BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Sentiment and Business
George Eastman, 1854-1932

You push the button. We do the rest. Early advertising slogan, George Eastman.

My dad’s interest in photography, he told me, dated from Kodak’s grand giveaway camera, which he got in 1930. But those gifts were only for kids whose 12th birthday fell in 1930 and whose parent brought them in to their local Kodak shop during May. And my dad was born in 1916. So either dad told it wrong, or his mother passed him off as 12, or she knew the camera shop owner and badgered ‘brownies’ for all three of her boys (dad, 14; Bill, 12; and Dick, 10). My stock of grandma stories inclines me to the third alternative. It was a genius move by Kodak, investment and gift, and coming at the nadir of the Depression gave the firm’s home factory and licensees an assured market (in 1930 Kodak still enjoyed a near-monopoly in developing its innovative roll films). And it came, the ads said, as a gift “with the compliments of” Kodak’s founder, George Eastman, and his motives were both “Sentiment” and “Business.” An honest man, was old George, born near Waterville, NY, on July 11, 1854 and, in 1930, still Eastman-Kodak’s leading spirit. Eastman had always done his best for his employees in terms of wages, hours, and profit-sharing, and he wanted to keep them on the payroll during hard times. As a philanthropist, he’d showered gifts on his adopted town (Rochester) and further afield too, with large donations to black colleges and public health clinics as far away as London, England, and Stockholm, Sweden. The total of his gifts, in today’s dollar values, might amount to as much as $2 trillion, often “anonymous,” and that’s not counting the 532,000 ‘brownies’ he intended for 12-year-olds in the USA and Canada. They were literally brown, in faux leather boxes with a gold seal, a special package for Kodak’s standard issue “Hawkeye” camera, its lens mounted on bellows which gave the photographer, however amateur, finer control over field and focus. With it came a free roll of 120 film, or (potentially) 6+ million photographs to be taken, developed, and printed. On the business side, too, Eastman hoped that the gift would create more dedicated amateur shutter-snappers, more films to develop and print. Eastman’s business had been built on his own delight in photography, his technical genius in developing both new films and simple cameras, and (he believed) his equal genius in seeing his whole enterprise as a public business. In 1930, though, he was almost finished. Afflicted by excruciating pain from (undiagnosed) spinal deterioration, George Eastman subsided first into a wheelchair and then into a suicide, which he claimed as a personal gift to himself. “To my friends: my work is completed. Why wait?” ©.

[Stanley]

A chip off the old block
Arthur Dee, 1579-1651

You are an alchemist. Make gold of that. Timon in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

Historians of science have long accepted that the ‘occult’ must be included in their subject, particularly in early modern Europe. Indeed several leaders of the ‘scientific revolution’ of that era (even Isaac Newton) were more-than-dabblers in astrology, alchemy, and other mysteries. Among the deeper English practitioners was John Dee (1527-1608) whose arts and eruditions made him a counselor of kings and queens, great nobles, even leading theologians. His successes enabled him to amass what was reputed to be England’s largest library. Dee the astrologer chose Queen Elizabeth’s coronation date; Dee the doctor of physick prescribed her medicines and ointments; Dee the courtier and politician probably spied for her and certainly helped to identify her enemies; Dee the intellectual urged upon Elizabeth and her realm the attractions of seaborne empire. In the midst of all this, John Dee also fathered a crowd of children (eight in all), one of whom followed in his father’s path to become early 17th-century England’s favorite occultist, the master of many arts, the amasser of much knowledge, and an even more prolific author than his father. This son, Arthur Dee, was born on July 13, 1579 in his father’s mansion house in Mortlake, then a village suburb, now engulfed in London, but appropriately named for the magical doings of John and then Arthur Dee. From the ages of 4 to 12 Arthur accompanied his father on an odyssey to the courts and centers of learning, of Poland, Bohemia, and several German states. Returning home already burned with several languages, Arthur was educated at Westminster School and Oxford, married, and launched his career first as a medical doctor, albeit unlicensed, and soon thereafter as an occultist. Arthur’s first big break was to be appointed physician to Anne of Denmark, King James’s wife. Then came 14 years as chief physician to Tsar Michael Romanov, during which Arthur became wealthy and began to emulate his father as astrologer and mystic. This magical aura helped him, like his father, to negotiate the political and religious challenges of a nation at war with itself, and he included among his confidantes not only royalists but also Puritans, among the latter John Winthrop, Jr., a future governor of Connecticut and the first “American” member of the Royal Society. It’s likely that Winthrop’s favorite cure-all, a red purging powder he called ‘rubila,’ was derived from Arthur Dee. Dee himself died in 1651, but we may say that his spirit lives on, today, in our credulous republic and its odder political devotions. Compared to the Dees, Q Anon is a mere charlatan. ©

[Stanley]

A baker becomes a mathematician
George Green, 1793-1841

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics. Galileo.

