British Library Puts Victorian Newspapers Online

One million pages of text from nineteenth-century newspapers went online last night [22 October] as part of a British Library project to increase public access to important historical resources.


The Newspapers Digitisation Project: British Newspapers 1800-1900, launched in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), will enable scholars and others to search the text of 46 regional newspapers from around the UK, dating back to 1800.

The online digital archive offers free access to lecturers and students in higher and further education institutions and to British Library visitors with reader passes, who can access it from the library's reading rooms in London's Kings Cross.

Users are able to search across the different newspaper titles to draw together materials relating to a wide range of research and learning topics. Researchers can discover, for example, how the Whitechapel murders were covered in the Birmingham Daily Post, how the Battle of Trafalgar was captured in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post, and how the Belfast News Letter reported the scramble for west Africa.

The website, developed over the past three years by Gale/Cengage Learning, the world's largest publisher of reference databases and digital collections, will allow users to search through material previously available only in hard-copy form or through microform or CD-ROMs in the library's newspaper archive in Colindale, north London.

The journals available online have been chosen by a team of experts and academics, and include regional publications from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and specialist titles covering, for example, Victorian radicalism and Chartism.

Launching the archive last night, Sir Colin Lucas, chairman of the British Library, said: "Traditionally, access to these newspapers has meant you get a newspaper on to a desk and turn each page, which can be laborious and has the risk you may miss something. If you are an old historian like me, that's the great pleasure in it. But nowadays, people need the kind of search engine that will throw up 150,000 references to steam ships."

He added that a major reason for digitising the archive was to find a long-term way of preserving journals.

"Research by UK communities relies on access to the very best publications and information sources for its survival. The creation of this new website . . . has created a vital online research tool providing the very best resources for the UK's higher and further education communities."

The initial one million pages, funded by £1m from the JISC, is the first phase of the library's digital archive project. More pages from the nineteenth-century journals will be added over the coming months. The library also has plans to digitise seventeenth- and eighteenth-century publications, and has secured an additional £1m from JISC to help cover costs.

By the end of 2008, the British Library hopes to digitise 3,000,000 pages of British newspapers and to offer worldwide access to that collection via a sophisticated searching and browsing interface on the web.

(via EducationGuardian.co.uk, 23 October 2007)

Victorian Paper Photography on View

"Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860," which runs through 30 December at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is the first exhibition to explore the opening decades of paper photography in the country of its birth, focusing exclusively on photographs printed from negatives of fine writing paper.

This early process—replaced almost entirely by glass negatives by 1860—was favored especially by men of learning and leisure who not only accepted but appreciated the medium’s tendency to soften details and mass light and shadow in a self-consciously artistic way. At home, their most frequent subjects—ancient oaks, rocky landscapes, ruined castles and abbeys, gatherings of friends and family—provided an antidote to the ills of modern, industrialized society; abroad, they were drawn to the glories of past civilizations manifest in Roman ruins, medieval churches, or Indian temples. Nearly 120 works by 40 artists have been assembled from 27 private and public collections; most are being exhibited in the United States for the first time.

Above: Robert Henry Cheney (British, 1800–1866); Guyscliffe, 1850s; albumen silver print; 7 x 8 3/4 in. (17.7 x 22.3 cm); Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

Here are a few of the images included in the exhibition; for more, visit the MMA website. Read the informative New York Times review here.

Above: John Murray (English, 1809–1898); The Taj Mahal from the Banks of the Yamuna River, 1858–62; albumen silver print; 15 3/4 x 17 3/8 in. (39.9 x 44 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen Gift, 2005.

Above: John McCosh (Scottish, 1805–1885), Englishman at the Entrance to a Pagoda, 1848–50; salted paper print; 6 1/4 x 5 in. (15.8 x 12.6 cm); Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Above: John Muir Wood (British, 1805–1892); Family Group, Leith, 1847–52; salted paper print; 4 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (11.3 x 14 cm); Scottish National Photography Collection, National Galleries of Scotland.

Above: Thomas Keith (Scottish, 1827–1895); Cardinal Beaton's House, Edinburgh, 1854–57; salted paper print; 11 x 9 3/4 in. (27.9 x 24.8 cm); Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.

Glimpses of "Young Victoria"

Hot off the set, here are a few still photos from the upcoming film Young Victoria, produced by Martin Scorcese and starring Emily Blunt as the queen and Rupert Friend as Prince Albert. For more information, read my previous posts of February 11, February 16, February 23, and March 4; you can read a hilarious account of being an extra in the movie at Dan's Media Digest.

Above: Emily Blunt as Queen Victoria.

Julian Fellowes, the screenwriter, says: "Everyone thinks they know [Queen Victoria] but 99 per cent of the public don’t know anything about the story we are telling and will be surprised. People think of a fat widow in black. They’ve forgotten the exciting young woman trying to find her own way. Some girls like to have fun and she was certainly one of them.”

Above: Blunt.

Above: Blunt with Rupert Friend as Prince Albert.

Above: Friend with greyhounds.

Above: Two unidentified actors try to keep the rain off their wigs while waiting to shoot their scenes.

Above: Princess Beatrice has a non-speaking role as a lady-in-waiting; her mother, the Duchess of York, is one of the film's executive producers.

Above: Screenwriter Julian Fellowes chats with the actors.

Above: Fellowes.

On the Other Hand

From The New York Times, 18 September 2007:

"Scientists look for data anywhere they can find it. Researchers from University College London studying handedness, for example, found data in a group of early 20th-century films of everyday English life.

"More than 800 short films made from 1900 to 1906 by Mitchell & Kenyon, a company in Blackburn, were found in 1994 and preserved by the British Film Institute. The researchers, Chris McManus and Alex Hartigan, wanted to see what the films showed about rates of left-handedness. More than 10 percent of people are left-handed, but studies have shown that the percentage was lower a century ago.

"The researchers found 391 arm-waving examples in the films, 61 involving the left arm. Other studies have shown a correlation between arm waving and handedness.

"In a control sample of 391 modern images of arm waving, 95 involved the left arm. The findings were published in Current Biology.

"The researchers estimated the ages of arm wavers and found that the frequency of left-arm use increased with age. It was higher, for example, among people estimated to have been born in the 1860s than those born in the 1870s.

"The researchers concluded left-handedness declined in Victorian England because of social and school pressures and the rise of industrial tools, among other factors, reaching bottom around the turn of the 20th century."

Shown here: Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood, c. 1901

Related links:
Mitchell & Kenyon Collection at the British Film Institute

Victorian Lives

I usually confine reviews to the sidebar, but one new book, Great Victorian Lives: An Era in Obituary (Times Books, 2007) -- available via amazon.co.uk -- deserves special mention. It brings together more than 70 obituaries of eminent Victorians from The Times and shows how some of the leading personalities of the nineteenth century were viewed by a newspaper that was itself one of the defining institutions of the age.

