BOB'S BITS

[Tizer]

European users of MailChimp were having problems on Monday. There was also a blip this morning. LINK

[PanBiker]

I see it is now owned by Intuit, same firm that produced Quick Books accounting software and others. I used that to run my business. It was stand alone then but has now moved to a cloud computing model all based online, customers now pay a subscription to use it. Call me old fashioned but that means all your business accounts, tax commitments and banking details are on some remote server somewhere on the planet instead of your local hard drive with a daily backup option. What can go wrong?

[Stanley]

MailChimp still broken but Bob is working on it. Meanwhile he has sent me the last two notes as attachments to his mail so here they are.

 Mar12a25perkin

In 1856, eighteen-year-old chemist William Henry Perkin was working in his laboratory, trying to discover a way to synthesize quinine. After one of his experiments failed to produce anything but a useless reddish-brown sludge, he proceeded to clean his beaker with alcohol and when he did something amazing happened. When the alcohol combined with the sludge it turned into a vibrantly beautiful purple liquid. Perkin had accidently discovered the world’s first synthetic dye. He named it mauveine.
At that time most colorful dyes were very expensive to produce and only the wealthy could afford the benefit of them. Dark blue, for example, was made from indigo, a subtropical plant that was one of the leading cash crops in slave-based economy of the American Deep South. At that time indigo was by weight more valuable than gold. Purple, so rare and valuable that it had always been considered the color of royalty, was laboriously produced from the excretions of certain kinds of mollusks. By comparison, the dye Perkin had discovered could be produced from coal tar, abundantly and cheaply available in industrial Britain. And whereas natural dyes tended to quickly fade, Perkin’s synthetic creations held their color.
After his serendipitous discovery, Perkin and two colleagues continued their dye research in secret, until Perkin was ready to register a patent and launch a dye-making business. Hoop skirts having come into style, more cloth than ever was required for women’s dresses, and fashionable colors were in great demand. Perkin’s discovery was well-timed. Within a few years Queen Victoria herself was wearing mauveine-dyed dresses, once outrageously expensive colors were now affordable by nearly all people, and Perkin was a wealthy man. He was only 18 years old when he registered his patent.
During his career Perkin invented synthetic dyes in numerous other colors. By the time of his death in 1907 at age 69, Perkin was an accomplished and highly esteemed scientist. The Perkin Medal, the highest honor in the U.S. chemical industry, is awarded each year to the chemist who has made the greatest contribution to the practical application of chemistry.
Sir William Henry Perkin was born in London on March 12, 1838, one hundred eighty-six years ago today.
The portrait is by Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope (1906) and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The other photo is of cloth dyed with Perkin’s original “mauveine.”


Write down:

I am an Arab
& my I.D. card number is 50,000
& my children are eight in number
& the ninth arrives next summer.

Does this bother you? --Mahmoud Darwish, “Identity Card”, 1964.

Mahmoud Darwish was born in Al-Birwa, Palestine, on March 13, 1941. The place is now called El-Birwa, Israel. That name change was the ‘hinge of fate’ that would define Darwish’s life and much of his poetry. In 1948, the seven-year old Darwish and his family (there were then, by the way, eight children in it) fled Al-Birwa for Lebanon. When they returned they found their home, and village, burned to the ground. They were defined legally as “present-absent aliens,” as striking an example of totalitarian newspeak as one can find, and one which may have led Darwish into inventing his own poetic language, precise and ironic, and written in Arabic. But he learned to write after he had begun to recite poetry, and stories, learned by ear and recited orally. His first known written work was produced in school, a poem that was supposed to celebrate the establishment of Israel. The schoolboy Darwish, overwhelmed by the irony, responded instead with a poetic dialogue between a Muslim boy and a Jewish boy about the status of Israeli Arabs. It got him in trouble. But it didn’t stop the poetry. Nor the activism. For a while, in his late teens, Mahmoud traveled from village to village reciting his poems—of sadness and liberation. He was jailed several times (usually for traveling without an “Identity Card”), and by the time he was 20 was defined (by himself and by the Israeli authorities) as a Palestinian nationalist, a ‘militant.’ In 1964 he published his first volume (which included “Identity Card”). Other volumes followed, prose and poetry, with titles like Journal of an Ordinary Grief and Memory for Forgetfulness. He breathed tragedy, but also defiance, and indeed quit the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in protest against the so-called Oslo Accords. Even so, Darwish’s preferred future was one of cultural dialogue—between Arab and Jew and in peace. There was some hope of that when, in 2000, the Israeli education minister proposed including some of Darwish’s work in standard high school curricula. But the very idea was vetoed by the ‘moderate’ prime minister Ehud Barak. Barak’s autobiography (2018) is subtitled Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace. One might have liked to see a Mahmoud Darwish review of Barak’s book. But Darwish, who would have seen the irony, had died in 2008, in Houston, Texas, where he had gone to seek surgical treatment for his broken heart. ©.

[Stanley]

Come all you rounders for I want you to hear

The story of a brave engineer

Casey Jones was the rounder’s name

On an 8—6 wheeler boys he won his fame.

