Trevor Pateman, Not In The Archives: Personal Letters 1800 -1840

 

For the past year, I've been putting together an anthology of letters written in English in  the period 1800-1840 but not housed in any archive other than my own. I have transcribed and written introductions to over fifty letters but have not (yet) succeeded in finding a publisher. If all else fails I will create a new blog which will probably reach more readers than a printed book though books are a much better way of reading anything of any length. Meanwhile, here is my draft Inroduction:

Introduction

Two days after I had despatched the foregoing long letter to Fanny, the little post-woman – for we had no post-man; but a good old soul who used to trot … came down the hill with a lanthorn, the mail-bag coming into Charmouth at ten o’clock at night. Eliza Edmond and I had watched this poor creature every night during a fortnight, from my little window, as the light of her lamp appeared for an instant and was lost again, while she stopped to deliver her letters. At last, she stopped at our door ….

Harriette Wilson Memoirs (1825)

The past is everywhere, often overwhelmingly so. Some is immoveable Heritage, some portable but archived in libraries or vaulted in museums. The immoveable is sometimes demolished; the majority of the portable circulates, passing from parents to children, attic to auction, dealer to collector, and sometimes ends in the bin or bonfire. Even without those terminal fates most things suffer some deterioration or damage.

Paper collectibles, as they are called, are the stock in trade of a worldwide market: bank notes, deeds, letters, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, postcards, posters, stamps. They are readily portable objects and often end up far from their origin or first destination. A small number are taken out of circulation when gifted to or purchased by libraries and museums, though even then they can suffer war-time looting and peace-time theft. Organisations, business and charitable, supposedly archiving their past can be careless or inconsistent: a letter might be taken home by somebody to read and, as with library books, never returned; when moving offices, someone might decide to clear out paperwork taking up far too much space already. A hundred years ago British banks, solicitors, and insurance companies sent vast nineteenth-century correspondences to paper mills for pulping. But on arrival it might be realised that it was collectible material and the mill would sell on to dealers.

The letters transcribed in this book were all written in English in the period 1800 to 1840. None were in archives; I found them browsing dealer boxes at table-top fairs or buying at auction attic accumulations or well-presented collections, sometimes bidding without having viewed but confident I would find something to include in the anthology I was trying to create. It all started with just one letter, now included here: the 1825 extortion demand written by the English courtesan Harriette Wilson. It’s only the third recorded of a couple of hundred letters she is believed to have despatched from exile in Paris. Most were probably burnt by the compromised men who received them. Two are in archives.

But perhaps this book also owes something to a much earlier experience. I spent the academic year 1971-72 in Paris and participated in Michel Foucault’s seminars at the Collège de France. He set us the task of reading an obscure memoir, chanced upon in a provincial archive, written in 1835 by Pierre Rivière who had murdered his mother, sister, and brother. The idea of working from something discovered accidentally was new to me, as was the focus on a text which had been completely forgotten but which astonished Foucault who saw that it could provide an entry into study of then-contemporary ways of thinking about criminal insanity. I made use of the possibilities opened up by this approach in my own research over the next few years and it may be that I am returning to it here in a book which foregrounds the accidental and forgotten.  I don’t have a memoir but do have an 1837 letter from a solicitor later murdered on his own doorstep by an aggrieved client, judged at the Old Bailey to have “a strong predisposition to insanity”. Like Pierre Rivière, he was sent to an asylum instead of being executed.

*

Machinery for making envelopes cheaply was not developed until the 1840s; before then envelopes were hand-made and expensive. Letters were almost always sent through the post as folded and tucked sheets of paper, often closed with a wax or paper seal. Such letters automatically preserve name and address of the recipient, written on the front panel, so that the identity of the Dear Mother or Dear Sir is always present and without which I could not have researched them. But when seals were broken a word or phrase might be lost. Thoughtful correspondents left blank spaces on the unfolded written page roughly where they thought their seal would fall on the folded outside, but not all correspondents were thoughtful or able to perform the origami-like mental feat involved.