Having walked the plank during my freshman year at college, I’ve always been awed by the higher mathematics and its practitioners. And I feel only reverence for anyone who, brought up to some other calling, came to mathematics later in life and made important contributions to the discipline. Such was George Green, born on July 14, 1793. His birthplace, ‘Wheatsheaf Yard,’ in Nottingham, England, was appropriate for a baker’s son, and stayed so as his father’s business grew to include flour milling. After rudimentary schooling, young George worked right along with his father, in the bakery and then as mill manager. In 1829 he inherited the business (a half-share with his sister). And that was that: a respectable entrepreneur and, except for the facts of his continued liaison with the lacemaker Jane Smith, and their eight children, a respectable place in Nottinghamshire’s business classes. And he did do those things, and in the end (1841) was properly buried in Jane Smith’s churchyard, but he had also become a mathematician, his first paper coming in 1826. George later used his miller’s profits to enter Cambridge University, continue his mathematical studies with signal success (graduating fourth in his year, 1839) and to carry on publishing important mathematical papers in English and continental journals. And today no one knows exactly how George Green did it. He was certainly an auto-didact but probably had some help along the way, perhaps from the headmaster of Nottingham’s Free Grammar School (a Cambridge grad), likely from reading in the respectable mathematical collection in the city’s subscription library, later and more certainly from one who read Green’s published papers and helped him get into Cambridge, a mathematical gentleman called Edward Bromhead (1789-1855) who was a graduate of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge. However it happened, it was obscure. George’s pathbreaking work (which I can’t begin to explain) remained known within the mathematical community (some of his theorems are known by his surname), but to the world he came from nowhere and, with his death, he returned there. In the 20th century George Green was rediscovered by historians of science who pieced together his unusual, even miraculous life well enough that, at his bicentenary (in 1993) a plaque to his memory was placed in Westminster Abbey. It’s next to Isaac Newton’s tomb and among other memorials to Lord Kelvin, James Clerk Maxwell, and Michael Faraday. The plaque bears a depiction of George Green’s flour mill, which seems appropriate: even, mathematically, exactly right. ©

[Stanley]

who was then the gentleman?
The Death of John Ball, 1381

When Adam delved and Eve spanned, who was then the gentleman? Attributed to John Ball, 1381.

In Chaucer’s English, that would read ‘Whanne Adam dalfe and Eve span, Who was þanne a gentil man?” Indeed Geoffrey Chaucer may have been familiar with the proverb, for it was ‘in circulation’ in 14th-century England. That it was proverbial suggests a social crisis, for who was really ‘gentil’ was not an acceptable query in a society where caste and class were marks of the divine order, fixed by birth and history, reinforced daily by the facts of life (and death), and preached as holy writ from every pulpit in the realm. But John Ball preached from this proverbial text, in public, and for doing so he was hanged, drawn, and quartered on July 15, 1381, and to improve upon the point his five body parts (his head and his four ‘quarters’) were placed on public display, in London and elsewhere. For Ball was chaplain-leader of Wat Tyler’s Peasant Revolt, a traveling mobocracy that had marched through southeastern England, then had dared to demand justice from his sacred Majesty Richard II. Failing that, the mob had entered London, burned the palace of the king’s brother, John of Gaunt, and executed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord High Treasurer. It was perhaps the highest tide of a century of troubles, and it subsided quickly when Tyler himself (thinking to renegotiate with King Richard) was treacherously murdered at Smithfield, London’s meat market, on June 15, 1381. The rebels dispersed, John Ball went into hiding. He was captured, brought to London, and tortured. His confession (probably a forgery) was ‘published,’ and he was then, duly and ghoulishly, executed. Other than that, we know little about him. Like the peasants he helped rile up, he was of obscure origin, but probably became a chantry priest at York, then at Colchester. In his travels he seems to have acquired some of the fire of the rebel priest John Wyclif, who wanted to recapture the humble Christ for a humble people (and in the common tongue). It’s likely too that Ball imbibed some of the radical spirits of the Lollards. And because of the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and repeated gusts of regressive taxation, there was plenty of discontent about. John Ball preached discontent loudly enough to be excommunicated (more than once, oddly) by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and so had acquired a reputation. It was not strange that there should have been a Peasant’s Revolt, nor that John Ball was one of its leaders, nor that he became one of its martyrs. His articulacy in his peoples’ cause brought him fame and death in 1381, but his proverbial riddle needs still to be asked—and answered. ©

[Stanley]

The art of real magic.
John Henry Anderson, 1814-1874

It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done. Terry Pratchett.