====From “The Ballad of Casey Jones”


Carl Sandburg called this the greatest of American folk songs. There were competitors: “The Ballad of John Henry” for instance. “Paul Bunyan” even got an opera. Such musics celebrated the (doomed) struggle between working people and the forces of modernization. “John Henry” competed with a steam drill in blasting a railway tunnel. In the version I remember, John Henry would have won but he burst a blood vessel and fell dead. Debates continue over whether there was ever an actual “John Henry”, and even over which tunnel did him in. And of course Paul Bunyan was merely legendary. Who ever heard of a big blue ox? Let alone one named “Babe”? But we know exactly who Casey Jones was, where he met his brave end, and all about his struggle. He had to keep to the Illinois Central (IC) timetable for its crack passenger train, #1, on its legendary route from Chicago to New Orleans. And at Vaughan, Mississippi, #1 ran into the back of a stopped freight train. It was a big accident, and the IC mounted an internal inquiry. To no one’s surprise, the IC found that the crash was the engineer’s fault. Popular legend decided otherwise, and made a hero of the “brave engineer” who so slowed #1 that he would be the crash’s only fatality. Indeed, except for his fireman, Sim Webb, there were no serious injuries. I prefer the hero story, myself. Casey Jones was born John Luther Jones in rural Missouri on March 14, 1863. In its search for work, the family moved to Cayce, Kentucky, where the boy acquired his nickname and the ambition to become a train engineer. He worked his way up (telegraph operator, brakeman, fireman), and in 1891 became a freight engineer for the IC. He was so good at it that the IC made him their chief engineer at Chicago’s 1893 World Fair, and then in 1900 he reached the top, engineering IC Train #1 on a leg of its New Orleans run. Casey was indeed a crack train driver, a brave one too. And he seems to have been pretty good at baseball, husbanding, and fatherhood. But his main life struggle was with the clock, the more so when, in Memphis, just past midnight on April 30, 1900, he took charge of #1: already 75 minutes behind schedule. Running at speed, he made up the time, only to run into jammed traffic at the rural station stop of Vaughan, Mississippi. While everyone else jumped ship, Casey stayed at the plate, whistling and braking. As the song says, Casey “took [his] trip to the Promised Land.” Queenlike, his widow Janey Brady wore black until she died, aged 92, in 1958.

[Tripps]

It's probably 70 years or so since I first heard this pop / folk song. Pause to let that sink in to my mind.
Part true story, part myth part legend. . . . The Lonnie Donegan version was probably the best. If this is of interest - click "Watch on Youtube" then skip the first minute or so of the German language intro, and note the high production values of the day.

PS there are too many intrusions to this video, and it has not been universally welcomed -so I have deleted it.
Members who are so inclined, can easily find musical versions of the story of Casey Jones.

[Stanley]

The camera jumping round all over the place made me feel dizzy! And why was it so badly lit?

[Stanley]

It is always difficult to identify the many threads that make up the fabric of a life’s work. E. Donnall Thomas, 1990.

Thus Dr. Thomas, in the brief autobiography he wrote ‘for the record’ after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. It’s an odd essay given its purpose. It reads in part like a curriculum vitae for a job application, but there are too many personal details for that, including how he married the girl, Dottie Martin, who threw a snowball at him when he was waiting tables in a women’s dorm at the University of Texas. E. Donnall Thomas also mentions, in the very first paragraph, that his father was a ‘horse and buggy’ general practitioner in the small Texas town (“village,” he calls it) where he was born on March 15, 1920. Personal details aside, though, this Nobel autobiography reads like a resumé. That may have been the case, because this Nobel was almost always won by a scientist, but E. Donnall Thomas was a clinician, a physician. He was not a GP like his dad. And ‘horse and buggy’ house calls played no part in his practice. Rather he was a hospital-based clinician who had learned his science by doing it. And much of the ‘doing’ involved patients who suffered from leukemia and other (normally fatal) blood disorders. After his MD, Thomas served his residency at Peter Brigham Hospital, Boston. There he became interested in transplantation, then an infant science, and of course in rejection caused by the patient’s immune system. This led on to early work with bone marrow transplantation in leukemia therapy. In all this the clinician medic was helped by colleagues, at various hospitals. Many get their mention in his Nobel autobiography, but his own predilection to take patients’ cases to the laboratory was also helped by that snowball Dottie, who’d changed her own career to laboratory scientist to get Donnall Thomas through medical school. Donnall (“Don” to his colleagues) and Dottie worked first with mice, then dogs, to find ways to circumvent or neutralize immune system responses to bone marrow transplantations. One such way came from the hint provided by clinical treatment of patients blessed with an identical twin. This ‘hint’ translated finally to the use of stem cells, and it’s this application that has since saved (literally) tens of thousands of lives. For this, Dr. Thomas was awarded the Nobel Prize. Stem cell research received a good deal of criticism from religious moralists (who view it as akin to abortion), but E. Donnall Thomas’s answer to that was to become one of the principal signers of the Humanist Manifesto of 2003. It argues that ethical values arise from empirical knowledge about human evolution and about human needs. So for Dr. Thomas, the 1990 Nobel was an award for the way he’d lived his life. And his Nobel autobiography was indeed a curriculum vitae. ©

[Stanley]

Fiametta

To seek not only to set a higher standard of craftsmanship, but at the same time, and in so doing, to protect the status of the craftsman. Manifesto of the Guild and School of Handicraft, 1888.