None of the letters I was buying bore postage stamps, first introduced in May 1840 when over a period of eight months sixty-eight million copies of the Penny Black were distributed to post offices across Britain and Ireland to serve on a small part of the correspondence of a population of twenty-seven million. The Penny Reds which succeeded the Blacks in 1841 were printed in vast quantities. Older stampless letters did receive markings indicating post towns of origin and destination, dates, postal charges, and so on. There are collectors for these pre-stamp or pre-philatelic letters. Hobbyists are very focussed in their habits and pre-stamp collectors no different in this respect; very often they do not see the wood for the trees. Surprising as it may seem, when they view and buy a folded letter for its outer postal markings they may not read the inner contents which, it’s true, often enough present themselves in faded ink or some apparently indecipherable cross-written scrawl. But I chose to view them the other way, projecting scans of the elusive characters onto my desktop magic screen. 

I thank you if you feel I prove my case, that these letters are interesting and provide insights, sometimes surprising, into both private lives and wider histories: a woman writes to her husband that she has suffered a miscarriage; a medical student from Barbados describes protests in Edinburgh against the Tory threat to the Great Reform Bill of 1832. There is some comedy, including the unintentional as when nine-year old James Forbes, writing to his father the Seventh Baronet Pitlsligo, identifies the excellent family Library as the place - no doubt it had a polished wooden floor - where you practice spinning your top.  There is rather more tragedy; the histories I record are strewn with early deaths: James Forbes lost his mother in early infancy; Mrs Darwin sees all four of her children culled by natural selection; going out to India in the service of the East India Company is quite likely to prove terminal and quickly. Medical science had barely begun to triumph over any of the very many fatal conditions and diseases, remedies for which we now take for granted. People were much more ready to place their faith in God and money into church building than into understanding the human body and its frailties. I find it strange that childbirth should have been so readily accepted as perilous and that when one of the main perils which women faced was eventually identified it was denied and the discoverer (Ignaz Semmelweis, 1847) ridiculed. Doctors did not like to be told to wash their hands.

With perhaps a couple of exceptions, the letters I have selected were not written in hope or expectation of securing a wider readership than the person they addressed and sometimes other family members who would want to hear the latest news. It is this which gave them an immediacy as I read them, even if at the same time I was struggling to decipher a word or make sense of an argument. Some are clearly crafted and not simply spontaneous; Martha Wilmot’s family letter is just a small addition to a large body of skilful constructions, recording her travels, which were published in fat volumes in the 1930s based on originals now housed in Dublin archives. And one correspondent, Hugh Baird, writing home from Rio de Janeiro in 1828, reflects on the power of the pen: when I sat down to my Desk I never imagined I would have got so far on, one subject drove hard after another, and we often find that there is no way in which one’s mind can be better known than by the good quill.

The letters are not in any sense representative. In early nineteenth century Britain and Ireland, literacy was far from universal; schooling was not compulsory and rarely free. The illiterate do not appear here though their dictated letters can occasionally be found. A handful of writers resort to phonetic spellings, as does Mary Epps in a heartfelt letter which dates from 1801: Now all my famley is goan to bed I am sete Down to Rite to you for I reley can never geat by my Self no other time.

But women are numerically under-represented in this book; the identity politics of the period almost completely excluded them from public life and from professions which generated vast correspondences. They were unlikely to travel either independently or as wives to the main destinations, India and the Caribbean, from where very many letters were written home to recipients who carefully saved them. There were women like Martha Wilmot who did travel independently within Europe; Catharine Rossiter who appears here was another Irish woman who did.

Colonial identity politics classified the Jamaica-born Richard Hill as a free man of Colour and for part of his life (but not all) subject to civil disabilities. He is the only writer here who is clearly not white but I hesitate to declare that everyone else clearly was. It is likely that several of the men living overseas formed enduring relationships with non-white women and had children with them; in the case of James Drummond Campbell I document provisions made in a will for both partner and children. I have no expertise in the matter, but I form the impression that it is only later in the Victorian period that casual racism decked itself out with scientific pretensions; in this earlier period, and perhaps because of the influence of Christian beliefs, the background assumption - despite slavery - is that there is just one race, the human race. As early as 1808 the proto-Darwinian scientist James Cowles Prichard FRS (1786-1848), coming from a Quaker background, sought to combine the idea of a single origin for humanity with some kind of explanation for its subsequent visible differentiation. But in 1813, rather than place human origins in the biblical Middle East, Prichard switched it to Africa, “On the whole there are many reasons which lead us to the conclusion that the primitive stock of men were probably Negroes”. I learnt this from researching a letter written by his son but not included here.