In the Library of Congress there’s a 1914 picture of Harry Houdini visiting the tomb of John Henry Anderson, in Aberdeen, Scotland. Anderson had died in the year (1874) of Houdini’s birth, 1914 was the centenary of Anderson’s birth, and Harry loved coincidences, but his visit was more than coincidence. Houdini paid for the tomb’s restoration and rejuvenation, and he wanted to see how it had all turned out. His visit was an homage, for like Houdini John Henry Anderson was a great magician, one of the greatest of his time and rivalled by only a few. Houdini also liked the story of Anderson’s ascent from humble beginnings to a premier place on the world’s stage. John Henry Anderson was born a stonemason’s son on July 16, 1814. Wanting excitement, or to escape poverty, Anderson (at 10!) joined a traveling theatrical troupe where he served as ‘gopher.’ He also learned some magical tricks from an old Italian stage hand, enough to start performing at schools . By 1837 he’d gained repertoire enough—and ego enough—to perform at one of Edinburgh’s prime locations, and for a 100-day run. It was then that Anderson gained (from none other than Sir Walter Scott) one of his publicity slogans, ‘The Wizard of the North.’ Anderson used that handle while performing in Britain and Europe (Scotland is north of many places), but seems to have dropped it when (in 1850) he began his first world tour. By then, Anderson had performed in London for Victoria and Albert, and in St. Petersburg for Nicholas I. Understandably, he’d developed a swelled head and, with it, a taste for further fame, and riches. The 19th century loved magic and loved Anderson enough that he built his own theaters, first in London and then in Glasgow. He also developed some trademarks, not least his pretty female assistants, one of whom he married. In due course their daughters assisted on stage, and along the same path came mistress-assistants and two illegitimate children (whom Anderson recognized and supported financially). If this was his seamy side, he also became famous for exposing the frauds of spiritualism and insisting (as Houdini would later) that his own magic was “real,” an illusion performed on stage, in public, and replicable if you had the patience (and the genius) needed to do it. He also, by the way, seems to have been the first magician to pull successive rabbits out of the same hat. It’s also worth noting that Anderson’s great rival on the world stage was Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, from whom Erik Weisz would later pull (like a rabbit out of a hat?) his own stage name, ‘Houdini.’ So that 1914 homage was no illusion. ©

[Stanley]

Lemaitre, Webb, and the Big Bang.
Georges Lemaître, 1894-1962

The Bible knows nothing about physics, and physics knows nothing about God. Fr. Georges Lemaître.

The word ‘telescope’ has a complex history dating back (possibly) to obscure Indo-European roots meaning “far off,” “in the distant past,” and/or “to observe.” But as a modern compound it’s of Latinate and Italian origin (Galileo had a hand in its coinage) meaning “far-seeing.” So the James Webb Space Telescope is well named—even though (as I understand it) it doesn’t see anything. But its readings of light waves and their frequencies can be translated into pictures, and these in turn enable us to “see” very far indeed, to observe things unimaginably distant from us in both space and time. So the Webb device may confirm, as it is already illustrating, a vision first sketched out by a Belgian priest in 1927. This was Fr. Georges Lemaître, and his awkwardly entitled vision was titled (in translation) "A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae." Lemaître’s vision was worked out mathematically from his reading of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Georges Lemaître was born in Charleroi, Belgium, on July 17, 1894. Educated there at a Jesuit school, he began university studies, at Louvain, in civil engineering. This was interrupted by WWI, during which he observed (as an artillery officer), some of our worst proclivities. At the peace he resumed his studies but now in the higher mathematics, at Cambridge, and with a focus on space, time, and relativity. Lemaître did not oppose or belittle observation. Indeed he worked for a time with, or under, Arthur Eddington, who would famously confirm experimentally Einstein’s outrageous suggestion that light bends in space and time. But in confirming Albert Einstein’s mathematics, Lemaître raised the disturbing notion that space itself was, if not exactly infinite, then infinitely expanding. If it was expanding, infinitely, then how and when and where did that process begin? Einstein himself was at first horrified by the whole notion (“Your calculations are correct but your physics is atrocious!”), but the question, and Lemaître’s answer to it, have become orthodoxy. The process began with the big bang, when an impossibly dense point exploded to create space, time, matter, and light. So Georges Lemaître got his Ph.D., obtained his priesthood, and a professorship at Louvain (in physics). There he continued to work on space and time, but also also to work out his ‘separate spheres’ resolution of physics and divinity, God and the Big Bang, for which he is (if anything) even more famous. As for me, I think NASA should have named its orbiting platform after Georges Lemaître, for it doesn’t “see.” It reads. ©

[Tripps]

Arthur Eddington, who would famously confirm experimentally Einstein’s outrageous suggestion that light bends in space and time

I didn't know that - I'll think of it next time I go to Sainsburys in Eddington

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

Doris Bernays, aka "Fleischman"
Doris Fleischman, 1891-1980

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Edward Bernays, 1929.

