-level reactions, of one of the leading minds of Victorian England.</p>
<h2>Great thinkers</h2>
<p>“This is all my eye” – Mill’s expression of scepticism never made it into his overwhelmingly <a href="http://thegreatthinkers.org/tocqueville/commentary/js-mill-m-de-tocqueville-on-democracy-in-america/">positive review</a> of Alexis de Tocqueville’s <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm">Democracy in America, Part II</a>. It is, nevertheless, clearly legible on page 170 of volume three as Mill’s first reaction to the French thinker’s somewhat imprecise distinction between what he called democratic and aristocratic centuries.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique, vol. 3, p. 170, inner margin, Mill’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mill had, in 1835, introduced England to the first two volumes of Tocqueville’s chef-d’oeuvre, and the men traded friendly and intellectually engaged letters on the subject of democracy over the next five years, as the Frenchman prepared the latter half of his treatise. In recognition of their growing mutual regard, Tocqueville even sent Mill an inscribed copy – it was on the basis of this French edition that Mill penned his second, 1840 review.</p>
<p>And it is in the margins of these same two volumes that Mill recorded comments that might well have tested their friendship. Thus, in response to the aristocratic Frenchman’s thesis, on page 323 of volume three, concerning what we might today call “vocational determinism”, in this case the degrading effects of a life spent “making heads for pins,” Mill wrote “all this mu[st] be taken wi[th] great reserve[ation]. It is not tr[ue] as here state[d]” (I have filled in any missing letters).</p>
<p>What was true, Mill thought, was Tocqueville’s observation, on page 128 of volume four, that Americans were thin-skinned and quick to take offence in response to criticism. Originally marked with a marginal double score (two vertical lines made in the outer margin of p. 128), this passage received fuller attention in Mill’s annotation on the volume’s back flyleaf:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This feeling has nothing to do with democracy – Wait, until the Americans by their great deeds, in arms, arts, science and literature, have taken a place among the great nations of the earth, and they will no longer be quarrelsome, and doubtful of their position – They will then be as proud haughty and self satisfied as the English – But not before – …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s hard to tell whether Tocqueville’s “insatiably vain” Americans or Mill’s “haughty and self-satisfied” British middle classes come off worse in this annotation. Either way, such caustic humour may surprise those accustomed to the measured reasonableness of Mill’s mature publications.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique, vol. 4, back flyleaf, JSM’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With roughly 10,000 examples of marginalia spread across well over 100 titles, Mill Marginalia Online offers numerous, previously unknown points of entry into Mill’s refreshingly versatile and perennial active mind. In addition to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, significant works by <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/bacon_francis.shtml">Francis Bacon</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Carlyle">Thomas Carlyle</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Auguste-Comte">Auguste Comte</a>, <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/ralph-waldo-emerson">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Maine">Henry Maine</a>, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/percy-bysshe-shelley">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/August-Wilhelm-von-Schlegel">August Schlegel</a> and many others bear revealing marks and annotations in Mill’s distinctive hand.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arnoldus Vinnius’s Institutionum Imperialium, pp. 674-75, interleaved material, Mill’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Mental acrobatics</h2>
<p>Also hinted at in the Mill collection are aspects of his personality and personal life that may never be fully known. For instance, tucked between pages 674 and 675 of <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3225997&partId=1&people=17918&peoA=17918-2-70&sortBy=producerSort&page=1">Arnoldus Vinnius</a>’s Institutionum Imperialium – a weighty and much-reprinted history of Justinian law – are two paper dolls, with a third waiting between pages 866 and 867.</p>
<p>Two of these bodies in motion have obviously been commercially produced and then either punched or cut from the pages on which they were printed. The bottom of the two acrobats is even more evidently homemade, although no less painstakingly shaped and coloured. I would guess that their presence in the Vinnius has less to do with the book’s subject matter than with its size and the solidity of its binding – it was an excellent choice for keeping one’s dolls flat and safe.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1315&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1315&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1315&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arnoldus Vinnius’s Institutionum Imperialium, pp. 866-67, interleaved material, Mill’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the question is, whose dolls were they? Printed in 1665, the book is old enough to have been in the Mill family library when the young John Stuart was tutoring his sisters. Left in the library at Blackheath after his death, it might also have served as a toy depository for Harriet Taylor Mill’s daughter Helen (Mill’s stepdaughter) about whose childhood relationship with Mill we know very little. And need these three objects have had only one owner, or could they have been passed down and around, as playthings sometimes are?</p>
<p>The questions posed by these inclusions assume greater intellectual, as opposed to biographical significance, when we examine the handmade figure more closely. Inverted both back to front and top to bottom, we can see that this doll was crafted from a manuscript – one that bears Mill’s handwriting. The partial word written across the torso could be “government” and that underneath it may be “leaves”. It’s too little for an identification, but more than enough to wonder whether this manuscript was volunteered for doll duty or had been fortuitously scavenged.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Close-up on Arnoldus Vinnius’s Institutionum Imperialium, pp. 674-75, inverted interleaved material, JSM’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Future conclusions</h2>