The Times recorded notable deaths from its beginning as The Daily Universal Register in 1785 and by the middle of the next century obituaries were established as one of the glories of the paper. There was no attempt at comprehensive coverage, and nothing like the daily obituary page of modern times, but under the 36-year editorship of John Thadeus Delane (1841-77) the paper began to respond to the deaths of significant national and international figures in a style – and on a scale – that none of its rivals could match.

The following excerpts provide a flavour of the full obituaries collected in the book.

William Wordsworth (1850)
"There is so much in the character, as well as in the works of William Wordsworth, to deserve hearty admiration, that we may indulge in the language most grateful to our feelings without overstepping the decent limits of propriety and plain sincerity. We point out, in the first place, one of the great excellencies of the departed worthy. His life was as pure and spotless as his song. It is rendering a great service to humanity when a man exalted by intellectual capacities above his fellow-men holds out to them his own person the example of a blameless life."

John Stuart Mill (1873)
"We need hardly add that many of his opinions on society and government have been generally and justly condemned; and that, in his more appropriate domain of mental and moral philosophy, he was engaged in unceasing feuds. He was, however, the most candid of controversialists, and too amiable to indulge in scorching sarcasm or inflict unnecessary pain. He was often a wrongheaded, but always a kind-hearted man."

Benjamin Disraeli (1881)
"We have remarked that, like a man of spirit and shrewdness, in his writings as in his speeches, Disraeli boldly prided himself on his Jewish descent and the glories of his race. Jews rich in gifts as in gold are the mythical heroes of the Utopias in his fictions. But this most eloquent defence of his people against the prejudices of Christendom is to be found in that chapter of the 'Political Biography' which precedes the explanation of Lord George Bentinck’s conduct with respect to the Jewish disabilities."

Charles Darwin (1882)
"In 1859 was published what may be regarded as the most momentous of all his works, 'The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.' No one who had not reached manhood at the time can have any idea of the consternation caused by the publication of this work. We need not repeat the anathemas that were hurled at the head of the simple-minded observer, and the prophecies of ruin to religion and morality if Mr. Darwin’s doctrines were accepted. No one, we are sure, would be more surprised than the author himself at the result which followed. But all this has long passed."

Climb Every Mountain ...

Three days before Christmas, 1857, a group of British mountaineers met at Ashley's Hotel in London and formed the Alpine Club, the world's first association of climbers, which is still going strong [shown above: climbers on Mont Blanc].

To mark the club's 150th anniversary, Christie's (King's Street, London) is holding a landmark sale called "Exploration and Travel: The Alps to Everest," which features, among many other things, a fascinating collection of items from the Victorian period.

Among the lots on offer: letters by David Livingstone, including one calling Richard Burton "an awful ruffian"; Henry Morton Stanley's pedometer [shown here] and gold watch; an album containing 91 photographs of Stanley's lecture tour of the United States in 1890-91; a Doulton brown-ground glazed pottery jug commemorating the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1887-89 [shown below]; the manuscript journal of a sailor who took part in an arctic expedition under Captain George Strong Nares in 1875-76; letters by Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Henry Shackleton, and General Charles George Gordon; books, paintings, prints, and maps galore, plus telescopes, skis, binoculars, and other equipment used by those who braved the antipodes.

The sale includes several albums of views of India and its people by renowned photographers Bourne, Shepherd, Paar, and Herzog & Higgins. One of these contains 112 photographs of the Coronation Durbar of 1903 [shown below]; another commemorates the visit of the Prince of Wales to Gwalior in 1906.

The historical importance of many of these items is staggering and I hope they will find their way into archives that can preserve them properly.

Resources:

"Early Victorian Mountaineering and the Search for Scientific Knowledge" at Victorian History (Bruce Rosen)

Mountaineering and Polar Collections, National Library of Scotland

Elizabeth Kolbert and Francis Spufford, eds., The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic (2007)

Ronald W. Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers (1953) and An Eccentric in the Alps: The Story of W. A. B. Coolidge, the Great Victorian Mountaineer (1959)

Edward Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871); The Ascent of the Matterhorn (1880); Travels Amongst the Great Andes of the Equator (1892)

Carlyle Letters Go Digital

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 September 2007:

"It was good of God, a catty observer wrote more than a century ago, to marry Thomas and Jane Carlyle together, 'and so make only two people miserable instead of four.'

"That’s a famously unkind cut at two of the central figures of the Victorian era, prolific writers who captured the spirit of this time of burgeoning industrialism and empire in their many letters. But readers can now decide for themselves whether the Carlyles were shallow creeps or keen observers (or both) because Duke University Press has just published Carlyle Letters Online.

"The archive features thousands of letters written by the Carlyles to more than 600 recipients: politicians, poets, scientists, and others. Each letter in the collection is indexed with multiple terms and can be searched by date, subject, and recipient. Similar letters are linked to each other through a network that designers hope will encourage discovery and facilitate research. Thanks to an interface developed by HighWire Press, part of the Stanford University Library system, users can save searches to personal folders and get alerts whenever the collection is updated."

Shown here: Thomas Carlyle (top); Jane Welsh Carlyle (bottom)

Florence Nightingale's Disputed Legacy: Angel of Mercy or Power-Hungry Meddler?

From The Guardian, 3 September 2007:

"She is known to generations of children as the saintly, iron-willed Lady With the Lamp who battled to improve the conditions of wounded British soldiers and founded modern nursing, but a strikingly different picture of Florence Nightingale [shown here] has emerged from the unpublished letters of one of her bitterest enemies.

"'Miss Nightingale shows an ambitious struggling after power inimical to the true interests of the medical department,' Sir John Hall [1795-1866], the chief British army medical officer in the Crimea, wrote to his superior in London.

"When she went over his head to order supplies from his stores, observers, Sir John wrote, were astounded at the 'petticoat imperieuse! in the medical imperio!'

"When Nightingale arrived in Scutari in November 1854 with 38 women volunteers, sent by her close friend, the war secretary Sydney Herbert, she was about to carve out her place in history and destroy Sir John's. Her determination to reform the army hospitals in which thousands of wounded and ill soldiers were treated in closely packed beds by overworked doctors and male medical orderlies, and untrained women whom she dismissed as drunken and slatternly, brought her into instant collision with Sir John -- and she also became a media star in the first British war reported in detail by the press.