About sexualities, readers will probably make inferences but I think it would be unwise to infer from bachelor or spinster status same-sex sexual preferences. There were many reasons for not marrying and, for women at least, some pretty good ones.

For the rest, vocabulary and spelling are already fairly standardised; just occasionally an obsolete dialect word appears and even a word about which I cannot retrieve any information. But punctuation is definitely a matter of personal taste though lack of enthusiasm for apostrophes is widely shared. Punctuation is affected by the quill pen: commas and dashes are preferred to full stops because stabbing a stop with the quill risks creating a blot. Effort is reduced by using abbreviations: the ampersand (&) is more frequently used than the word it replaces. These habits persisted when steel pens began to replace the quill in the 1820s because they were not a magic solution to these practical writing difficulties. I learnt to write with a steel pen in a 1950s primary school and have the ink-blotted exercise books to prove it.

In my transcriptions ellipses (….) signify either that I cannot read a word (and nor can anyone else who has peered at it) or that damage to the letter, most often occasioned by breaking the seal, has removed a portion of text. But the letters are not abridged except in the chapter devoted to a connected group of letters from Admiral Crown and Count Vorontsov to the same recipient. Very occasionally, it is only possible to make sense of a passage by assuming that there has been a slip of the pen, Freudian or otherwise. But this is noted, not silently corrected.

Is there an overarching theme? Editorial choices have, of course, been made: I chose letters which appeared to me and several pre-publication readers to have some intrinsic interest and, additionally, invited informative introduction. But this is an anthology: chapters are loosely grouped by theme but are standalone and not cross-referenced; they can be read in any order and could be used separately in discussion groups. They are found letters and that is important, at least to me, rather like the anthropomorphic stones I scavenge from beaches and downlands.

The personal and historical settings provided are based on both internet sleuthing and commissioned reports from professional researchers in archives. But I hope to open the way to further research and discussion, not prove it unnecessary. There are no footnotes; sources, acknowledgments, and reading suggestions are given, chapter by chapter, in the End Notes.

And should you, after all, want to begin at the beginning then Miss Beeby would like to tell you what she has been up to:

 

Christmas in Bethlehem

December 1995

When in Israel at Christmas the place to go must be Bethlehem, especially in the year when the Israelis are going and the Palestine Authority arriving. So I went, three times.

On Christmas Eve morning, I boarded a dusty Arab bus from outside the Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem, and paid my thirty pence for the eight-mile ride to Manger Street. Bethlehem is not a pretty town, even on a bright sunny day. It is pretty squalid, a mass of litter, untidy precast buildings and - in the absence of traffic lights - honking traffic chaos, controlled or contributed to by the newly deployed Palestinian police and defence forces. A visiting French journalist from one of Bethlehem's twin towns told me that the Israelis had made no effort to develop the town's tourist potential during their twenty-eight year occupation, preferring that tourists like me should stay and pay in Jerusalem.

Manger Square is crammed with people at eleven in the morning and Palestine flags and pictures of Arafat outnumber pictures of Mary and the Infant Jesus. But those are there, as is a giant Christmas Tree outside the old Israeli and new Palestine Police Station, the roof of which is full of armed men. In the past few days, the barbed wire fence surrounding it has been torn down.

We appear to be waiting for the Latin Patriarch, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Jerusalem, whose entry into Bethlehem is preceded by an endlessly long procession of bands, scouts and guides. I spot the Greek Orthodox Patriarch disappearing up a side street in a shiny stretched limo. He is the custodian of the Church of the Nativity, and others worship there as his guests. Orthodox Christmas happens in early January, and Armenian Apostolic even later. Today's celebrations are the first of the trio.