Thus the Guild stated its somewhat contradictory goals. In this the manifesto was a typical expression of the British ‘Arts and Crafts Movement,’ a reaction against the factory, mass production, and the deskilling of ‘work’. The Guild first settled in London’s East End as a community, both guild and socialistic commune, aiming to merge the creator of fine design with the craft skills required to produce the stuff: but with an eye to selling it profitably in their retail shop in fashionable Mayfair. Fourteen years on, the guild moved to quieter surroundings in the Cotswold village of Chipping Camden, where they housed their production site in an abandoned silk mill. There they were joined by a couple from Birmingham, Arthur and Georgie Gaskin, who had in their marriage (1894) made real that ideal partnership between aesthetic design, practical production, and profitable sales. Arthur Joseph Gaskin was born into Birmingham’s skilled working class on March 16, 1862. His family had enough resource to send him to grammar school, from which he went on to the Birmingham School of Art. There his work so impressed the faculty that they hired him as instructor before he’d even finished the course. His designs, notably woodcut illustrations for William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, also demonstrate his great potential. As impressive was a portrait he painted of one of his students, Georgina French, who’d arrived at the school as a precociously talented seamstress. He entitled the painting Fiametta, Italian for “little flame” or—better yet—“little fiery one.” There was something more to “Georgie” than stitching, and once the couple married she became the brains of the operation in several arts and crafts genres. Arthur and Georgie did continue to work as individual artists, but when they worked as partners she tended to do the ‘art’ while he executed the ‘craft.’ This division of labor was especially evident in their jewelry. They began in simplicity, their silverwork reflective of some medieval designs, but as the arts nouveaux began to influence ‘arts and crafts’, Gaskin jewelry became more complex, organic silver forms with foci of stone or enamel. This made the Gaskins leading members of the Guild and School of Handicraft in its Chipping Camden silk mill. They began their association early, then in 1924 actually moved to Chipping Camden, Arthur retiring from his headmaster’s position at Birmingham’s Vittoria Street School of Silversmithing. Today their jewelry sells best as wrought by “Georgie Gaskin,” but in their real life, turn-of-the-century England it was marketed as the work of “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gaskin.” It this particular partnership between art and craft, tradition won out. ©.

[Stanley]

I saw that 12 of the deaths due to tornadoes were in Missouri so I asked Bob if he had been affected and he said not, the tornadoes were North of St Louis....

[Stanley]

Jerusalem Jam

Mix equal parts of faith and courage with a sense of humour, sprinkle with a few tears and a large helping of kindness. Bake in a good-natured oven, dust with laughter. Remove all self-pity, scrape away any self-indulgence, and serve in generous helpings.

This “Recipe for Life” is among the “Inspirational Quotes” on the website of Britain’s “WI”, the “National Federation of Women’s Institutes.” It wouldn’t inspire all women, and the NFWI is often seen as belonging to a particular type of woman. She’s middle or upper class, dressed in rural tweeds, shod in wellington boots, armed with a garden trowel. She’ll do you good on her terms. As such she’s been a butt of national satire almost since the British WI was founded in 1915 (as, by the way, a Canadian import). There have been fake news stories (often on April 1) about two NFWI chapters wishing to change their names. They are the WIs at Ugley, in Essex, and Loose, in Kent. There have been popular sitcoms about the WI, one (2006) entitled Jam and Jerusalem. In 2003 the film Calendar Girls portrayed a rebellious group of WI women—Yorkshirewomen of course—who went naked for a cancer charity, at first offending their local WI. All good British satire, of course, and in the film Helen Mirren and Julie Walters and their 10 WI sisters do their tweedless best to lighten our mood. But remember that the calendar girls do, finally, lighten the mood of the NFWI leadership, for they did raise a ton of money for a good cause. That was the “double standard” laid down by Frances Farrer, who (as General Secretary) led the NFWI from 1929 to 1959. That’s a long time (the longest term yet), and included the Great Depression and WWII. Through it all she strengthened the WI, doubled its membership, and began—tentatively—to move the Federation citywards. Frances Margaret Farrer was born on March 17, 1895, in London, and into the better reaches of the aristocracy, her father a civil service baron and her mother out of the Spring-Rice stable. Soon Lady Frances went off to Newnham College, Cambridge, where women had only recently been allowed to take degrees. There she stormed through the Economics curriculum and was elected president of the university’s Economics Society. Predictive of her WI future , she also took time, trowel in hand, to revolutionize Newnham’s college gardens. After war work with the government (which was what many ambitious young women did during World War I) she organized a new WI chapter at her family’s country seat, the Surrey village of Abinger Hammer. Energetic, intelligent, personable, and well-connected, she was named General Secretary in 1929. It was lucky for the NFWI, for in these years of national crisis ‘relevance’ was an issue, and Lady Frances made clear to government ministers (many she knew personally) the potential relevance of the WI to WWII work, already (in 1938!!) preparing rural WIs for the likelihood of evacuee children being driven from city centers by air raids. A more characteristic act was the WI’s production of 1,740 tons of fruit preserves, and this in late 1939. Serious work indeed, not least because it involved liberating 430 tons of sugar, an act that required Farrer to call government ministers at home, before even they sat down to breakfast. So she was not everyone’s cup of tea, and her imperiousness did raise many hackles, not only amongst men. But if Dame Frances Farrer had been faced with the real Calendar Girls Crisis of 1999, she would have seen it as a good cause recipe, served generously, that raised tons of sweet money. ©.

[Stanley]

Outside Agitator.

I wasn’t raised to run. Fred Shuttlesworth, December 1956.