"'It was absolutely as night follows day that her upper-class Victorian female morality would clash head on with his traditional closed male army world,' said Richard Aspin, head of the archive and manuscripts at the Wellcome Trust, which recently [26 June] bought Sir John's letters [read a description of the letter book prepared by Bonham's]. 'She simply ignored his authority. She would no more have dreamed of consulting him about her nurses than she would have sought the opinion of a husband, if she ever had one, about hiring a parlour maid.'

"Sir John's letters [shown here] denounced her as a publicity seeking meddler. Her ambitions, which launched the modern career of nursing, 'if not resisted,' he wrote, 'will, with the influence she has at present at home, throw us completely into the shade in future, as we are at present overlooked in all that is good and beneficial regarding our hospital arrangements, which are ascribed utterly to her presiding genius by great part of the press and her own itinerant eulogistic orators.'

"He accused her of squandering resources by sacking good nurses and orderlies and trying to take over control of others -- 'but in that she was disappointed, for they declined to serve under her orders.'

"It might be some consolation to poor Sir John that the scruffy marbled notebook containing his transcripts of the letters he considered most important cost the Wellcome Trust £4,000, while Nightingale's letters were bought for only £200. One letter from Nightingale, advising on how to find a reliable medical officer for a post in Egypt, warns against employing ex-army doctors: 'The fact is, nearly all the half-pay list are blackguards.'

"Henry Wellcome, who founded the trust, shared the general reverence for the Lady with the Lamp. Hers was the only woman's name he included in the frieze of his library, and he bought the scuffed moccasins she wore at Scutari - now on view in the new museum galleries which opened in London this summer. The collection also owns, but has lent to the British Library, the only known recording of Nightingale's voice, on a wax cylinder.

"Hall battled on, writing in February 1856: 'The army is in splendid health, only seven deaths in a week and one of them a fit of apoplexy from drunkeness.'

"However, his view of history's treatment of Nightingale and himself was prophetic. He wrote sadly: 'We shall to the end of time be made the victims of public odium in the way we were last winter ... the poor suffering sick soldier is a fine theme to ride off on.'

"When his long military service was rewarded with a knighthood (a KCB), Nightingale commented to Sydney Herbert that the honour could only mean 'knight of the Crimean burial grounds.'"


A disputed legacy: What the historians say

"Most biographies of Florence Nightingale attest that she became a national hero after dramatically reducing the mortality rate at the Scutari hospital during the Crimean war. But new research casts doubt on her role in transforming the hospital after her arrival in 1854.

"Official records show that by February 1855, the mortality rate had fallen from 60% to 42.7% and then, once a fresh water supply was introduced, it dropped further to 2.2%.

"Recently historians have suggested the death rate among soldiers did not fall immediately but rose, and was higher than any other hospital in the region. During Nightingale's first winter there, 4,077 soldiers died, mostly of typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery. Ten times more died of these illnesses than from battle wounds.

"The death rate began to fall six months after she took charge -- only after a sanitary commission was sent out by Lord Palmerston to improve ventilation and clean out the sewers.

Nightingale had believed the mortality rates were due to poor nutrition and overworking of soldiers. But Hugh Small, author of Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel, claims an unpublished letter shows it was not until 1857 that she realised the conditions within the hospitals themselves had caused such a huge number of deaths."

Related links:

"Hall, Sir John (1795–1866), military surgeon," Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required)

"Wellcome, Sir Henry Solomon (1853–1936), pharmacist and benefactor," Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required)

"Letter book of military surgeon depicts Nightingale as no heroine," Wellcome Library, London, 3 September 2007

"Letters reveal nurse Florence Nightingale was maybe more of a sinner than a saint," The Mail on Sunday, 4 September 2007

"Florence Nightingale: Just a publicity-seeker?" The Telegraph, 4 September 2007

Florence Nightingale: A Guide to Sources in the Wellcome Institute Library [PDF]

The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (University of Guelph)

Florence Nightingale’s personal papers are located in the British Library (Add. MSS. 43393–43403, 45750–45849, 46835, 47714–47767)

Recording of Florence Nightingale's voice (1890) in the British Library Sound Archive

Florence Nightingale Museum

Steampunk: Channeling the Spirit of Victorian Inventors

Today's Boston Globe takes note of the endlessly creative band of steampunk aficionados who seem to be channeling the spirit of Victorian inventors with their imaginative versions of modern technological objects. Check out the article's extensive photo gallery and prepare to be amazed.

"In the past two years ... steampunk has emerged in the real world, as a growing number of enthusiasts build steampunk objects and then share photos of them on the Internet. One of the first was the appearance last summer of a group of robots designed by the San Francisco Bay Area artist I-Wei Huang: they look like nineteenth-century locomotives with legs and are literally steam powered.

"This year alone has produced steampunk watches from Japan (bizarre assemblages of rusted brass, cracked leather, and antique watch faces) and a steampunk tree house (a steaming metal tree that houses a main room with all manner of secret compartments and drawers) at the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. There is even steampunk fashion, such as a combination dress/overalls adorned with gears and belt loops for every lady's steampunk tools.

"In their embrace of the toothy cog and the sooty pipe, this guild of steampunk hackers represents a rebellion of sorts against our iPhone moment."

Shown here: Steampunkworkshop.com's modified keyboard and flat-panel monitor.

Related links:

datamancer.net

Steampunk Magazine

If We Could Talk to the Animals ...

"Walter Rothschild: The Man, the Museum, and the Menagerie" is a fascinating exhibit running through 2 December at the Natural History Museum at Tring.

Lionel Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild (1868-1937; shown above apparently teasing a giant tortoise) was a Victorian collector par excellence. Born into the Rothschild banking dynasty, he became interested in zoology while still a boy. As a young man, he gallivanted around the Empire with net and trap in hand, conducting numerous (and treacherous) collecting expeditions, and became a noted authority on the taxonomy of birds and butterflies.

To house his finds, he created a private zoological museum and park at Tring, Hertfordshire, near his family's country home, which was opened to visitors in 1892.

Rothschild's collecting interests literally ran the gamut from A (armadillos) to Z (zebras). At the end of his life, the museum included about 950 stuffed mammals, 2,000 mounted birds, 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 birds' eggs, 200 reptiles "stuffed and in spirit," 300 fish, 2 million butterflies and moths, 144 giant tortoises, and a range of shells, corals, and sponges. In the park he kept, among other exotic animals, a tame wolf, rheas, kangaroos, kiwis, and cassowaries. He once drove a team of zebras into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. (The monarch's reaction is unrecorded.)

The Rothschild family gifted the entire museum and its collections to the nation in 1937 on Walter's death.

The museum's website includes a biography of Walter Rothschild, a history of the collections, and a description of the Rothschild Room, a reconstruction of the office in which the museum's original curators may have worked.