Clinging to municipal street furniture with half a dozen Arab young men, I'm wilting in the heat when several hours later and to cries of The Patriarch, Michel Sabbah, clad in pink, eventually enters Manger Square. I can only take my photos now by holding the camera over my head. The crowd has been relaxed throughout but it occurs to me that the Palestine security forces, three days into their role here, have no experience of crowd control and a sudden surge could easily result in people getting crushed. I'm also not sure that I can last out until the midnight mass which Yasser Arafat is scheduled to attend. I decide to return to Jerusalem by clapped out taxi (five dollars) to rest and to come back later.

But how to get back? Israelis have been told Bethlehem is off limits for Christmas, a closed zone, and what transport will be running is unclear. I discover that the Anglican cathedral of St George in Jerusalem runs a coach to Bethlehem in the evening in order to conduct a carol service at the Church of the Nativity. This sounds attractive: my lack of religious conviction has always had to take second place to the pleasure I take in singing carols. So, leaving my camera behind (I've taken enough photos for today), I head over to St George's, where an assortment of English pilgrims and American tourists (some in Father Christmas hats) fills no less than three modern Israeli coaches at three pounds a head. We've got a police escort, to make it easier, and the Israelis take us down the new and eerily dark Bethlehem by pass road, built to allow travel to Hebron (Israeli) without going through the Palestine Authority enclave. At some point we are invisibly handed over to a Palestinian escort, which pushes aside Bethlehem's packed crowds to allow the coaches to come close to the Church of the Nativity. Inside, we get to see the Star of Bethlehem, which marks the apocryphal place of Jesus's birth, before being escorted up to the roof where we have our carol singing pitch for the evening. A lovely idea!

There to welcome us are the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul, and Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Authority, who shakes hands with each of us and stays to listen to an hour's ragged English carol singing. We have no choristers or instruments to help us out. Then Arafat makes a prepared speech before the one TV camera on the roof. I forget what he said, and it scarcely matters, but it was brief and modest. His job is to reassure Christians that they will be secure under Palestinian rule, and much has been made of the fact that his wife was born a Greek Orthodox Christian. He is surrounded by a bodyguard shield but for the first time today I cannot see a gun.

Well, to stay in Manger Square for the open-air TV relay of midnight mass inside the Church would be an anti-climax after this strange encounter, so I go back in the coach to Jerusalem with the Anglicans. The Bishop goes in his Mercedes and H. M. Consul in his Land Rover, a path cleared for both by a blaring, flashing Palestinian police jeep.

It occurs to me that as pilgrims and tourists we haven't spent a shekel, dinar or cent in Bethlehem (which has three legal currencies) and I mention this to the Bishop's Chaplain, asking him to pass on the thought. It was clear from the Bishop's address to us that his sympathies are with the Palestinians; he effectively said Today Bethlehem, next year Jerusalem. So he might well take heed. A compulsory snack, drink or knick-knack would have done none of us any harm and the Bethlehem economy a tiny bit of good.

Christmas Day sees me back on the bus to Bethlehem, where it's the morning after the night before. The crowds have gone, and I head to a deserted Post Office to fabricate philatelic souvenirs. They haven't got special Christmas stamps this year, but they have managed a special Palestinian Authority postmark with a candle, holly and what I think we would tend to call wedding bells. I stick regular Palestine Authority stamps on Bethlehem postcards and get them specially cancelled at the post office counter. It's still novel for the post office clerk, who laughs at my eccentricity. We don't have enough language in common for me to explain that with any luck these cards will pay for my holiday.

When you find yourself shaking hands with Yasser Arafat, what do you say?

My knowledge of the situation amounts to this: Rabin is dead. Arafat survives, despite rather more death threats and under pressure from all sides: Israel, on which he is economically dependent and which requires him to clamp down on his extremists; his people, who want an end to poverty and Israeli checkpoints; Hamas, which won't participate in the January elections for what they regard as a Bantustan; Arab states, which have their own agendas.

So I shook hands and said the sort of thing someone intent on open air English carol singing might be moved to say:

"Good Luck!"

*

Written at the time; previously published in Trevor Pateman Silence is So Accurate (2017)

 

 Captain Warner’s Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Invisible Shell

This is not a book review, but an expanded version of an article which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of 18 July 2025 and records a discovery which contributes substantially to the resolution of a small historical puzzle.

