January 9, 2018 History The Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain By Gary Scharnhorst Lamano Studios Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was “bound to have a biographer one of these days—may it be a hundred years hence!” Albert Bigelow Paine’s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. It is an indispensable source for the legend of Saint Mark. Paine portrayed his subject as “the zealous champion of justice and liberty” who was “never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the underdog.” As recently as 2002, Robert E. Weir echoed the dubious claim: Sam “was an indefatigable foe of anything that stood in the way of human progress and individual potential,” as if to suggest that the world would be a better place if only everyone emulated him. Sam Clemens’s most honest comments about his life, or so he asserted, appear in his autobiography, most of which appeared posthumously. “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way,” he explained in 1899. “In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.” “I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason,” he declared. “I can speak thence freely.” In a March 1904 letter to his friend W. D. Howells, Sam described his autobiography as the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly in extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell … the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences. Howells replied skeptically, “Even you won’t tell the black heart’s-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day.” Read More
November 3, 2017 History From Throwing Sticks at Roosters to Dwarf Tossing By James McWilliams On the human desire to hurl (and hurl things at) animals, and other humans. In the fourth volume of Brett’s Miscellany, published in Dublin in 1757, readers could find an entry on a custom called “throwing at cocks.” This was an activity where a rooster was tied to a post while the participants, as if playing darts, threw small weighted and sharpened sticks (called coksteles) at the poor bird until it expired. The article explored the sport’s origin: “When the Danes were masters of England, and used the inhabitants very cruelly,” it began, “the people of a certain great city formed a conspiracy to murder their masters in one night.” The English artfully devised “a stratagem,” but “when they were putting it in execution, the unusual crowing and fluttering of the cocks about the place discovered their design.” The Danes, tipped off by the commotion, “doubled their cruelty” and made the Englishmen suffer as never before. “Upon this,” the entry concluded, “the English made custom of knocking the cocks on the head, on Shrove-Tuesday, the day on which it happened.” Very soon “this barbarous act became at last a natural and common diversion, and has continued every since.” Thus the innate human urge to throw things at things entered the early modern era. William Hogarth depicted cock throwing in The Four Stages of Cruelty, Children Torturing Animals (1751). Throwing at cocks continued well into the late eighteenth century. Although the custom, according to Remarks on the character and customs of the English and French (1726), exemplified a “diversion of the meanest of the populace,” throwing at cocks was soon normalized. It ranked up there with “playing at foot ball,” “bowls,” and “prize fighting.” A Complete History of the English Stage (1800) referred to it as an “annual sport.” In 1747, a volume called The History and Present State of the British Isles lumped throwing at cocks with “wrestling,” “footraces,” and “nine pins” as “the sports of the common people.” A regular activity, in other words. In time, the moralists cracked down on such hoi-polloi barbarity. Anyone who knows anything about throwing at cocks probably does because of Hogarth’s etching, First Stage of Cruelty, which demonstrates—while censuring—the incivility of this particular blood sport. John Brand, in his 1777 Observations on Popular Antiquities, notes that, “to the credit of our northern manners, the barbarous sport of throwing at cocks on Shrove Tuesdays is worn out in this country.” A London minister who published a lengthy sermon on the topic urged “the suppression of the throwing at cocks in the town or city” because it was an activity that all too easily exemplified how “the lower orders of people among us are eminently reproachable.” By 1793, the Country Spectator advised that throwing at cocks should be met with the “pain of your heavy displeasure.” Read More
October 31, 2017 History Ghost Club: Yeats’s and Dickens’s Secret Society of Spirits By Peter Hoskin Still from Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922). When it comes to ghosts, belief and outright disbelief are not the only options—or at least they weren’t in nineteenth-century Britain. The Victorians didn’t stick to simple arguments about the existence of ghosts; they also argued about how, when, and why they might exist. Spiritualists attacked spiritualists over whether the supernatural should be classed as natural. Scientists discussed whether psychological or physiological factors were at play. Inventors, politicians, journalists, and madmen joined in, too. Indeed, it was such a popular, multidisciplinary pursuit that its practitioners needed new places to meet, outside of their existing societies, and various organizations were established to debate the boundaries of the immaterial. One of these exploratory committees was the Ghost Club. It was founded in 1862 and lasted about a decade, although its history stretches back to a group of Cambridge academics in the 1850s, and it stretches forward, through several resurrections, to now. The earliest days of the club are not well recorded, but we do know that it was small, populated by male intellectuals, and it concentrated on investigating supposed supernatural encounters, with the intention of exposing frauds. Charles Dickens is said to have been a founding member; the first in a procession of writers—including William Butler Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon—who joined its ranks. Read More