It’s not a great leap from diagnosing the human mind to molding it, and who else to preach that latter gospel than Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995)? He was, after all, Sigmund Freud’s nephew (Anna Freud was his mother). Bernays started out with an agriculture degree from Cornell’s land-grant division. He never did intend to cultivate corn (his father had become a leading dealer in New York’s grain markets), but his stated ambition was to become a journalist. We know him as a pioneer of modern advertising, the doing of it but also in articulating its theories. He soon transitioned from Crystallizing Public Opinion (his first big book, 1923) to Propaganda (1929), wherein he advanced the more sinister notion that there was a “mass mind” and that he (and others like him) could manipulate it. Potentially sinister, anyway, which may be why his best biographer called him “the Father of Spin.” Bernays promoted ‘democracy’ in World War I and various charities throughout his long career. There were some failures, though, for instance Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential campaign. Others, in retrospect, seem unfortunate, like his efforts to make Lucky Strike cigarettes both fashionable and healthful (good looking and good for your voices, he told American women!!). Bernays made strenuous efforts to keep his daughters from smoking, but his daughters proved not manipulable and went on puffing. Thus they took after their mother, Doris Fleischman, a strong-minded woman who shaped Edward Barnays’ career in advertising but refused ‘mere’ domesticity. Fleischman was born to an immigrant family on July 18, 1891, and determined from an early age to make her own way in life. At Barnard College she excelled in her studies and at sports, and graduated onto the New York market not as a potential bride but as a suffragist, an artist, a writer, even a would-be musician. She did marry Bernays (in 1922, in a civil ceremony at City Hall) but by her own choice she stayed “Doris Fleischman” in all legal documents, notably her US passport, and also as the (sole) Vice President of their marketing firm. In this she acted not as wife and mother but as a charter member of the Lucy Stone Society, insisting that marriage (hers, for sure) was a voluntary partnership, not a submission. A successful writer and advertiser, she publicly mocked “men-only” clubs with her own “The Woman Pays” establishment and further roiled the waters as chief marketeer for the NAACP. OK, so her autobiography (1972) was called A Wife Is Many Women and was authored by “Doris Bernays,” but she was also her very own self, unmolded, as she always aimed to be. ©

[Stanley]

"Lord, how she works . . . "
Mary Ann Bickerdyke, 1817-1901

Did I tell you about Mrs. Bickerdyke? She is perfectly splendid. To be sure, she snubs me and everybody else; but, Lord, how she works. Letter home from a US Sanitary Commission nurse, Beaufort, South Carolina, April 30, 1865.

The US Sanitary Commission was managed by men (it was established in 1861 when men ruled in most US roosts), but today one of its chief claims to fame is that it empowered women to play important public roles. Over 15,000 women served the commission, most as local volunteers gathering supplies for Union Army hospitals and encampments. The Commission did have female employees, most famously that paragon of social reform, Dorothea Dix (1802-1877) who was appointed the commission’s medical superintendent (just beating out Elizabeth Blackwell. 1821-1910, the first American female medical doctor). Among many others, Louisa May Alcott served as a battlefield nurse. But the most famed of the Commission’s battlefield nurses was Mary Ann Bickerdyke,born Mary Ann Ball on July 19, 1817. We can infer her politics from the fact that she was one of the first women to attend Oberlin College, a notorious hotbed of abolitionist and feminist agitation, but when the Civil War started, in 1861, she was a mother of two boys and a forty-something widow living in Galesburg, Illinois. There she volunteered to shepherd a donation of hospital supplies to the Union Army at Cairo, Illinois, quickly made herself known to the local commanding officer, one Ulysses S. Grant, and stayed on to fight for the cause by tending to its wounded and ill. Her courage impressed Grant, who issued general orders on her behalf (that his field officers should recognize her authority and support her work), but it was not until February 1862, after the battle that won Fort Donelson, KY, for the Union, that Bickerdyke joined the Sanitary Commission. Or perhaps vice-versa. Thereafter she served as battlefield nurse and hospital superintendent through more than a dozen major battles and several campaigns, dirty and dangerous work. Her forcefulness angered more than one Union general, but to the army’s enlisted men and to escaped slaves (in whom she took special interest) she became “Mother” Bickerdyke. In the end, even William Tecumseh Sherman conceded that she was one of the army’s best generals. She marched with him through Georgia and then (at his request) at the head of the army in Washington’s victorious “Grand Review” in the summer of 1865. She wasn’t done yet, but continued making good trouble almost to the end of her life, in Kansas and California, for the Salvation Army and others (including Union Army veterans). ‘Mother’ Bickerdyke was granted a special Union Army pension in 1886 and died in 1901. Her memorial stands today in Galesburg, showing her, brave in bronze, nursing a wounded soldier on the field of battle. ©

[Stanley]

Reform or revolution?
Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, 1804-1877

The growth of civilization proceeds according to laws which are as much matters of science as are the physical laws which govern the material world. James Kay-Shuttleworth, 1866.