Related link:

"Something in the Genes: Walter Rothschild, Zoological Collector Extraordinaire": Lecture by Victor Gray, former director of the Rothschild Archive, to The Royal College of Surgeons, 25 October 2006 [PDF]

Liverpool Museum Honors Black Victorians

Via The Independent, 17 August 2007:

The International Slavery Museum opens in Liverpool later this week with an exhibition naming history's greatest black achievers. Some are household names, others are barely known. All are extraordinary.

"The transatlantic slave trade was the greatest forced migration in history," says David Fleming, director of National Museums Liverpool. "And yet the story of the mass enslavement of Africans by Europeans is one of resilience and survival against all odds and a testament to the unquenchable nature of the human spirit."

The museum aims to address ignorance and misunderstanding by looking at the deep and permanent impact of slavery and the slave trade on Africa, South America, the United States, the Caribbean, and Western Europe.

One way the museum will do that is through its "Black Achievers Wall," which will demonstrate how people of African descent have contributed to cultural transformation in the Americas and Europe. Nearly 80 individuals representing a diverse mix of backgrounds, eras, and disciplines will be included initially, with more to come.

Among the black Victorians who will be honored are:

John Archer - Campaigner, 1863-1932
In 1913, John Archer was elected Mayor of Battersea, the first person of African descent to reach such a position in the UK. An equality campaigner, he chaired the Pan-African Congress in London in 1921 and was president of the African Progress Union. [Related links: Untold London--England's First Black Mayor Speaks; British Library--Black Europeans: John Archer]


Paul Bogle - Cleric, 1822-1865
A hero in Jamaica, Bogle (shown here) was a Baptist deacon who used his education and wealth to help the black community. He led the Morant Bay Rebellion, in which many impoverished former slaves were killed by British troops sent to quell the uprising. He was hung by the British.






William Cuffay - Activist, 1788-1870
Cuffay (shown at the top of this post) was the son of a former slave and a leading figure in the Chartist movement, which opposed imbalances in the distribution of wealth in Britain. He was transported to Tasmania in 1848 for his role in organizing a popular protest. The significance of his contribution is evident from a report in The Times which referred to the London Chartist movement as "the black man and his party." The Chartist movement is considered the first major working-class movement in the world. [Related links: 100 Great Black Britons: William Cuffay; BBC Historic Figures: William Cuffay]


Mary Seacole - Nurse, 1805-1881 (read my previous post on Seacole and her memorial)
Seacole rose to prominence during the Crimean War when she funded her own journey to Turkey after British authorities refused her offers of help. There she opened a hospital and became a popular figure in Britain, receiving various awards for bravery. Her autobiography (shown here) was published in 1857.




Related link: Celebrating the Black Presence in Westminster, 1500-2000

Shown here: William Cuffay in Reynolds’s Political Instructor, 13 April 1850 (top); Paul Bogle (middle), cover of Mary Seacole's autobiography (bottom).

Watts Gallery Acquires Important Collection of Victorian Photographs

From The Times, 11 August 2007:

"The Watts Gallery at Compton in Surrey, created by the wife of the painter G. F. Watts towards the end of his life to show his paintings and store his archive, has acquired a collection of almost 5,000 Victorian photographs, almost none of them seen in public before, thanks to the generosity of one of its own trustees.

"In it we see Alma Tadema decorously leaning on the mantelpiece of his capacious studio; a youthful Ruskin with his friend Rossetti, and again at the end of his life in a dramatic profile by Frederick Hollyer, who photographed many of the Pre-Raphaelite artists; and the actress Ellen Terry [shown here] to whom Watts was briefly married when she was 16 and he 46.

"It was with his second wife, Mary, that Watts moved to Compton, near Guildford, and where she set up pottery workshops and built the gallery using local labour.

"The recording magnate and philanthropist Rob Dickins – famous for having signed Vangelis and the Sex Pistols when he was managing director of Warner Music – had already been a collector of nineteenth-century literature and correspondence, particularly about the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their circles. Over three decades he had been amassing his own archive of their lives, through which he gradually came to know them intimately, 'not just their talents but hopes, dreams, successes, and failures – almost all of them were vulnerable and flawed in their brilliance. As much as I thought I "knew" them as people, though, I had very little to go on visually.'

"Then, with the death in 1997 of Jeremy Maas, the art dealer and historian who specialised in Victoriana, he found a new dimension for his archive.

"'Jeremy Maas was one of the very few champions of Victorian art in the 1960s and 1970s, and over many years he’d put together this vast collection of Victorian photographs, many of which have never been seen in public,” Dickins said. “When I bought his archive I realised that I had the final piece of a jigsaw and my own collection became in its way, complete.'

"Then, after becoming a trustee of Watts Gallery in 2004, he realised how the sepia prints could be a resource for others. He intends the rest of his archive to go the gallery after its refurbishment.

"'The Watts Gallery in Compton is a magical place at which another, mostly lost, England exists but which unfortunately is showing the ravages of age (after all, it is over 100) and which desperately needs and is thankfully beginning to receive the support and recognition that will make it a unique venue to see the work of G. F. Watts,' he said.

"'By donating my collection to the Watts Gallery, I hope to add another facet, one in which the work and lives of Victorian artists can be studied as well as the chance to view such extraordinary people and their contemporaries at the dawn of the age of photography.'

"Last month he added a new acquisition to the gift, a drawing of the chapel the Wattses built close to the gallery, and three signed photographs of them.

"The Watts Gallery is in serious need of refurbishment and if a £10 million fundraising campaign – to which the Heritage Lottery Fund has promised to contribute £4.3 million if it can be matched – is successful by the spring, it will close next year for the work to be done on restoring the Grade II listed building and conserving the collection and archive.

"Meanwhile, a selection of 200 of the photographs will be the subject of the last temporary exhibition at the Watts before its refurbishment, opening on September 15 and running until the end of the year."

--end of The Times article--

On the Watts Gallery website, Dickins adds: “G. F. Watts was a visionary not only in art but also in the needs of society, campaigning for the poor and dispossessed as well as against the then common use of animals and birds in fashion. Watts Gallery is the best way to see and appreciate his work and the perfect home for my collection of photographs. My interest in this period was first sparked by the paintings of the Victorian artists but caught fire when I read more about the lives of Rossetti, Morris, Whistler, Solomon, Shields, Hunt, and the poet Swinburne ... with their interest in sex, drugs, and art, I think their lives were very rock’n roll.”