So said Fred Shuttlesworth when advised to leave Birmingham (Alabama) by a local police officer. Shuttlesworth’s house had just been dynamited, and badly damaged, but Fred escaped unhurt, and undaunted too, certainly not by a cop who was a member of the local Ku Klux Klan. The next September, the 9th, Shuttlesworth wasn’t so lucky. When Fred and his wife, the former Ruby Keeler, tried to enroll their four kids in Birmingham’s ‘flagship’ high school they were attacked by a mob. Fred was beaten with “chains, baseball bats, and brass knuckles,” while Ruby was stabbed, twice. Fred had to drive himself and Ruby to the hospital. The assailant who wielded the knuckles was Bobby Frank Cherry, a Ku Kluxer who was later involved in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls, one 11 years old, the others 14. As for Fred Shuttlesworth, he was already well known to the authorities as an “agitator.” And you only had to look at him to see that he had a chip on his shoulder. Fred Shuttlesworth was born Freddie Lee Robinson on March 18, 1922. He took the name Shuttlesworth from his stepfather, a coalminer who eked out his income as a bootlegger. So it may be that Fred grew up with rebellion on his mind. But how could he help it? He was black, smart, and living in white supremacy land. While running through a segregated schooling, he found Baptist faith (he was a convert from Methodism) and a pastorate at Bethel Church in Birmingham. Of course he joined the NAACP, and when that organization was outlawed by the white state of Alabama Fred founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. That was in the same year his house was bombed. So it was no surprise that, instead of leaving town, Fred became a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. There he played to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s tune, but always as a radical second-fiddler wanting less waiting and more willingness to obliterate apartheid. So Fred (for instance) took a leading role in the freedom riders’ actions in 1961-63, despite a certainty that it would bring violence. But the violence wouldn’t be Fred Shuttlesworth’s. He was fine with passive resistance, as long as it was militant. He did leave town, in 1961, taking up a pastorate in Cincinnati. He thus became white Birmingham’s favorite “outside agitator.” But he lived long enough (longer than, for instance, Bobby Frank Cherry) to become Birmingham’s favorite native son. After he retired from preaching, he returned home, where the city’s airport was renamed in his honor. Fred Shuttlesworth died in 2011, a free man. Bobby Frank Cherry died in prison in 2004. The arc of the moral universe is long, but sometimes it bends to justice. ©.

[Stanley]

Rising Elites.

I must declare, that from a full examination and due examination of this system, it appears to me the best that the world has yet seen. Thomas McKean, in Philadelphia, moving to ratify the US Constitution. December 1787.

The motion won overwhelmingly, and Pennsylvania, the ‘keystone,’ was the first state to ratify the Constitution of 1787. Thomas McKean is one of the more interesting of our founders. He was born poor, on March 19, 1734, the younger son of a failed innkeeper. Both parents were Scots-Irish immigrants. They never became rich. And it may be that Thomas never lost the taste for Irish whiskey. But he was a clever lad. Educated into literacy by his local pastor, he polished himself off by apprenticing in law with a richer cousin, and then became a successful lawyer in the three “lower counties” that would, in 1776, become the state of Delaware, declaring their independence from Britain and Pennsylvania. Delaware assemblyman Thomas McKean was a leader of both independence movements, thus taking risks for his constituents were of a conservative temper. That may be why he moved to Pennsylvania, where he served as assemblyman, “president” (read governor), and chief justice under that state’s radical constitution of 1776. Somewhat too radical for McKean, who developed the doctrine of judicial review in order to restrain the state’s legislature. All the while he amassed a fortune: legal fees, land grants, purchases, all went to make him the owner of over 11,000 acres. During the Revolution, he bought the opulent home of the loyalist clergyman Jacob Duché, who’d fled to the mother country. In the 19th century, McKean’s descendants married into even more money. His grandson and great-grandson built two of Victorian Philadelphia’s most imposing mansions, stables included, right next door to each other. Oddly, they continued Thomas’s upwards course by moving his corpse from a downtown churchyard to the fashionable (and much greener) Laurel Hill Cemetery. Those who see the Revolution as the work of a rising bourgeoisie love to cite McKean’s pre- and post-humous social climbing. But it’s not that simple. He did spearhead the reaction that overturned the state’s 1776 constitution. He did engineer a virtual coup d’état at the ratifying convention of December 1787. But when Thomas McKean settled down to run the state under the new régime, he did so as a radical Jeffersonian, sympathetic to the French Revolution, resolute in his belief that the common folk should govern. Scotch-Irish to the end, he took a sympathetic stance towards the Whiskey Rebels of 1793. He always was an intemperate man, as he was over-portrayed in the Broadway musical 1776. His descendant, the diplomat and scholar David McKean, took a different tack to call Thomas the “power broker” of the revolution. Perhaps he was all these things. In a democracy, politics is a funny old game. ©

[Stanley]

Lucy Mitchell

And to the angel of the church in Pergamon write: these things saith he that hath the sharp two-edged sword: I know where thou livest, even where Satan’s throne is. The Revelation of John, 2: 12-13.

The Book of Revelation is a hard read. But this passage began to make more sense when a German scholar, Carl Humann, began his excavations at Pergamon, in Turkey. What he (re)discovered were artifacts, fragments really, of what had been the ‘great altar’ of Zeus. Pergamon was already an old place when Revelation was written, or concocted, but early in the Common Era it was the site of tremendous revival of Hellenistic art and architecture, and of the old polytheistic religion, too. For the author of Revelation, Pergamon might well have seemed a present threat, the place where Satan lived. That was probably why Lucy Wright Myers Mitchell used Revelation 2:12-13 to preface her lengthy study of the Pergamon sculptures. It was printed in 1882 in The Century, an illustrated monthly much beloved by the cognoscenti of Victorian America. Mitchell’s article is available on line, and is worth a visit. Lucy W. Mitchell, as she then signed herself, was born on March 20, 1845. She was born in Persia, of all places, where her missionary parents had gone to serve, and to learn from, Nestorian Christians. The Nestorians were themselves a theological fragment, splintered off from both western and eastern churches by the Trinitarian-Arian controversies of the third and fourth centuries. (The Nestorians then took, and hewed to, a mystic middle line. ) No doubt Lucy Wright absorbed some physical archaeology as a missionary child in Persia, but her academic contact began back home, at Mount Holyoke College. She never graduated, but from her formal and informal educations she absorbed a great deal of knowledge about the ancient world and its languages (Greek and Latin of course, but also Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic). She married an amateur linguist, Samuel Mitchell, in 1867 and then went to Europe where she polished off her education with museum work and more informal museum visits, in London, Leipzig, and Berlin. In Berlin, of course, she took close views of the Pergamon sculptures, hence her marvelous Century essay. But she was more than a gifted essayist for the Century (and, inter alia, for the New York Times). Lucy W. Mitchell made herself into a pioneer woman archaeologist. Working in museums, in the academy, and in the field (notably in Rome), and enriched by her childhood experiences in the near East, she produced, A History of Ancient Sculpture, a two-volume combination of text and photographic plates. It was published in 1883, in New York and London. Sadly, her first study soon became her magnum opus. Lucy W. Mitchell died, not yet 43 years old, in 1888. One likes to think that there might have been more to come. ©.