I knew Gawthorpe Hall, mid-Lancashire, as the repository of 17th-century portraiture owned (and deemed surplus by) the National Trust and the National Portrait Gallery. There I delighted in seeing the vivid, ruddy-cheeked faces of people whose lives I had researched. The hall itself is Elizabethan, a pleasing vintage, and it’s also said to be where a drunken King James I drew his sword and ‘knighted’ a toothsome cut of beef as “Sir Loin.” I did not then know that Gawthorpe was also, for several decades in the 19th century, the home of a medical gentleman who awakened his contemporaries to home truths about poverty, its causes, and its cures. He was born James Kay, in nearby Rochdale, on July 20, 1804, but the world would know him as Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, for in 1842 he married the heiress of Gawthorpe Hall, Janet Shuttleworth, and was pleased to change his surname in her honor. James Kay was brought up a strict dissenter and was convinced (or, as Calvinists would put it, convicted) of the view that poverty was, like death, among the chief wages of sin. As a youth, he was morbidly anxious that his own soul-state would end in poverty. He went off (to Edinburgh) to study medicine, and returned to Lancashire to practice it, still of that mind. But along that line Kay-Shuttleworth decided that poverty was a social disease. His medical studies and medical practice helped cause this change of heart. Of more direct importance was his growing expertise in statistics. He was an Edinburgh MD and a founder of the Manchester Statistical Society. Both medicine and probability went into his first major publication, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832). It was a book that would be used by Marx and Engels to ground their argument that revolution would be the only possible cure. But the same study made James Kay into a bourgeois reformer. Janet Shuttleworth also had something to do with this. She had inherited Gawthorpe Hall when just a baby, and as she grew up she had, with her half-sister Marianne North (a pioneer lady biologist), made Gawthorpe into a sort of reform school. Dr. James Kay became part of that, convinced that education was the best social cure for the social disease of poverty. So it was that, aged 38, James married Janet, aged 25. It’s also said that Gawthorpe is the place where Charlotte Brontë met Elizabeth Gaskell. So there is a lot more to Gawthorpe Hall than Stuart portraiture, royal revels, and tender steaks. It may be seen, too, as a birthplace of England’s system of free, public education. ©

[And for many years it was an extension of Nelson and Colne College used for training chefs and catering managers and personal fief of my mate David Moore who used it for many activities.]

[Tripps]

It's a journalistic cliche that when you know something of the subject under discussion, you can usually find errors.

I never expected it to happen on this thread. I never heard of Gawthorpe Hall, but I'm very impressed wth it.

However I think Hoghton Tower perhaps has a better claim to the Sirloin story.

[Stanley]

I think you may be right David. However the the chaise longue that Charlotte Brontë swooned on is still in the dining room and the Rachel Kay Shuttleworth embroidery collection is still curated there

[Tripps]

the the chaise longue that Charlotte Brontë swooned on is still in the dining room

What's the evidence? Where's the youtube video?

I've emailed Uncle Bob and copied you in.

[plaques]

As a regular visitor to Gawthorpe Hall, at least when its open day and the entrance is free. Once or twice they have had actors doing a period cameos. Invariably the vintage lock up tea trolley is wheeled out with the question of "what's this". Never heard anything about swooning couches chaise longue. I've lots of photos both inside and out and Kev did a photo shoot of his lads band on the steps to the lawn.

[Tripps]

Been thinking. I have Audley End House just up the road yet never had any urge to visit it.

I see Gawthorpe charge £6 for admission and Audley End is £21.

Don't press too hard for 'levelling up' .

[Stanley]

1979, David Moore presiding at the opening of the barn at Gawthorpe as an exhibition space. Russell Harty and Lord Charles Shuttleworth in attendance. One of many occasions at the hall.

[Stanley]

"There's much to be said for challenging fate rather than ducking behind it."
Diana Trilling, 1904-1996

I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world. Diana Trilling.

One of New York’s most eminent (and most feared) literary lionesses once speculated that her own obituary would be headlined “Diana Trilling Dies at 150: Widow of Distinguished Professor and Literary Critic Lionel Trilling." She never made 150. But when she did die, aged 91, her obituaries did emphasize her oddly subservient or secondary relationship to her husband. I say “oddly” because she was not, perhaps not ever, a subservient sort of person. Diana Trilling was born Diana Rubin in Westchester County, New York, on July 21, 1905, and was brought up in Manhattan in a prosperous immigrant family. She was raised to be contentious and intelligent, and continued to be so when she went off to Radcliffe College. There her contentious intelligence attracted the attention of Lionel Trilling, then a graduate student at Columbia. They cohabited for a time and then, after she spent time seasoning in Paris, married in 1929. Lionel went on to become a leading, perhaps the leading, American literary scholar. And Diana? She followed in Lionel’s wake to become—on his recommendation—the lead critic for The Nation magazine. Together, they were a “power couple,” except that the phrase was not then in use, and the small pool in which they swam, the New York intellectual elite, recognized women (wives or lovers) as adjuncts. In some ways she accepted that status, happy in his eminence, but she also edited him to death (or to clarity) and harbored grander ambitions for him as a great American novelist. In public (at dinner parties and as a critic) she followed his enthusiasms for left-wing politics, psychoanalysis (in criticism and on the couch), and then most controversially as a liberal anti-communist and thus (within the convoluted rhetoric of the intellectual community) as an anti-anti-communist. She also, in her 40s, dutifully bore him a son, for her perhaps the ultimate of all editorial acts, but she played a more important—certainly more obvious—editorial role in cleaning up the manuscript of his most important work, The Liberal Imagination (1950). Lionel did thank her for this in the foreword but may have revealed his real feelings by trashing (burning, actually) her heavily annotated copy of the book’s proofs. After 46 years of marriage, Lionel died; un-freed, Diana went on collecting his essays (in fourteen volumes), reflecting on their relationship, and regretting his failure to become a novelist. Unsurprisingly, Diana Trilling never did embrace second-wave feminism and, as she predicted, her 1996 obituaries unfailingly identified her as Lionel’s best critic. ©

[Stanley]

A pioneer woman scientist
Etheldred Benett, 1775-1845

Scientific people in general have a very low opinion of the abilities of my sex. Etheldred Benett to Samuel Woodward, 1836.