Subjects included in the temporary exhibition, which runs through 31 December:

Royalty and politicians: Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Gladstone, Disraeli

Influential thinkers: Ruskin, Carlyle, Darwin, J S Mill

Literary greats: Tennyson, Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins

Artists: Leighton, E J Poynter, Lady Butler, the Alma Tademas

G. F. Watts and his circle: Tennyson, Prinseps

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement: Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones

Artists at home in the studio: Leighton, Val Prinsep, Philip Morris

Artists’ dress and costume: Henry Holiday, Dalziel dressed up

The artist’s muse: Fanny Cornforth, Phoebe "Effie" Cookson, Edith Holman Hunt, and Margaret Burne-Jones

Satellites of the art world: John Tenniel, Phil May, George Cruikshank

Links:

Watts Gallery Virtual Tour (BBC)

George Frederick Watts RA (1817-1904): An Overview (The Victorian Web)

Victorian Dinos Get an Upgrade

The Victorian dinosaur models in Crystal Palace Park, London, were granted status as a Grade I-listed monument today by the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport. They had been listed Grade II since 1973.

The models were constructed in 1852-54 in the grounds of the Crystal Palace after the building was moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham following the Great Exhibition of 1851.

They were created to demonstrate the process of evolution -- notably five years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. They were built at the lower end of the park, near Penge, and were accompanied by exhibits illustrating the geology that existed at the time of each dinosaur. The site soon came to be known as Dinosaur Court.

The models, comprising 15 separate prehistoric species, collectively formed the first-ever "dinosaur theme park," although their accuracy has long been disproved.

"The prehistoric animal sculptures and associated geological formations provide an insight into the mid-nineteenth century reconstruction of dinosaur species that had only recently been discovered," said Margaret Hodge, culture minister, in a statement.

"They are believed to be unique and are clearly of exceptional historic interest in a national and probably international context. I am delighted to upgrade their list entry to reflect their importance.”

They were designed by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and built out of brick and artificial stone on a framework of iron rods. The park's geological strata exhibits were constructed at the same time by engineer and mineralogist James Campbell.

A £4 million restoration of Dinosaur Court was undertaken in 2002 by the London Borough of Bromley with contributions from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Government’s SRB scheme, and Bromley Council.

Related links and resources:

Crystal Palace Panoramics (BBC)

Crystal Palace Park, London Borough of Bromley

Crystal Palace Foundation

Martin Rudwick, Scenes From Deep Time (University of Chicago Press, 1992)

Steve McCarthy and Mick Gilbert, Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (Crystal Palace Foundation, 1994)

Shown here: Megalosauri on the prowl at Crystal Palace Park, with pterodactyls in back. Hawkins incorrectly portrayed the former as a quadruped with a sloping gait rather than the two-legged agile predator we now know it was.

Salmagundi #5

My fifth collection of odds and ends ...

Behold the handiwork of musician Ryan Adams (left)! This is the front cover he designed for Bram Stoker's Dracula as part of publisher Penguin's "My Penguin" program. Adams used oil paints to create an "outline or silhouette juxtaposed with the idea of the castle -- you know, Dracula's headquarters, his hang." He continues: "In my opinion, Dracula is about how suffocating the Victorian times were. The bonus is, you get vampires! I can't reveal my secrets, but I can reveal that no garlic was harmed in the making of this cover." This is a cool idea, actually ("My Penguin," I mean, not Adams's exegesis) ... you buy a "naked" book for £5 from a list of a dozen classics (including, besides Dracula, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), then "draw, paint, scribble, or scratch" your own cover for it.

Queen Victoria is getting rained on in Kolkata.

Think the Victorians were crazy? Check out The Little Professor's list of links on the Victorians and mental illness.

Two interesting picture sources have come to my attention:

• British Library Images Online is intended for commercial picture buyers but makes for fascinating browsing even if you don't fall into that category. The site features "thousands of the greatest images from the British Library's collections," which include manuscripts, rare books, musical texts, and maps spanning almost 3,000 years. It's searchable and conveniently divided into 15 subject areas, including buildings, historical events, military and combat, religion and belief, and entertainment.


• English Heritage's Viewfinder boasts "illustrations of the industrial age, social history, architecture, and archaeology dating from the 1840s to the present day." You can search by keyword, theme, place name, or "story" (for example, "England at Work"). There's a wonderful collection of the work of Victorian photographer Henry W. Taunt (1842-1922), whose favorite subjects included the Thames River and Oxfordshire. York & Son, one of the largest English producers of lantern slides in the second half of the nineteenth century, is also well represented. Also included are Philip Delamotte's photographs of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham.

And finally ... did you know that there's a variety of rhubarb named for Queen Victoria? Nor did I.

Shark Mania

In honor of "Shark Week," which is currently terrifying even those of us who live several hundred miles from an ocean (thanks, Discovery Channel!) and those of you in the UK enjoying a bout of "shark mania," I offer the following three Victorian close encounters with Jaws's great-great-grandparents.

From The Times, 12 July 1848: "AN INTRUDER ON SEA BATHERS -- A few days ago, as one of the fishermen of Hunstanton, Norfolk, was employed catching crabs near the shore of that watering place, he observed something of a most formidable size approaching him in the water. The tide was receding, and the man, who was without companions, was within fifty yards of the shore, but much above the waist in the sea, when, nothing daunted, he struck a severe blow at his new acquaintance, which he soon discovered to be a shark. A regular combat ensued, the man aiming heavy blows at the head of the fish and the latter fighting with his tail, with which he struck the fisherman two or three times severely on the chest. The man, fortunately for himself, never lost his footing, his presence of mind, or his strength, and ultimately succeeded in capturing the monster. The tide continuing to ebb, the shark was left on the dry sands, where the old man was soon standing, with much satisfaction, over his captured enemy. The shark measured nine feet in length and was presumed to weigh about 30 stone. The spot on which it was first seen was close to the place frequented by bathers, a machine having on that day frequently conveyed parties there."

From The Times, 3 October 1862: "CAPTURE OF A SHARK -- A gentleman writing from the Isle of Wight narrates a successful capture he and a party made of a shark. He observed a large fish floundering in the sea, near the shore, and concluding it was a shark, from its turning over on its side to seize some prey, he summoned some fishermen and manned a boat, taking with him a hook on an iron chain baited with beef. 'This,' he says, 'on approaching the monster, we dragged behind us. He immediately seized it in his rapacious jaws, and then tried with his teeth to cut the chain; he almost turned his stomach inside out to disgorge the hook, but in vain. The struggle lasted half an hour, when, quite spent, he suffered his head to be drawn above water, and, confining his tail with a noose, we drew him to shore and despatched him with great difficulty by beating him on the head. He measured 18 ft. 4 in., and from his enormous mouth, containing six rows of hard, flat, sharp-pointed teeth (of which I counted 120), and the total absence of spiracles, its skin rough, hard, and prickly, I judged it to be the carcharias vulgaris, or white shark, which is, according to Cuvier, sometimes found on the British coast."