July 20, 2017 History Masses of Beautiful Alabaster By Marissa Grunes Johann G. A. Forster, Ice Islands with ice blink, 1773, gouache on paper. Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Painted during Cook’s second voyage. At noon on February 21, 1773, as the Antarctic sun glittered on the decks of the HMS Resolution, a cry of “land” ricocheted through the tiny world of wood, water, and ice. Captain James Cook examined the slate-gray smudge on the southern horizon, and his crew eagerly followed his gaze. For two months they had been seeking the terra australis incognita—the unknown southern continent—first proposed by Aristotle in 350 B.C. Satisfied by what he saw, Cook ordered his men to “work up” to the land, watching its contours sharpen to jagged mountains as they tacked toward it. Two hours later, they were confounded. The land had grown hazy again and seemed to drift away from them, as if dissolving. In his narrative of the voyage, Cook would write, “We thought we saw land to the S.W. The appearance was so strong, that we doubted not it was there in reality, and tacked to work up to it accordingly … We were, however, soon undeceived, by finding that it was only clouds,” which disappeared by evening. Cook had begun by seeking Cape Circumcision, a spit of land sighted by the French captain Bouvet de Lozier in 1739. He found instead a realm of bewildering mirage. Along with capricious cloud formations, icebergs also baffled Cook’s men, who were “deceived by the ice hills, the day we first fell in with the field ice.” These “floating rocks” of ice were such masters of disguise that Cook believed they had fooled the French captain as well. In his journal, he confided his “opinion that what M. Bouvet took for Land and named Cape Circumcision was nothing but Mountains of Ice surrounded by Field Ice.” Fields, hills, rocks, islands, mountains—the icy formations resembled every land formation imaginable to Cook, with “ponds” or “narrow creeks” of water running among them. Yet solid land itself was nowhere to be found. Read More
March 13, 2015 History Broken on the Wheel By Ken Armstrong A gruesome legal case turned Voltaire into a crusader for the innocent. The death of John Calas, depicted in an English chapbook. This article was reported and written by Ken Armstrong for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal-justice system. On the night of October 13, 1761, cries rang from the shop of Jean Calas, a cloth merchant who lived and worked in the commercial heart of Toulouse, in the South of France. The eldest of Calas’s six children, Marc-Antoine, a moody, handsome man who was fond of billiards and gambling, had just been found dead. The family said he had been murdered—perhaps stuck with a sword by someone who slipped into the darkened boutique from the cobblestone street. A crowd gathered outside the front door as investigators were summoned. A doctor and two surgeons, called to examine the body, found only a “livid mark on the neck.” They signed a report refuting the family’s account of some intruder with a blade, concluding that Marc-Antoine, twenty-nine, had been “hanged whilst alive, by himself or by others.” Those last five words, “by himself or by others,” began an enduring mystery and a true cause célèbre, one that might have been the “crime of the century” for the 1700s had the cliché been in use back then. Voltaire, the philosopher, dramatist and propagandist—“the greatest amuser of his age” and the greatest polemicist—became obsessed with the case, and for years worked to eradicate what he considered to be a stain on his country, church, and courts. Finally, a panel of forty judges sat in Paris to hear the case against Calas once again. The verdict they issued, 250 years ago this week, “echoed and re-echoed” in Europe and beyond. Voltaire, by appealing directly to the people, helped established the power of public opinion as a tool to fight injustice. To some legal scholars, the infamous case also marked the first stirrings of the global movement to end capital punishment. Read More
March 13, 2015 History The Great Bottle Conjurer Hoax By Dan Piepenbring A representation of the Bottle Conjurer from an English broadside dated 1748-49. From William S. Walsh’s Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, a 1909 compendium of “bibelots and curios” from the world of letters. The critic Barbara M. Benedict has written that the Bottle Conjurer “promised to bring literature to life; to reverse power relations; to incarnate onanism; to make monstrosity—the transgression of physical boundaries—humorous. Instead, he made the audience fools of their own desire … The explosive result revealed the danger of unmonitored curiosity.” Perhaps the most gigantic hoax ever perpetrated was that known to history as the Great Bottle Hoax. Early in the year 1749, a distinguished company of Englishmen were discussing the question of human gullibility. Among them were the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Chesterfield. “I will wager,” said the duke, “that let a man advertise the most impossible thing in the world, he will find fools enough in London to fill a play house and pay handsomely for the privilege of being there.” “Surely,” returned the earl, “if a man should say that he would jump into a quart bottle, nobody would believe that.” At first the duke was staggered. But having made the wager he held to it. The jest pleased the rest of the company. They put their heads together and evolved the following advertisement, which appeared in the London papers of the first week in January: Read More