<p>What is certain is that these dolls – and every other example of human/book interaction in the roughly 1,700-item personal library of Mill’s – will be catalogued, digitised and rendered fully searchable within Mill Marginalia Online. All of us who work on the project are acutely aware that we cannot know what the research questions of the future might be. </p>
<p>So, rather than limiting our data by type or frequency or what we – today – perceive as its significance, we are striving to record everything that we find, to remove ourselves as much as possible from the results – and to welcome the future by refusing to foreclose upon it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95448/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Albert Pionke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The great thinker left thousands of comments in the margins of his personal library. Now these are being digitised and catalogued.Albert Pionke, Professor of English Literature, University of AlabamaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/841732017-12-14T23:28:02Z2017-12-14T23:28:02ZLifting the whole world: Leigh Hunt’s message for Christmas Day<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198033/original/file-20171206-31555-yljjlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Perhaps the designers of the first Christmas card from 1840 were influenced by Leigh Hunt's question: Is it right to spend, laugh and revel when there are so many people who live in isolation and poverty? John Calcott Horsely, curator and designer of the card, asked the painter, Sir Henry Cole, to show people being fed and clothed to remind his friends of the needs of the poor during this season. </span> </figcaption></figure><p>As Christmas and the winter holiday season approaches, Leigh Hunt comes often to mind. He is a 19th-century English writer who grappled with a question that is as relevant today as it was two centuries ago when Hunt first tried to answer it: how can we celebrate and enjoy ourselves at Christmas when there is so much misery in the world? </p>
<p>Widely known in his lifetime as both a poet and a prose writer, Hunt fought courageously against political injustice and corruption, especially as the editor of the radical Sunday newspaper, <em>The Examiner</em>, and as a contributor to some of the leading liberal magazines of the era. </p>
<p>Virginia Woolf recognized his great contribution to social and cultural reform when she described him as one of those “free and vigorous spirits who advance the world.” </p>
<p>Yet Hunt is perhaps best remembered today as the victim of two malicious literary attacks. Beginning in 1817, the conservative critics of <em>Blackwood’s Magazine</em> tarred him as the ringleader of the so-called “Cockney School of Poetry,” an informal group of London writers that <em>Blackwood’s</em> maligned as vulgar, suburban mediocrities with ideas well above their social station. </p>
<p>Hunt suffered again when his friend Charles Dickens caricatured him in his great novel <em>Bleak House</em> as the insolvent and unscrupulous Harold Skimpole. It was an unfair portrait that has nevertheless endured because it successfully, if callously, exploited two central aspects of Hunt’s character: his dedication to beauty and his irresponsible attitude toward money. </p>
<p>At the heart of Hunt’s writings is a double-bind: How to reconcile a dedication to the world of action and unfairness with an equally strong devotion to art and poetry. When Hunt loses his way, his negotiation of this crux produces essays that are sentimental and naive. </p>
<p>But in much of his finest writing Hunt combines the political and the esthetic, for in his eyes a love of beauty is deeply consonant with a love of freedom. </p>
<p>“Politics,” he believes, “are a part of humane literature; and they who can be taught to like them in common with wit and philosophy, insensibly do an infinite deal of good by mingling them with the common talk of life.”</p>
<p>Hunt is very good on holidays. Over the course of his career he wrote compellingly on New Year’s Eve, Twelfth Night, Valentine’s Day, Easter and May-Day, as well as several essays on Christmas. </p>
<h2>Ideals on Christmas Day</h2>
<p>My favourite is simply entitled “Christmas Day,” and Hunt first published it in his newspaper, <em>The Tatler</em>, on Dec. 25, 1830. In the essay, he devotes much of his time to describing the food and festivities that accompanied the celebration of Christmas in England almost 200 years ago. </p>
<p>But before he gets to these topics, he has — characteristically — “a word or two to say of a graver tendency.” He considers the “enjoyment, or relief” of the festive season, and then considers the despair evident in so many people and so many places. “It appears to us that we ought not to take” a break, he writes. Is it right to spend, laugh, relax and revel when there are so many people who live in isolation, fear and poverty?</p>
<p>The shortest answer, Hunt affirms, is that you do not defeat sadness by adding to its sum total. “It would be a great pity,” he observes, “were there no sunshine in one place, because there is rain in another.” </p>
<p>To do good, to stay strong and constructive, to ensure that love defeats anger in as many instances as possible, “it is part of your duty to enjoy what pleasures you can, not inconsistent with others’ welfare or your own.” </p>
<p>Hunt in his life knew betrayal, penury, derision and injustice. But he also knew many people who had less and suffered more. Even in circumstances that many of us would find utterly overwhelming, Hunt celebrated what remained available to him, sometimes mawkishly, but more often in the gritty realization that giving into despair helps no one. </p>
<p>For Hunt, we should make every effort to realize the happiness in our own lives that we would wish to bestow on every life. He knew that the “best hearted joy may sometimes forget others.” Hunt asks us not to forget others, and to embrace the pleasures in our own lives as a means of deepening and renewing our commitment to bettering the lives of others. </p>
<p>His ideals – in “Christmas Day” and far beyond – were compassion, acceptance and equality. “The great point,” he declares, “is to lift the whole world if you can, and trample on nobody.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84173/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Morrison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Leigh Hunt is a nineteenth-century writer who grappled with the question: How can we celebrate and enjoy ourselves at this time of the year when there is so much misery in the world?Robert Morrison, Professor of English Language and Literature, Queen's University, OntarioLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.