From The Times, 29 September 1864: "BITTEN BY A SHARK -- On Monday morning, while Mr Barland, druggist, Home-Street, and some other gentlemen were bathing outside the eastern breakwater at Granton, a shark suddenly rose and seized hold of Mr Barland by the left leg, biting him in three places. Fortunately Mr. Barland was near the bulwarks, and notwithstanding the severe nature of the injuries he had sustained he was able to get out of the water. The shark was afterwards seen by other bathers, who say that this strange visitor to the Firth appeared to be about three feet in length."

Morris Treasures Saved From Rising Waters

Via The Guardian, 1 August 2007:

"As the floods recede, tales of selfless heroism emerge. At Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, once home of the Victorian arts and crafts pioneer William Morris, staff and villagers stepped in to rescue tapestries, furniture, and works of art as water seeped up through the floor. And they did more: with the neighbouring village cut off from the outside world, the manor's manager, Tristan Molloy, took to a boat to deliver supplies from the manor's well-stocked restaurant refrigerators to local residents."

Bravo!

Says the Society of Antiquaries (London), which owns and manages the property:

"Prompt action by Kelmscott Manor's curatorial staff has ensured that unique works of art made by William Morris have been saved from flood damage at the Oxfordshire home of the arts and crafts movement founder.

"Tapestries, furniture, and paintings were rescued as water lapped at the steps and seeped through the floor of the historic manor house, described in Morris's Utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) as 'the only house in England worth inhabiting.'

"While the village of Kelmscott was rendered inaccessible by three feet of water, the Manor’s on-site managers, Jane Milne and Tristan Molloy, battled to raise heavy furniture onto palettes and move irreplaceable works to safety, including the important 'Cabbage and Vine' tapestry, woven entirely by Morris himself, and a portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Morris's wife, Jane, called 'The Blue Silk Dress.'

"Jane Milne said they had been helped enormously by residents from the village; in return Tristan Molloy toured the village in his homemade boat dispensing food from the Kelmscott cafe to neighbours who were left without electricity for two days as a result of the worst floods in the area since July 1968.

"Water levels are now described as stable. David Gaimster, General Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London, said: 'Clearly we won’t know the extent of any damage to the fabric of the building until the water has receded and a proper assessment can be made, but everyone is very relieved that Jane and Tristan are safe and the collections have escaped damage.'

Shown here: Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire

Corf-Batters and Bum-Bailiffs: Victorian Miners' Language Catalogued

There's a fascinating review in yesterday's Guardian of Pitmatic: The Talk of the North-East Coalfield (Northumbria University Press):

"A dialect so dense that it held up social reforms has been rescued from obscurity by the publication of its first dictionary.

"Thousands of terms used in Pitmatic, the oddly-named argot of north-east miners for more than 150 years, have been compiled through detailed research in archives and interviews with the last generation to talk of kips, corf-batters, and arse-loops.

"First recorded in Victorian newspapers, the language was part of the intense camaraderie of underground working which excluded even friendly outsiders such as the parliamentary commissioners pressing for better conditions in the pits in 1842.

"'The barriers to our intercourse were formidable,' they wrote in their report on encountering the Pitmatic dialect. 'Numerous mining technicalities, northern provincialisms, peculiar intonation, and accents and rapid and indistinct utterance rendered it essential for us to devote time to the study of these peculiarities ere we could translate and write the evidence.'

"The first Pitmatic dictionary, including pit recollections and analysis of the origins of the dialect's words, has been compiled by Bill Griffiths, the country's foremost Geordie scholar, whose previous work includes the standard Dictionary of North East Dialect. His new book reveals an exceptionally rich combination of borrowings from Old Norse, Dutch, and a score of other languages, with inventive usages dreamed up by the miners themselves.

"'There's been an urgency to the project, copying the handwritten diaries and songs stored away in family homes,' said Mr Griffiths, who also collected booklets, pit newspapers, and magazines and spent hours interviewing ex-miners.

"Although the north-east was once the world capital of mining - hence the phrase carrying coals to Newcastle - the last major pit closed in 2005 and the industry's traces are vanishing.

"'The golden age of writing about the pits by working pitmen for working pitmen and their families is over,' said Mr Griffiths. 'It is time to save and share what we can.'

"Part-financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund, in a three-stage dialect study of the north-east called Wor Language, the dictionary reveals the deeply practical nature of Pitmatic. The dialect was originally called Pitmatical, and its curious name was a parallel to mathematics, intended to stress the skill, precision, and craft of the colliers' work.

"Term after term is related to mining practices, such as stappil, a shaft with steps beside the coal seam, or corf-batters, boys who scraped out filthy baskets used for hauling coal to the pithead.

"Other words are more earthy: arse-loop is a rope chair used when repairing shafts and a candyman or bum-bailiff is a despised official who evicts strikers from company-owned homes."

--end of The Guardian article--

Shown here: "The Miner," The Graphic, 15 April 1876.

Staying On Track

George Bradshaw (1801-1853), compiler of railway guides, is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's "Life of the Day" today. (The full bio is available at the DNB website for the next week.)

Bradshaw is one of my favorite Victorians because his particular set of abilities is so characteristic of the period: he was a disciplined man whose painstakingly detailed work was undertaken in service of extending the fruits of the Industrial Revolution to the British public (in this case, the steam railway) and making that public exponentially more conscious of time, imposing order and regularity on travelers through schedules produced with new printing technologies and disseminated through newly formed commercial distribution channels.

During an apprenticeship to a Manchester engraver, Bradshaw discovered the technical and artistic pleasures of map making. He produced engraved maps of Lancashire roads as well as maps of the canals of his native north England.

This interest in documenting travel routes was extended to the nascent railway system in 1830, when he produced Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables, a small cloth-bound book that sold for 6d. In 1840 Bradshaw's Railway Companion was produced, containing section maps and monthly timetables. The first edition of Bradshaw's Monthly Railway Guide appeared in 1841; Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide ("the foreign Bradshaw"), followed six years later. The monthly Bradshaw continued publication until 1961, more than 100 years after its founder's death.

The DNB notes that the monthly Bradshaw was notoriously hard to read because of its small format and print: "This presented a challenge to Victorian opticians to produce spectacles which were serviceable for reading Bradshaw--an essential companion for railway travellers. You did not simply 'look up' train times: you 'studied' Bradshaw. But the word 'Bradshaw' became synonymous with incomprehensibility: the guide was pilloried in Punch and Vanity Fair and was the subject of music-hall jokes [click here for an example]. When the actress Fanny Kemble was asked what she read to send her to sleep she replied: 'Why, the foreign Bradshaw, of course.'"