I’ve been writing ‘anniversary notes’ daily since 2012, and if they were collected and parsed one connecting theme would be ‘pioneer women,’ especially those who’ve overthrown the prejudice of centuries to blaze new trails in the sciences. That’s partly in tribute to the women scientists (from brilliant undergraduates to full professors) I have met. Now here’s another pioneer, Etheldred Benett, born in Wiltshire, England, on July 22, 1775. During her lifetime, geology became scientific (proceeding from evidence to argument, rather than vice-versa), and in her collecting, mainly fossils, and reflecting on them, she made several signal contributions. Notably, she demonstrated that soft tissues could be and were fossilized, however rarely, and she also discovered how to discover (pardon the redundancy) and then to classify microfossils. She was enabled to do these things by a fortunate concatenation of circumstances, not least location and timing, for her Wiltshire home was within reach of important chalk and limestone deposits then being quarried for building materials. She was also a female heir in her own right and she preserved that independence by never marrying, and so was able to do more than dabble—to achieve professional grade—in her avocations. Her baptismal name, Etheldred, helped those who never met her to think her a man even though it was a female name of hoary vintage, as in Ætheldreda, a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon princess turned saint. Some who appreciated Etheldred’s geological findings thought of her as male, notably Moscow’s Imperial Natural History Society when it admitted her into its fellowship as “Master” (dominum Etheldredus Benett). Benett sorted that through another of her ‘avocations,’ tracing back her family’s history to Anglo-Saxon times. Even to those correspondents who knew her as a she, Etheldred sometimes had to insist that her geological work “was written by myself.” Among those who read her reports, visited her massive collection, and were inspired to hypothesize about a very ancient earth was Charles Lyell, whose own geological work would create a usable frame of reference for Charles Darwin’s time-hungry theory of evolution. But during her life Etheldred Benett worked alone, just herself and her evidence. It wasn’t until 1848, three years after her death, that the (male) president of the Geological Society announced to a startled audience that soft parts could be, and were, part of the living world’s fossil evidence. He gave her credit. But today you need to travel to Philadelphia to see her collection. It might be worth the journey. ©.

[Stanley]

The Walnut Queen of Whittier CA
Harriet Williams Russell Strong, 1844-1926

I had the courage of ignorance and plenty of determination to back it up. Harriet Russell Strong, interview, 1904.

It now appears that climate change and population growth will dry out the great Los Angeles conurbation and much else in California. Moralists have already noted (with some satisfaction?) that among the casualties will be green suburban lawns and lush golf courses, profligacies that never belonged in what is a naturally arid landscape. But such fripperies were not among the objectives of one of the first planners of California water management, Harriet Williams Russell Strong, born Harriet Russell in Buffalo, NY, on July 23, 1844. She moved to with her family to California shortly after it was filched from the Mexicans and thus always regarded herself as a pioneer. She became a resourceful one through her marriage (at age 19) to one of Nevada’s silver barons, Charles Strong. Strong’s wealth and his grandiose ambitions led him to buy Pio Pico, the ranch of California’s last Mexican governor, to rename it Rancho del Fuerte (“ranch of the strong”!!!) and to set himself up as a kingpin, or at least a king-maker, in the state’s politics. That all came to naught when Strong suicided in 1883, disgraced by his debts and by his business frauds. But not quite ‘naught’, for Harriet had, meanwhile, birthed and raised four daughters, reviewed her assets, and found enough to pay off Strong’s debts and remake her ranch and the semi-arid San Gabriel Valley into a green and productive landscape. The first thing Harriet hit upon was not golf greens but walnuts. Pio Pico already had a walnut grove; within a few years Harriet had made herself into the “Walnut Queen”, virtually a foundress of the city of Whittier, and a credit-worthy entrepreneur. She knew that walnut trees were water-hungry and had begun to plant pampas grass among the trees to keep water in the soil, but to achieve commercial-grade production more water was needed, and Mrs. Strong recreated herself as water engineer. She designed and patented irrigation systems (most notably a cascade of self-reinforcing reservoir dams in an upstream valley), and made pampas grass into a stylish commodity. Not for Harriet the seamy water wars of the San Fernando valley but rather political activism, not only her advocacy of women’s rights but her sound commercial sense, talking both major parties into using red, white, and blue pampas ‘bouquets’ to decorate their national conventions. To reinforce water supply she also dreamed up the Hoover Dam, but died (in 1926, in a car accident) too soon to see it materialize, and far too soon to see it dry up. She also made Pio Pico into a history museum, where tourists learn (of course) about Whittier but also about a lady hydrologist. ©

[Stanley]

A black actor plays white.
Ira Aldridge, 1807-1867

For she had eyes and chose me. Othello speaking to Iago, from Shakespeare’s Othello: The Moor of Venice. Act iii, scene 3.