*

Human beings are natural believers and that was once an evolutionary advantage. When out hunting with companions if one cries “Snakes in the grass!” then instant reaction is a better survival strategy than chin-stroking reflection on the probability of its truth. This natural credulity survives; without it we would be unmoved by horror movies, tear-jerk novels, and the promises of politicians. Belief just happens to us; we don’t choose it nor is it ever willingly suspended.

Credulity provides space for both pranksters who seek to amuse and charlatans who seek fame and profit. Pranksters may beam as they tell us to our faces that we have been fooled but charlatans do not want to be unmasked. And how do you unmask them anyway? They are often as convincing as stage magicians and those who have fallen for the trick rarely wish to admit it; credulous at the outset they suddenly become sceptics when evidence is put before them.

Fears of death and illness provide fertile ground for false prophets and medical quacks; scientific frauds have been committed by tenured and respected academics. But pulling the wool over the eyes of those responsible for the defence of the realm risks being counted a rather serious offence, and it seems few dare. But the risk has been taken.

*

On 17 July 1844 a crowd estimated by the Illustrated London News at between thirty and forty thousand people gathered on the seafront at Brighton in anticipation of a spectacular experiment. A 300 ton decommissioned sailing ship, the John o’ Gaunt, was towed into view and for a very long time not much else was seen to happen. But then at a signal given by independent monitors, Captain Samuel Alfred Warner launched his Invisible Shell, there was an explosion (see the illustration), and within minutes the John o’ Gaunt duly fell apart and sunk as if invisibly hit below the waterline by what we would now call a torpedo. The Illustrated London News provided extensive pictorial coverage and a roll-call of the great and good who had come down from London by the new railway to observe the event, among them Lord Brougham and at least a dozen other Lords; a dozen M.P’s and likewise of men with R.N. after their name; the Bishop of Oxford; directors of the East India Company;  and the Chevalier Benkausen, Russia’s Consul in London, representing one of the countries to which Warner intermittently threatened to take his invention.  Many of those who witnessed the event were impressed, but the official History of Parliament currently takes the view that “the ship had been structurally weakened beforehand and rigged with ropes beneath the surface to effect the deception”.

For over a decade, Captain Warner had been seeking to secure official interest and funding for his work on weapons which would defeat all enemies at sea, writing letters and publishing pamphlets full of dire warnings that Britain’s coasts were currently defenceless against invasion.  He secured at least some followers, including Royal Navy officers and members of Parliament, but there had been failed demonstrations and in addition a complete refusal to allow any Invisible Shell to be examined without a very large payment up front. The Brighton spectacular revived Warner’s fortunes and there was debate in the House of Commons in 1846 and the House of Lords in 1852 where as one of his last official acts the Duke of Wellington, a long-time Warner-sceptic, stripped investigative responsibility from a newly-established committee of their Lordships and transferred it to the scientific hands of the Royal Ordnance. Wikipedia wraps up its version of a very long story saying “With this the matter appears to have been dropped” but in fact the Royal Ordnance did constitute a panel on which Michael Faraday took the lead, interviewing Warner in June 1852. It promptly abandoned its enquiries when he persisted in his habitual refusal to describe the composition of the material which filled his shells. Wellington died in September 1852 and Warner in December 1853.

*

But there was an aftermath which offers some kind of resolution. Warner died leaving a woman, apparently his wife, with whom he had been living for many years in Pimlico. There were several children, some now married, no money and quite a lot of debt. A local vicar publicised a fund-raiser for widow and children but had to publish an amended version when he discovered that the woman in Pimlico was not the wife; the legal wife was living in Ashford Kent and now responsible for Warner’s estate, including the very visible and bulky contents of his workshop.

What happened next is recorded in a letter recently picked out of a box at a table top fair in Eastbourne, price three pounds. It is written by one of Warner’s sons-in-law, Thomas Moncas, a watch-maker turned London bookseller in the notorious Holywell Street off the Strand. The recipient is a married daughter of Captain Warner staying with the real Mrs Warner (“Grandma” in the letter) in Ashford. The shells which it describes may still exist.