Everyone consulted Bradshaw, even certain Transylvanian vampires. In the second chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker discovers the Count in his library, reclining on a sofa and leafing through a copy. As the business manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre, Stoker would have been intimately familiar with the Bradshaw guides; they would have been indispensable as he planned the company's extensive provincial tours.

Bradshaw was an active and philanthropic Quaker. He died in Norway in 1853 after contracting cholera and is buried there.

Shown here: Top--George Bradshaw by R. Evans (1841); Bottom--a typical page of a Bradshaw guide, from an 1850 edition.

Note to Readers: Search the Peeper!

In response to several requests, I've added a custom Google search engine to my blog. It's located at the bottom of the white sidebar on the right-hand side of the page. I hope this will make it easier for you to find information on the site.

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions. Thanks, and enjoy!

(To learn how to create a custom Google search engine on your own website or blog, please read my response to a question in the comments to this post.)

Mary Seacole Gets Her Due

It looks like Mary Seacole, the celebrated Crimean War nurse who was the daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free-black Jamaican, will finally receive a much-deserved tribute in the form of a memorial at St Thomas’s Hospital, London.

The Mary Seacole Memorial Statue Appeal was launched in November 2003. The appeal’s original target of £475,000 was recently reduced after the construction company Sir Robert McAlpine offered to build the monument at cost and the hospital offered the site, reducing the expenses associated with acquiring land for the memorial.

The Times reports that a design competition will now move forward and will seek ideas for the memorial from artists around the world. The selection panel, chaired by Baroness Amos, leader of the House of Lords, "will be looking for a design that not only represents Seacole but also reflects the scope of her activities and journey from Jamaica to the Crimea, via London, and back to Britain." It expects to announce the winning design next spring.

The memorial will celebrate the life and work of the self-taught nurse, herbalist, and businesswoman who made her own way to the Crimea in 1854, where she set up a rest, refreshment, and nursing post for troops near Sebastopol.

Her work won the gratitude of soldiers and the admiration of officers, and became known to Britons back home through the reporting of William Howard Russell, The Times’s legendary correspondent in the Crimea. When Seacole arrived in London penniless after the war ended, The Times sponsored an appeal that was supported by dukes and generals.

That appeal, and her bestselling autobiography (Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Mary Seacole in Many Lands), helped put Seacole back on her feet. After a quiet and apparently happy later life, which included working as a masseuse for the Princess of Wales, she died in 1881 at the age of 76. She is buried at St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, northwest London.

In 2004 Seacole was named "Greatest Black Briton" in a BBC poll. The Albert Charles Challen portrait of Mary Seacole shown above currently graces a Royal Mail stamp.

Related links:

http://www.maryseacole.com/

"Seacole memorial a step closer," The Times, 1 August 2006

Florence Nightingale Museum

Agony at Sea

Is this the greatest British painting of the nineteenth century?

Historian Simon Schama thinks so, and makes a pretty solid case, too, in his series "Simon Schama's Power of Art" (originally aired last October and November on BBC Two and now airing in the United States on PBS).

This is JMW Turner's Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) from 1840. (Click on the image for a larger version.) John Ruskin once owned this oil painting, which is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It measures 90.8 x 122.6 cm (35 3/4 x 48 1/4 inches).

The painting was based on a poem that described a slave ship caught in a typhoon and on the true story of the slave ship Zong, whose captain, Luke Collingwood, had (in 1781) thrown sick and dying slaves overboard so he could claim compensation from his insurers for lost "cargo."

A replica of the Zong was sailed up the Thames in March 2007 as part of the UK's national commemoration of the bicentennary of the abolition of the slave trade. GrahamIX has some nice shots at Flickr.

Here's what Schama says:

"In 1840 in London, an international convention of the Great and Good was planned to express righteous indignation against slavery in the United States. Turner, initiated into the cause many years before by his patron, Walter Fawkes, wanted to have his say in paint. So how does he do it? By being a thorn in the side of self congratulation.

"He reaches back 60 years to resurrect one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the British Empire, when 132 Africans - men, women and children, their hands and feet fettered - were thrown overboard into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean. And Turner has drowned you in this moment, pulled you into this terrifying chasm in the ocean, drenched you in this bloody light - exactly the hue you sense in your blood-filled optic nerves when you close your eyes in blinding sunlight.

"Though almost all of his critics believed that the painting represented an all-time low in Turner's reckless disregard for the rules of art, it was in fact his greatest triumph in the sculptural carving of space."

So...is this the greatest British painting of the nineteenth century? If not, what painting would you nominate instead?

Shiny Pretty Things

Queen Elizabeth II has reportedly dumped her official jeweller, Garrard, ending the 164-year link between the world's oldest jewellery house and the royal family. [Read the report in The Daily Mail.]

Garrard, the upmarket jeweller based in London's Mayfair, was originally chosen by Queen Victoria to be the official crown jeweller in 1843.

The little-known jeweller Harry Collins has been selected by the Queen to take over the coveted role of caring for the crown jewels and the monarch's personal collection.

Collins runs a family-owned antique and modern jewellery business at Tunbridge Wells and will travel to London once a week to tend to the Queens' collection of priceless tiaras, necklaces, and brooches.

He has been the Queen's private jeweller for five years and is the first jeweller ever to have his workshop in Buckingham Palace.

Shown here: The famous Small Diamond Crown of Queen Victoria, made for her by Garrard, which measures just 9 centimetres wide and 10 centimetres tall. Victoria first used the crown at the State Opening of Parliament in February 1871. She subsequently wore it as required on state occasions.

Victorian Things: Bashaw by Matthew Cotes Wyatt

Meet Bashaw, hound extraordinaire.

The Victoria and Albert Museum introduces us to this life-size sculpture of a Newfoundland dog commissioned by John William Ward, 1st Earl of Dudley, which was to have been placed in Lord Dudley's house in Park Lane, London.

"Lord Dudley commissioned the portrait in 1831 from the sculptor Matthew Cotes Wyatt (1777-1862). He wanted not only a portrait of [his favourite dog] Bashaw, but also a great work of art. Money no object, Bashaw was taken [from Lord Dudley's country seat, Himley Hall, Staffordshire] about 50 times to sit for Wyatt at his London studio. Lord Dudley searched through family jewels and chose a combination of Persian topaz and sardonyx for his eyes.