[Stanley]

Constructive Critic.

I couldn’t tolerate ‘grading’ writers. Faulkner got a D at Mississippi. Sherwood failed freshman English at Harvard. And poor Thurber! Where’d he go? Oberlin? He couldn’t even get through Botany. Martha Foley.

Foley got that one wrong. As everyone should know, James Thurber went to Ohio State, where he was flummoxed by a microscope. But throughout her life she stuck to her editorial guns, encouraging young writers through ‘constructive’ criticism. When she took up teaching story writing at Columbia, 1946-1966, group review was her rule; but woe betide the student whose critiques were acidic. Soap was the better cleanser. One got down to the bare bones of a short story by washing away its superfluities, not trashing it. Martha Foley got down to fiction early. Born Boston Irish, on March 21, 1897, she wrote her first ‘novel’ when she in grade school. It was an escape, she said, from a temporary unhappiness, both parents too ill to take good care of their little girl. But she did get into Boston Latin, girls’ division. That was no small feat, then, for an Irish kid, even if her dad was a medical doctor. During her first year there, aged 11, she published her first short story, “Jabberwock”. She never graduated from Boston Latin, nor from Boston University. After some time spent on the picket lines, demonstrating for women’s suffrage, Martha would go on to become famous as the editor (1941-1976) of the annual publication The Best American Short Stories. Each year she aimed to include about 30 stories. Somehow (one assumes she didn’t “grade” submissions!) she’d get down to 100, and then she’d pick the 30 that ‘seemed’ best. She learned that mysterious art by doing it, in Europe, where she’d gone in 1927 with her lover Whit Burnett. After a time in Paris getting to know some of the Lost Generation, they moved to Vienna, where they produced (it was mimeographed: only 167 copies) their first-ever edition of Story Magazine. They married, moved back stateside, and talked Random House into grubstaking the venture. For a publication notorious for its piddling fees (their going rate for a short story was, for a long time, $25), it was hugely successful. After their divorce, she moved on to the annual ‘Best Stories’ venture. Among the writers she helped get started (through either Story magazine or her annual anthology) you can count Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, Richard Wright, Joyce Carol Oates, J.D. Salinger, and John Updike. I suppose their stories ‘seemed’ at least OK to Martha Foley. At her death, in 1977, Foley was at work on a memoir that was supposed to tell more about her editorial methods. It was seen through the press by a friend, one of those many writers who had benefited from her benign criticism. Perhaps more people should take it up. ©

[Stanley]

THE DERBYS

Madame,—I am exceedingly sorry to have disobeyed you; but I hope henceforth you will not have occasion to complain of me, although hitherto I have not been too good. Charlotte de la Trémoille to her mother, 1609.

Charlotte wrote from The Hague, for her grandfather was William I of the House of Orange. Aristocrat or not, humble submission to her mother was the proper form for a 10 year old girl of any class, especially if she was, like Charlotte, brought up in the French Calvinist (‘Huguenot’) tradition. In this letter she went on to explain how she was reforming and to hope that, one day, her family would be proud of her. Perhaps she passed that test. By the time Charlotte de Trémoille died, March 22, 1664, she was the dowager Countess of Derby. She’d come to the English royal court in 1625, serving in the household of King Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria of France. There she promptly married James Stanley, Lord Strange, who would in due course become the 7th Earl of Derby. She brought a large dowry, bore him nine children (in 14 years) and held her own court at Lathom Castle, Lancashire. But the birth of the youngest, in 1641, coincided with the beginning of the English Civil Wars, a breaking of the traditional order of things. King Charles I lost his head (and his throne) in 1649. The 7th Earl of Derby was also beheaded, in 1651, technically for treason but really for his part in the 1644 massacre of the parliamentary garrison of Bolton, Lancashire. Lady Charlotte might have been famous for many things, her mastery of Latin, for instance, or her Huguenot dislike for Charles I’s Catholic Queen. But Charlotte it was who led the defense of Lathom Castle against the siege laid by Sir Thomas Fairfax and his Roundhead army. With only 300 men under her command, she held it for 11 weeks, until relieved by Royalist forces. For this she was mocked by the Roundheads: she had “stolen the earl’s breeches . . . and play’d the man.” Just so, Royalists made her a heroine. Much later, romantic novelists (e.g. Sir Walter Scott) and some historians further polished that image. Take your pick. Gallant heroine or villainess? Before you decide, follow her life through her seven surviving portraits. For Rubens and VanDyck, she was indeed a beauty, and a wise one. One painter (at the time of her marriage) posed her as Minerva, goddess of wisdom. The only Charlotte portrait I’ve seen in the flesh, at Gawthorpe Hall, showed her later self. It was started in 1657 by Peter Lely, he who would after 1660 become the court painter under the restored monarchy of Charles II. Stern and steely-eyed, she looks out on a hostile world, a dowager countess determined to restore the Stanleys’ estate and their territorial powers over Lancashire and the Isle of Man. By the time she died, that process was well underway. ©.