Transcription

Addressed to: Mrs Viggors care of Mrs Warner Ashford Kent

Datelined: 45 Holywell Street Strand London 13 July 1854; Ashford arrival postmark 14 July

Dear Jane

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has been the result of all the trouble & expense attending the examination of the Shells. There was not anything in a single one, nor could not ever have been in most, as they still contained the “core” from the founders. Nothing could be fairer than the behaviour of Colonel Chalmers & the Gentlemen who assisted & as you now know the worst I will detail all that occurred.

I wrote several notes on the evening that I sent you a short last one. I went from here at 7 the next morg. to Harry & Mr Batten to prevent any mistake. I was back a ½ past 9 & of course had other matters to attend to. At 12 Mr Batten & a Mr Green [the famous balloonist who had assisted Warner at one of his demonstrations] came & also Harry, we had a hurried lunch a glass of ale, took the Steamer down to London Bridge & the Rail at one down to Woolwich raining cats & dogs, & xxxx over by the assistance of Mr Payne to the Laboratory at 5 minutes past 2. The Colonel in the Chair, Mr Abel from the Pharmaceutical Society, Capt. Boxer & another tall Gentleman, after some necessary arrangements &ca we all adjourned to the Shed & there sure enough were the packages containing the Shells. I cannot tell you half the fear hope & care that was taken in moving breaking unlocking the Boxes &ca & handling the contents the Colonel himself warning us “that if those shells contained the explosive material employed by Warner at Brighton, there was enough there to blow up the whole Arsenal”.

For 2 hours & 4o minutes did we examine. Some were broke up with chisel & hammer  & turns out to be an old cannon ball sheathed in copper. Some as proved to be an old Congreve rocket as two long ones this shape one shorter than the other well wedged into 32 pounder Guns & the heads unscrewed they contained nothing. The Balls which were dropped in the Isle of Anglesea [Anglesey] were there …. Some shells this shape this was Gun metal evidently turned on a lathe & was evidently cast

 in a Mould first: a small copper screw was at one end, & round the middle was a band an inch wide divided into 2 halfs was fastened down with 2 screws, weighed about 18 pounds about the size of a 32 pound shot so this was evidently hollow. The band that encircled it was easily taken off but then there was no passage to the inside hollow part. The band rounds its waste covered a cutting about an inch deep thus evidently solid. The screw at end did not open into the center hollow part as far as we could see, so after a deal of fear & consultation the saw was set to work & after penetrating a good inch through solid metal it was apparent the hollow part was reached, on turning it over some black small grans dropped out which were closely examined. They looked like very fine gunpowder & after a good deal of scrutiny turned out to be mixture used by the Moulder to make the mould & all agreed a very ingenious moulder he must have been; but it is evident nothing had ever been inside them, as the modellers core was still there. In fact there was absolutely nothing not a clue nor a shade of a clue to found even a [word lost when seal was broken; could be guess].

We left the Yard at 5 Mr Payne accompanying us to the entrance gate raining as if all were coming down at once, had dinner of which we had a great need & returned to Town bidding Mr Batten & Mr Green good-bye at the Essex pier. Harry & I joining Emma & Polly telling them the same tale I have told you only a good deal more.

Now Grandma [Mrs Warner] must send wish what is to be done with the Shells &ca, the Colonel will send them up in a few days. Harry [one of Warner’s sons] wants one of those with a hook in, that fell from the Balloon, to suspend from his room ceiling. Any directions you give shall be attended to – whether you wish them sold or kept, or sent to you. We are all pretty well, considering. I intended to have written to you from Woolwich, but the Post Office closes there for country letters at 4 & we did not get clear from the yard ‘till 5 so it was no use to write there. If nothing else results at all events it has not been for want of trying. But this does not prove there is no secret, it only proves that there was no evidence is those particular shells.

 Thomas Moncas

 

 

 

Why No New Book Reviews?