If the streaming serial Bridgerton starts a trend, we may be witnessing the end of the traditional ‘segregation’ between black roles and white roles in Anglophone drama. And about time, too, for effective drama requires of its audiences a nearly total suspension of disbelief. In that theatrical context, why worry about an actor’s skin shade? One actor who pioneered in crossing that color line was Ira Frederick Aldridge, born of free parents in New York City on July 24, 1807. It’s not known exactly where Ira picked up his acting ambitions, perhaps from his preacher father, or from his classical education at the city’s African Free School, but in his teens he was already acting for the African Company, an all-black enterprise doing its best to break away from blackface minstrelsy and its openly racist styles. But the USA, where racial enslavement was widely established, made that a difficult task, and after the African Company was shut down (for the lèse majesté “crime” of putting on Richard III with an all-black cast), Ira took his talents to England. There he started in traveling troupes, but broke into the big time in 1833, replacing none other than Edmund Keane in a London production of Shakespeare’s Othello. That is a play where color is woven into plot, text, and characterization, and indeed it had (almost) always been played by white actors in blackface. Coming at just the time parliament was debating the abolition of slavery in the empire, it created quite a ripple to see a really black actor in such a really black role. More than a ripple: after two performances the production was shut down, Aldridge was fired, and that was that. Except that he’d showed his talent, and his mettle, and from that point he built himself a career. This began, necessarily, in ‘colored’ roles, Othello and a few others, for instance Aphra Behn’s 17th-century Oroonoko. As an actor of color, even in ‘colored’ roles, Aldridge did cause outrage. But talent won out, and soon he was appearing, in Britain, Ireland, and on the continent, in “white” roles and in both classic and contemporary plays. King Lear became one of his most popular roles, I believe NOT in whiteface. But Aldridge never forgot his roots, and often (before or after a performance) he addressed his audience on the subject of slavery and its abolition. He would marry, three times, and two of his daughters would enjoy success in opera. In 1867 he died on tour, in Poland, where today you can find his tomb, but Britain is peppered with plaques marking out the milestones of his remarkable career and, with that, the ways in which political correctness merges with moral correctness. ©

[Stanley]

the devil is in the details.
Thomas Eakins, 1844-1916

You can copy a thing to a certain limit. Then you must use intellect. Thomas Eakin.

Probably because I rowed on the Schuylkill, I’ve long admired the paintings of Thomas Eakins. Oarsmen on that river were among his favorite subjects. Eakins himself was born in Philadelphia on July 25, 1844, spent most of his life there, and one of his pastimes was to row on that water, mainly in single or double sculls. Eakins’ Schuylkill images were ‘taken’ before Philadelphia had a skyline, and they were images I admired before I had much inkling of what ‘realism’ in art might mean. Today Eakins is hailed as the leading American ‘realist,’ but realism does not (in his case) mean accuracy. For one thing he took too great care to frame his river scenes, many of them with the same bridges under which, decades later, I struggled. Careful framing is also obvious in his most famous portrayal, a large canvas of an open-theatre surgery at The Gross Clinic (1875) at the old Jefferson College of Medicine, lead surgeon being Dr. Samuel Gross. There Gross and his seconds hover over their work, at the focus of (one imagines) a pillar of sunlight, all of them framed by serried (and mostly shadowed) ranks of onlookers. No: Eakins’ “realism” is found in the painting’s detail, the bloody human tissue, the blooded surgeons’ hands and instruments, the open wound and its surrounding, unmarred skin. Thomas Eakins came to appreciate ‘detail’ before he came to painting as a profession, first through his father’s tutelage in fine penmanship and then in mechanical drawing at Philadelphia’s elite public school, Central. After he took up painting seriously, he deepened this interest in detail by looking underneath human and animal surfaces to master dissection and anatomy. He used this ‘realism’ to paint living figures, going so far as actually to construct statues while he was making a painting of carriage horses hauling his patron (and subject) through the lanes of Fairmount Park. That all became much easier, and much more detailed, when Eakins took up photography, which enabled him to follow underlying body structures as male and female models ran and leaped and rested against black backgrounds. In his portraiture, especially, one gets tendons and wrinkles of body and face, even the warp and woof of clothing fabrics. Thomas Eakins did well enough at all this not only to pay the rent but also to build a nice house near the park, three stories with a studio atop. But rarely did he get his just deserts (as defined by him). The Gross Clinic won no prizes, caused outrage, and brought only a paltry fee. Later, rediscovered and restored, that painting sold for $68 million and is now shared, permanently one hopes, by two Philadelphia museums. ©.