[Stanley]

ROXALANA

These are court-monsters, corm’rants of the crown;

They feed on favour till th’are overgrown,

Then sawcily believe, we monarchs wives

Were made but to . . . hear soft sounds

And play away our lives.

The Empress Roxalana, in William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (1661)


Davenant’s play was first staged in 1656, during Cromwell’s Puritan rule, but revised at the Restoration of 1660 to make it fit for a king. It was an interesting revision for several reasons, not least the expansion of women’s roles, judged acceptable, even preferable by the “Merry Monarch” Charles II. In the new version, the Empress Roxalana (wronged by her husband, Suleiman the Great) speaks her mind several times and at length, and shows herself as steely a character as Suleiman. In 1661, Roxalana’s role was played (and sung) by Hester Davenport, born in London on March 23, 1642. Only 19, she made a great impression, on the diarist John Evelyn for instance. Hester also attracted the attention of Aubrey de Vere, the 20th Earl of Oxford. The heir of one of England’s oldest earldoms, and the great-grandson of the Oxford who is supposed by the credulous to have written Shakespeare’s better plays, this particular de Vere was no Suleiman. But he was an actor. Notorious for dressing his part, at court or on parade, he became one of those “court-monsters” and went after Hester. She, though of humble birth and an actress, resisted, holding out for marriage. After that, the real-life plot becomes murky. But there was a marriage ceremony. The newly-(perhaps)-weds took up residence in Drury Lane, and in 1664 a babe was born, baptized as Aubrey de Vere, after his father. Oxford did acknowledge the boy, and settled a pension on Hester Davenport. Ever after, “Roxalana” (as she was widely known) called herself the Countess of Oxford. But the Earl thought differently. Before Hester, he’d married a nobleman’s daughter. She died soon, so he was a widower when he took after Hester. But then in 1672 he married again, Diana Kirke, a lady of the court at least as seductive as Hester-Roxalana—if we judge her by her portrait, painted by Sir Peter Lely. Soon the court cases began, with Hester claiming a legitimate (and prior) marriage. Oxford admitted to staging one, with one of his servants “dress’d in a Minister’s Habit.” The dispute dragged on, entertainingly, until Oxford died in 1703. He and Diana Kirke left no living issue, so Roxalana, the “dowager countess,” claimed the earldom for her son. He was buried in 1708 as “The Earl of Oxford from Gray’s Inn.” In 1718, Roxalana died after signing her will as “Hester Oxford.” It was a long, complicated drama, in which Hester Davenport had played the better part. But in the end the critics had their way. The earldom died in 1703. ©.

[Stanley]

A TOGHER COOKIE.

She is in great spirits, and seems to be very glad that she has got rid of him. Lady Sarah Lennox to Lady Susan O’Brian, January 9, 1766.

Thus Lady Sarah commented on what became the most notorious divorce of the decade, between Diana, Lady Bolingbroke, and her husband the 3rd Viscount Bolingbroke. Sarah went on to comment, acidly, that Bolingbroke used his wife badly when he was drunk and worse when he was sober, and that Lady Bolingbroke left the marriage to preserve her health and safety. Bolingbroke was indeed a notorious lout, a drunkard and a womanizer; but then he had the immortal gall to bring a divorce bill to the House of Lords (necessary to dissolve an aristocratic wedlock) accusing his lady of infidelity. That seems to have been a true bill, for Lady Bolingbroke had for some time been having an affair, and indeed had borne her lover’s child. After the divorce went through the Lords, she married that lover, who turned out to be worse than her first husband, if in different ways. He was one Topham Beauclerk, whose chief distinction was that he was the great-grandson of Charles II and the actress Nell Gwyn. He was also known for “his ill humour, the filth of his person, and the quantity of vermin in his wig.” So Lady Diana left him, too, and again “in great spirits.” For she seems to have been a woman of mettle and resolve, and if she was not a good judge of prospective husbands she was determined to live a good and useful life. For Lady Bolingbroke, or Diana Beauclerk, was born Lady Diana Spencer, on March 24, 1734. She was the eldest child of the 3rd Duke of Marlborough, much loved by her parents and siblings. At home (not Blenheim but at another family property) she was raised a Lady, taught the wifely crafts, and introduced to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds not only painted her portrait, a rather charming one, but taught her how to do it herself. So once ‘Lady Di’ (as she was known to her friends) shut herself of Beauclerk, she set herself up as an artist and decorator. No doubt her successes owed to her name, but also to her ‘great spirits,’ for her circle of admirers (and customers) would widen to include such as the actor-impresario David Garrick, the historian Edward Gibbon, the parliamentarian Edmund Burke, and the biographer James Boswell. Though aware of Lady Di’s unluckiness in love, none regarded her as an object of pity. Even that old cynic Samuel Johnson, who’d first dismissed her as a notorious “whore,” came to admit that there was something wonderful about the woman. And about her works, too. Her paintings still hang in museums, and if you collect original Wedgworth pottery, chances are that you’ll have a piece designed by her, for one of her triumphs was to gain the patronage of old Josiah himself. She had, after all, proved that you could make something memorable out of mere clay. ©.

[Stanley]

HARPER

What pity hell’s gates are not kept by O’Flinn!
So surly a dog would let nobody in.
From ‘Carolan’s Quarrel With the Landlady.’ circa 1720.