I'm working on a book, an anthology of letters written in the  period 1800 - 1840, and nearly all my reading right now is devoted to background research for the introductions which accompany each letter. I have over fifty, none of them in archives and many written by "ordinary people".  The Word doc is approaching 80 000 words (plus pictures!) and thus long enough to allow me to remove weaker chapters. 

I've had no luck so far in interesting agents or publishers. Below I introduce a letter from an author who had much more success than I am having; he doesn't take up many words  so here he is with my rueful introduction:

  

Reverend John Platts 1825

Eccentric Characters     Impostors           Extraordinary Females

Some readers will be aware of a thriving industry which in articles and books, on-line and in person, advises authors on the procedures to follow and articles of faith to which they must subscribe should they wish to transition from being writers to being published writers. All agree that you should be able to complete an inordinately long one-size-fits-all questionnaire without becoming facetious.

But how was one advised two hundred years ago? Seeking patronage was one recommended route; paying the publisher another. The Reverend John Platts has a different strategy comprising four easy to follow steps:  Step One: Provide a Title and Table of Contents in Your Best Handwriting; Step Two: Puff Your Work (this takes an entire sentence); Step Three: Flatter the Publisher (three words); Step Four: Name Your Price. He makes no reference to his under-represented and marginalised position: he is a Unitarian Minister, not a Trinitarian one, and he preaches in Doncaster.

 

Did it work?  Well, not with the publisher he is addressing, Messrs Harding, Leopard & Co who appear to have had a very small list. But it worked with another London publisher, Sherwood, Jones & Co, which brought out the work in 1825 and thus at most ten months after this letter was written. They must have been keen. It may have been their idea to re-title it; the author imagined it as The Wonders of Human Nature as Exemplified … but it was published as A New Universal Biography, Containing Interesting Accounts ….

The work is a main reason why Platts (1775-1837) has a Wikipedia page. And the book is currently available in a choice of Print on Demand hardback or paperback. Shall I buy and reproduce one of the Interesting Accounts? It’s not necessary; the Reverend Platts’ letter can stand alone as the book’s teaser:

*

Transcription

Addressed to: Messrs Harding Leopard & Co Booksellers Finsbury Square   London

Datelined: Doncaster Feb. 22, 1825

Gentlemen I have a work, nearly completed, to dispose of, of which the above is the table; I think it calculated to be a very popular work. Is it at all suitable for your respectable house? If so, you shall have a sight of it, if you desire it. It will form 2 vols. 8 vo.[octavo], the price £150 Rev J Platts Doncaster

*

Catherine Nixey Heresy

 

It's a long time since I posted a review of a new book but this one is so good that it prompts me to put aside preoccupation with finishing my current project. Nearly everything in this book was new to me. Catherine Nixey has found the right style and tone to write about the early Church of Rome as it established itself as "the greatest organized persecuting force in human history" - a phrase she takes from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix. She does this by narrating the histories and often violent fates, as far as we can know them, of those early versions of Christianity which found themselves defined as "heresies" by that Roman version which focussed itself on alliance with secular power, wealth accumulation, and the pleasures of ostentation, pomp and the flesh - a set of choices far from dead not only in Rome but in Canterbury too. 

Despite a lifelong sideline interest in religion, both as histories and as theologies, I knew almost nothing of what Nixey writes about and that, as she might be the first to point out, is just as my English state schooling intended. Watered down to not much more than prayers, hymns, carols and nativity plays it never suggested alternatives, that there might be other stories. It's true, however, that so successful was the dominant church's  suppression of alternative pasts, including as recorded in books which were burnt,  that it is only in my lifetime that some of those other histories have been at least partially recovered, notably from the 1945 discovery in Egypt of the Gnostic Gospels. But what are traditionally called the Apocrypha, excluded from canonical Bibles, had been around for a very long time before that.