"Unfortunately, Lord Dudley died in 1833 before the sculpture was completed and his executors refused to pay Wyatt the five thousand guinea fee. It had been an extravagant commission: a full-length marble statue of a man by the eminent sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, for example, would only have cost about three thousand pounds.

"In his own lifetime, Wyatt’s sculpture of Bashaw was enthusiastically received. When it was exhibited at Wyatt's studio in 1834, the Court Journal declared that 'the work must be regarded as a triumph of art', while the Literary Gazette judged it 'the most elaborate representation of a quadruped ever produced by ancient or modern art ... singularly effective, magnificent, and unique'.

"It was also a popular exhibit at the Great Exhibition of 1851, with the title 'The Faithful Friend of Man Trampling Underfoot His Most Insidious Enemy.'

"Remaining unsold at the sale of Wyatt's effects, Bashaw became the property of the sculptor's son James. In 1870, he lent it to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). This time, the critics were not all in favour of Bashaw.

"John Ruskin scathingly wrote in a letter dated May 1871: 'It showed that the persons who produced it had seen everything, and practised everything; and misunderstood everything they saw, and misapplied everything they did … and misunderstanding of everything had passed through them as the mud does through earthworms, and here at last was their worm-cast of a Production.'

"Bashaw was also criticised in the Art Journal in January 1870: ‘The great placid beast is trampling with calm indifference on a bronze serpent, ingeniously contrived to form a support to the body of the oppressor … We are glad to learn from the label that this work is only on loan.'

"Bashaw was sold at auction in 1887. It then changed hands four more times before being bought by the V&A for £200 in 1960."

Shown here: Matthew Cotes Wyatt, Bashaw and detail of head. © SCRAN/ Victoria and Albert Museum.

Was A Scottish Warlock the Inspiration for Mr. Hyde?

From The Independent, 15 June 2007:

To the great and good of seventeenth-century Edinburgh, Major Thomas Weir was the epitome of puritanical respectability. An esteemed preacher who railed against sin from his pulpit in the city's West Bow thoroughfare, he and his sister Jean were considered so devout they were known locally as the "Bowhead Saints."

So it came as something of a surprise to his devoted faithful when the Major confessed, at the age of 70, to leading a darker life as a warlock behind a string of horrendous crimes including bestiality, incest, black magic, and necromancy.

His trial and subsequent execution for witchcraft in 1670 has gone down in the annals of Edinburgh's folklore. But it appears Major Weir boasts an even more formidable legacy: it was his bizarre, schizophrenic life that Robert Louis Stevenson used as his inspiration for his most infamous of literary creations - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

According to the BBC Four documentary "Ian Rankin Investigates: Dr Jekyll," the split personality of Major Weir both fascinated and terrified a young Stevenson who was haunted by the ghost stories his nanny, known as "Cummy," would tell him when he was little.

"What made Cummy's bedtime stories for young Louis so terrifying was that they really happened - just outside his bedroom window on the haunted streets of Edinburgh," said the documentary's presenter, the crime writer Ian Rankin.

Stevenson's novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, stunned Victorian London when it was published in 1886 and became an instant best-seller.

Rankin believes that the incredible duplicity of Major Weir, who for decades was able to convince his peers that he was a man beyond sin only to be condemned to death as a follower of the devil provided a perfect muse for the character of Dr Jekyll.

Described by Stevenson as a "tall black man" with a "grim countenance and a big nose," Major Weir was the Scottish equivalent of a holy warrior. Throughout the Bishops' Wars, which pitted Scotland's clergy against Charles I, he fought on behalf of Scotland's strictest religious sect, the Covenators, and, by the time he confessed, was regarded as the most pious man in Edinburgh.

Sentenced to death by strangulation and burning, it is said that while tied to the stake the former preacher who had spent a lifetime telling his flock to ask forgiveness refused to repent. "Let me alone," he said as the executioner tried one last time to make him pray. "I will not. I have lived as a Beast and I must die as a Beast."

Rankin also believes that the city of Edinburgh itself may have been just as much an inspiration for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as the ghost stories of Major Weir. Stevenson would have been aware of the way the city's elite would often lead duplicitous lives, extolling the virtues of Victorian moralism while drinking and whoring in the city's poorer old quarters.

"The city itself has a split personality," said Rankin. "Stevenson himself lived a double life, enjoying the kind of company that would have appalled his upright and god-fearing parents. The city's haunted and violent past is all around you; it's impossible to escape."

--end of The Independent article--

As commenter Trish notes, BBC One is currently airing a six-part modern version of the Jekyll and Hyde story.

Shown here: Henry Van der Weyde (1838-1924, London), Mr. Mansfield, albumen print cabinet card, circa 1895.

Richard Mansfield (1857-1907) was an actor and producer. He appeared in several productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas during stints with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company but was best known for the dual role depicted in this double exposure: he starred in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in both New York and London. The stage adaptation opened in London in 1887, a year after the publication of the novella by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Mansfield's performance was of such ferocity that it was rumored he was questioned by Scotland Yard in connection with the notorious Jack the Ripper murders in 1888.

Photo from the American Museum of Photography online exhibit "Seeing Double: Creating Clones with a Camera."

Victorian Things: Vase by William de Morgan

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City) introduces us to a beautiful vase by William De Morgan (1839–1917).

"Beasts and dogs among stylized foliate motifs in a ruby luster on an ivory ground decorate this vase by William De Morgan. A designer and master potter associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as a founding member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1888), De Morgan studied at the Royal Academy Schools before leaving his studies to work for William Morris' firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. as a designer of stained glass and a painter of furniture panels.

"De Morgan noticed an iridescence that resulted from the firing of silver paint used in the stained-glass process, thus sparking his interest in ceramic luster glazes, for which he later became famous. His inspiration came primarily from Iznik (Turkey) and Persian ceramics as well as Italian Renaissance maiolica and sixteenth-century Hispano-Moresque wares.

"In the 1870s, De Morgan (shown here) concentrated on decorating tiles. His mastery in this area culminated in a commission to copy Sir Frederic Leighton's collection of Persian tiles for the Arab Hall at Leighton House, London, in 1879. In 1882, he moved to a larger workshop in Merton Abbey, where he produced and decorated hollowware and continued to experiment with luster glazes."

This vase was made sometime between 1888 and 1898. It was manufactured at Sands End Pottery and is 13 3/4 in. (34.9 cm) tall.

Related links:

The De Morgan Centre in southwest London is a permanent home for work by William De Morgan, the Victorian ceramic artist, and his wife Evelyn, the painter. The Centre also houses an archive of papers relating to their lives and their circle, a reserve collection, and a temporary exhibition space. Visitors are welcome.

"Design Reform" (Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)