That’s a very loose translation. A more exact one would be longer and, sadly, would lose the lilt and wit of the original, sung in Gaelic to the accompaniment of the Irish harp. It was composed by Turlough Carolan, but his Gaelic name is longer: “Toirdhealbhach ó Cearbhalláin” was born in County Meath, in 1670, and died not too far away in Roscommon, in the home of his chief patrons, the MacDermott Roe family. He died there, too, on March 25, 1738. For most of the intervening years, Carolan was an itinerant harpist or, more exactly, “harper.” And he’s one of the reasons, chief of many, that the harp has become a symbol of the modern Irish state (not to mention the Guiness trademark). His statues abound. Parks are named after him. And there are “Carolan Streets” (‘O’Carolan’ in Dublin but ‘Carolan” in Belfast) . That’s important, for in his lifetime he became popular with the ‘native’ Irish, Catholic and Gaelic-speaking, and with Protestant folk too, and not only in the countryside. One of his first translators was Jonathan Swift, who published Pléaráca Ruarcach as O’Rourke’s Feast in 1735. Later, Oliver Goldsmith sang (or, rather, versified) Carolan’s praises. And English editions of his songs soon appeared. But Gaelic was Carolan’s birth tongue and, with only one known exception, the language of his lyrics. As he journeyed around the island, he was taken in by landed gentry (including Protestants), fed, feted, and sent on his way. Many of Carolan’s surviving songs were created for his hosts, some commissioned by them, some merely grateful gifts. Obviously the satire on Mrs. O’Flinn was an exception, and there were a few others who felt the sting of Carolan’s native wit. Overall, he's become an Irish saint. Indeed, Carolan’s Welcome was played when Pope John Paul II alighted at Dublin in 1979, and then became the theme song of the Pope’s visit. The most remarkable thing about Carolan is that in his youth he was struck blind by smallpox. The MacDermott Roes, a Catholic gentry family, who had already favored him as an exceptionally bright child (the son of their estate’s blacksmith), took the blind boy in, helped him train himself to the harp, and then provided a lifelong refuge where he could rest from his travels. On those travels, he was the blind man who rode behind his mounted guide, and he composed his music by fingering his coat buttons as if they were harp strings. Of course there’s a song about it. Carolan made up his own lyrics as he went (or often ex temp, as he played the harp). We know the words only because his hosts took them down: except, one supposes, in the case of Mrs. O’Flinn. ©

[Stanley]

TURNCOAT

Man is not more distinguished from the brute creation by the use of speech, than by his power over that wonderful agent. Count Rumford, circa 1800.

Rumford’s ‘wonderful agent’ was fire, and his view on fire has since been endorsed by many paleo-anthropologists. Rumford knew much about fire, starting with his experiments with gunpowder on Long Island. He was then Colonel Benjamin Thompson, commander of a Loyalist regiment, “The King’s American Dragoons.” Born in New Hampshire on March 26, 1753, he’d wooed a rich widow, married her (he was only 19), and looked forward to collecting rents on her properties in the planned village of Rumford. Instead, the American Revolution made him a loyalist and, eventually, an exile. I wouldn’t have known much about Thompson-Rumford (young historians don’t usually study losers) but for a charming review article written by Michael Heale, my senior colleague at Lancaster. In England, Thompson continued his gunpowder experiments, avoided blowing himself up, and extended his remit to study heat: how to preserve heat as well as create it. These inquiries won him election to London’s Royal Society in 1799, which he celebrated by endowing—in the same year—the Royal Institution. In 1804, having reached these eminences, he married Marie-Anne, the widow of the great scientist Antoine de Lavoisier. He moved to Paris where he continued to conduct his experiments and his life until his death in 1814. His contributions to science were significant, notably his educated guess that heat was motion. To still that motion, he invented thermal underwear. This also led to his invention of a kitchen range, an improvement on Benjamin Franklin’s stove, and to other foundational discoveries about insulation. He’s remembered by the “Rumford Medals,” awards endowed by him and given out annually by both the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. There’s also a “Rumford” Chair of Physics, at Harvard. So Thompson could change his political loyalties. He also took lovers and abandoned them. He left his New Hampshire wife to the mercy of the American Revolution. After her death he married Mme. Lavoisier, a victim of the French Revolution, then left her too. Thompson was also prone to change his sexual loyalties. His male lovers included George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville, a British government minister of impeccable pedigree and staggering incompetence. But how did our wild colonial boy, Benjamin Thompson, end up as a titled aristocrat? After his British knighthood (1784) he entered the service of the (new) king of Bavaria. That’s where he got his title, Count Rumford. And Bavaria is where you’ll find Thompson-Rumford’s lasting achievement, the so-called “Englischer Garten,” a 1600-acre park that today furnishes Munich with much of its oxygen. He designed that beauty in 1789. ©

[Stanley]

I am missing yesterday's note, I have mailed Uncle Bob about it!

[Stanley]

PHIL-ANTHROPY

If no simple form—such as ‘The St. George’s Company, formed under the direction of directorship of J. R., of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for the education of English peasantry’—will stand in law, you must just transfer the land straight to me, without verbal restraint, and trust me to do right with it. John Ruskin to Mrs. J. T. ‘Fanny’ Talbot, February 3, 1875.