[Stanley]

The non-so-dismal moral science of economics
Alfred Marshall, 1844-1924

The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings. Alfred Marshall, 1899.

Before Alfred Marshall took his first teaching job (at St. John’s College, Cambridge) in 1868, economics had wormed into the university’s still largely classical curriculum as a “moral science”: a bit of an oxymoron. Indeed, Alfred Marshall (born in London on July 26, 1844) was educated in mathematics, and his most lasting contribution was to subject economics to mathematical thinking. But in Marshall’s description, analysis, and theory there was an irreducible ‘moral’ content, to be found in his view that there was an ‘optimum’ point in economic life where with scissor-like precision supply met demand and where everyone involved—entrepreneur, owner, worker, and buyer—would reap their fair share of the proceeds. All this was summarized in Marshall’s longest lasting work, Principles of Economics (1891). In its umpteenth revision, Principles of Economics was still my father’s freshman economics textbook at Iowa State, bang in the middle of the Great Depression, a decade during which Marshall’s optimum point seemed to be as distant, and as imaginary, as Shangri-La. So it was that my dad (and many others) thought of Marshall as an obstacle, a reactionary, an academic whose ideas had been rendered out of date and heartless by the economic realities of world war, imperialism, financial panic, and industrial depression. That’s a bit harsh, and to see why you must remember that equilibrium point where, Marshall believed, all shares would indeed be fair. He was himself of respectable lower-middle-class origins, his father a clerk in the Bank of England. Alfred worked hard enough to win his way into the Merchant Taylors school in London, and then to wangle scholarship support for Cambridge entry from a wealthier uncle. At Cambridge he upset several apple carts, not least when he married one of his brightest students, Mary Paley, herself a breakthrough student at a new women’s college. Thus they broke a rule and paid the price by exile to Bristol, where Alfred was one of the founders of a new and broader-gauged “civic” university. When Cambridge dropped its celibacy rule, Alfred and Mary returned to make their house and her garden a center of new thinking. Mary is now reckoned to have been his best critic (and behind-the-scenes editor), and we should remember that the economist best known for dismantling Alfred Marshall’s free-trade and fair-share universe, John Maynard Keynes, was himself one of the Marshalls’ prize students. For the mathematician Marshall, economics always remained a moral science, and so it is, or should be, still today. ©.

[Stanley]

Testament of Youth
Vera Brittain, 1893-1970

Now, like the rest of my generation, I have had to learn again and again the terrible truth . . . that no life is really private, or isolated, or self-sufficient. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, 1933.

Once upon a time, Britain’s “middle class” was a more exclusive club than it has turned out to be. Its members perched near the top of society, just below the aristocracy and more urban than the gentry. By their own bourgeois lights it was a social order which they (or the males amongst them) managed in a socially conscious way. Vera Brittain was born into this class, in the industrial midlands, on July 27, 1893. Growing up, Vera shared her class’s conventionalities; but she did have a yen for higher education, and from early on she was intent upon writing. Her parents were not enthusiastic about these oddities, but they indulged them, and Vera (an enthusiastic diarist) went up to Oxford in 1914 to study English. It was not, however, Oxford that made her into a writer, but World War I. Like her younger brother Edward, she entered into the war conventionally, doing patriotic service as a volunteer nurse. But the war wounded her. It took Edward’s life (in Italy, in 1918), robbed her of her fiancé (in France, in 1915) and killed two other close men friends (one of whom died after she had determined to marry him, as much for pity’s as for love’s sake, when he was badly wounded in 1917). When peace came, Vera Brittain returned to Oxford, changed to a history major and finished her studies creditably. She embarked on her writing career as a convinced pacifist, feminist, and socialist, each ‘ism’ representing a big change from her pre-war self. Her first three novels traced these changes by presenting plots and characters that were (perhaps too) autobiographical. Then Brittain turned to autobiography straight up and produced her hauntingly titled Testament of Youth. Subtitled An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925, it became an international best seller and, I believe, has never gone out of print. It has several themes, but the main sense is one of loss: of her brother Edward, her fiancé and other friends, and it resolves itself with her marriage to the political economist George Catlin in 1925. Whether that was a ‘real’ resolution is an open question. It turned out to be a rather odd marriage, and Vera Brittain turned out to be not the best of mothers, but she never did renounce pacifism, feminism, or socialism. When she died (in 1970) her ashes were scattered over Edward’s grave in Italy, a testament to her youth indeed, but Vera also left behind her one of the world’s most accomplished politicians, her daughter Shirley Williams. Williams, who died only last year, did much to honor her mother’s memory, and to keep Vera’s youth and her changes fresh in our minds. ©.

[Tripps]

Vera also left behind her one of the world’s most accomplished politicians, her daughter Shirley Williams.

Well cared for during WWII - though after her mother's experience who can blame her?

" During the Second World War, from 1940-1943, she was evacuated to St. Paul, Minnesota, in the United States, where she attended the all-girls' Summit School."