Nixey establishes her case with lively, caustic, and well-crafted short histories and striking examples. Her display of alternative versions of the Nativity scene is perhaps the most striking as is the fact that some of those scenes pre-date the Christian version. Virgins having babies with remarkable powers was not a new idea. There are other things too: the "Three Wise Men" of school nativity plays are the creation of a dubious translation; they are Magi and if you want to translate that, then magicians or sorcerers would be obvious choices. But in this 1840s folk art version of De Tre Wise Man  from Dalarna in Sweden - I bought the postcard there in 1964 -  they are local notables who ride horses not camels; they are the local go-to people for the seal of approval; but the ox and the ass are there, as in the best English versions:

Catherine Nixey is a classicist by training and may wish to stay close to the period she is most  familiar with. But if she ventured into the more recent past, the early history of the Church of England (and of Scotland) is also that of an organised persecuting force busily rooting out heretics and  heresies. The last person to be executed for Blasphemy in Britain was the twenty-year old Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead, hanged in 1697. The indictment against him (which can be found at his Wikipedia page) shows he was familiar with early criticisms of Christianity and, in particular, its associations with magic.  

Today it is only continued state support for the Established Church with its Bench of Bishops, accumulated  wealth, and continuing hold on the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham which lifts it above the status of not much more than a middle-class hobby prone to the usual jealousies and in-fighting. The Roman Catholic church is another matter and will remain so until Italy repudiates the Lateran treaty and incorporates the Vatican City State into its national territory. It would then be able to order the archives opened.

Sylvia Townsend Warner and a Proposed Dorchester Effigy

 

This is the full version of a letter of which a small  extract appears in M.C.'s column at the Times Literary Supplement November 15 2024. A sketch of the proposed effigy was published in the TLS on November 8 2024.

Dear Editor

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s life and work are parts of living cultures: her books are readily available in print (I read that much credit is due to Professor Peter Swaab); they are enjoyed, discussed, and written about. Her biography gets attention and is complex, interesting, and open to many interpretations. What more can one ask for?

It seems that £13 000 has already been raised towards the £85 000 cost of placing a polite effigy of her on a park bench in Dorchester (M.C 8 November). If this unimaginative private project is completed, it will diminish her life and work.

Most new “public art” is doomed to scorn and neglect, usually deserved; apart from the obvious case of Banksy, it is strangled at birth by committee think. The only good effigies around are those burnt on Bonfire Nights.

Trevor Pateman 

Nick Bradley Four Seasons in Japan

 

This is a very well-conceived and structured book; it kept my attention throughout. Flo Dunthorpe living in Japan decides to translate an obscure though modern Japanese novel titled Sound of Water by Hibiki and pitches her material to a US publisher before she has completed the translation and before she tries to contact author and publisher for permission. The novel comprises her completed translation divided into sections each representing one of the four seasons. Sandwiched between and within sections are third person accounts of Flo’s troubled life, parts of which parallel the troubled lives of the main characters of the Japanese novel. A late section narrates the search to identify and find the reclusive author.

As I began reading I felt that the prose had been constructed deliberately to suggest a first draft (literal) translation of the novel; the prose was rather stilted and didn’t flow or transition easily - things which a re-draft would correct. But maybe it was meant to suggest something about Japanese formality and if so I think it succeeded.  However, I encountered prose choices which caused me unease

Flo Dunthorpe signs off in “Tokyo 2023” and the Hibiki novel appears to be set sometime after 1990 since the characters have smartphones; the Japanese LINE messaging app they are using dates from 2011. But the register of the novel often suggests an earlier period and even then some of the exclamations and idioms which characters use feel awkward. Some examples relating just to one of the three or four main characters, Ayako, the elderly and strict grandmother:.

“Put that blasted thing away …” said Ayako in reaction to her grandson consulting a Weather App. (p 118)

“Usually she [Ayako] would’ve made a cup of coffee for herself and sat down next to Sato for a decent chinwag” (p 125)

“Those were the kinds of stories Ayako used to like to overhear and snicker about …. Telling her the juicy news she so desperately wanted to hear” (p 223)

“Oh wow” said Ayako, in surprise (p 255)

“I kept going. I never gave up…. I was discovered by some Mountain Rescue guys who whisked me off to hospital” (p 267)

It suggests an author who is a non-native speaker who is looking online for idioms (a mixture of American and English ones) and not quite getting it right either for time or place.

I have other minor niggles; Nick Bradley uses “must’ve” and “would’ve” in authorial prose – see the example from page 125 above. I can’t remember the last time I saw ‘em used. They stick out.