The history of philanthropy has few stranger chapters than the creation of ‘St. George’s Cottages’ in Barmouth, Wales. John Ruskin believed himself to be a revolutionary, but if he had authored a revolution it would have been a surpassingly odd affair. The Guild of St. George, created by Ruskin in 1871, feared that Victorian Britain had become (too) material and (too) crass. Ruskin’s letters breathed urgency, for the Guild had only 30 members, some of them rather feeble, and its ‘Master’—as Ruskin sometimes styled himself—didn’t expect to live very long. In the short meanwhile it would begin the revolution by educating the people—the common people, workingmen and “peasants”—in life’s finer things: good design, for instance, and skilled craftsmanship. Not surprisingly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels surveyed Ruskin’s prospectus and pronounced him a “feudal utopian.” But the Master appealed to many compatriots, the pre-Raphaelites for instance, and among them was Mrs. Talbot, a rich widow who was, apparently, OK with Ruskin’s mantra that “we are all socialists.” She also enjoyed playing chess with him, by correspondence. And it was Fanny Talbot who bought 13 stone-built cottages, in Barmouth, and turned them over to Ruskin’s Guild of St. George. She was born March 28, 1824 as Fanny Browne, of good dissenting stock (Presbyterian), her father a prospering merchant in Somerset. In 1856 she married George Tertius Talbot, a reforming surgeon of similar background. She bore him a son, inevitably named George Quartius, and together they lived a Good Life. When she was widowed, in 1873, she and Quartius moved to Barmouth and commited to a life of philanthropy. She had money to spend and (having heard of Ruskin’s good works) made the approach to him in 1873. Of course Barmouth is in north Wales (in Welsh, it’s ‘Abermaw’), so “English peasantry” was in short supply, but the cottages were purchased, rehabbed, and the sitting tenants assured that they would stay, pay very low rents, and also be rehabbed. Fanny Talbot expanded her philanthropies as a pioneer member of the National Trust, a principal donor to Ruskin’s Museum project at Sheffield, and as a patron of St. Mark’s, Venice (Italy was another of her favorite vacation spots). When she died, she willed the remainder of her property to Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, another National Trust founder, perhaps in recognition of his preservation (or restoration?) work in England’s Lake District. And 9 of those Barmouth cottages still exist, in trust. I believe that the tenantry still pay low rents. But as to their civilization, their crafts, and their culture, I have no information. ©

[Stanley]

MAN-ART

Most artists like best to produce what they know best. What they know best is commonly what they love best. Kathleen Kennett, 1927.

Considering her best-known sculptures, and also considering her biography, what Kathleen Kennett loved best was men. There was her ‘ideal’ man, lean and muscled, sculpted in stone or metal, and often in an athletic pose. But of course such a man doesn’t need a mind, and some art historians have been spooked by the sentimentality (and, maybe, the political implications) of such idealized forms. It’s good, then, that she’s best remembered for her portrait sculptures of actual, living men. Her subjects included famous authors, prime ministers (4), empire-builders, kings (2), even Anglican bishops. Moving beyond her subjects to a list of her men friends, we get such a diversity as Henry James, Max Beerbohm, Malcolm Sargent, J. B. Priestley, E. M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw (both friend and model), and T. E. Lawrence (he ‘of Arabia’). And I suppose I should throw in Auguste Rodin, who tutored her when she was learning her art in Paris in the first years of the 20th century. Kathleen Kennett was born Edith Agnes Kathleen Bruce on March 27, 1878. Her father was a Church of England clergyman who claimed descent from Scottish kings (his middle name was Stewart) and her mother, oddly, was connected with modern Greek aristocracy. But they were both dead before Kathleen (as she preferred to be known) was 8. Her schooling for life began under a kindly uncle, an historian, and in Edinburgh. Then, after boarding school in England, she enrolled at the Slade School in London, where she discovered a calling to sculpt, and that moved her to Paris (Rodin and Edward Steichen). After a two-year mission to children orphaned by Turkish atrocities in Macedonia and Armenia, she moved back to London to commence her artistic career and to find the first of her two husbands, Robert Falcon Scott. She bore him a son, Peter, in 1910, and after his martyrdom in Antarctica (1912) she produced strikingly heroic sculptures of him. While her artistic reputation waxed, the young widow Scott chose as her second husband the public intellectual Hilton Young (he’d once proposed to Virginia Stephen, whom we know better as Virginia Woolf) and thus a new circle of friends and subjects, the Bloomsbury Group. She bore Young a son, too, Wayland, when she was 46, and some say that she “sculpted” both boys. Whether that’s true or not, they did both grow up to be men of considerable achievement: Sir Peter Scott, the naturalist, and Wayland Hilton, later a Labour government minister (of the environment, of course). One might, indeed, call Lady Kathleen Scott (as she is called today, in museum catalogs) a “masculinist.” But she was not anti-feminist. She just liked men. ©.

[Stanley]

BAGLEY WOOD

Could we but win earth’s heart, and give desire release;
Then were we all divine, then were ours by right
These stars, these nightingales, these scents; then shame would cease.

From “Bagley Wood,” by Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867-1902)

This Edenic view of nature was not Lionel Johnson’s characteristic motif. He was more into fin-de-siècle decadence. But perhaps, as an Oxford undergraduate, he’d been captivated by Bagley Wood’s nightingales, its sweet fragrances, its arching ceiling of stars. It’s not a large wood (568 acres), but it is an ancient one. Since 1557 it’s had just one owner, St. John’s College, Oxford. In that time Bagley’s been cared for, pretty much left to go its own way, as “natural” a place as one can find in southern England. As an academic property, Bagley has also hosted scientific studies. One of the most important was conducted by Charles Elton. Born on March 29, 1900, Elton came from a literary family (and he would marry a poet), but at Oxford he studied a new field, “ecology,” and although his exam results were, frankly, horrible, his research projects impressed his tutors. He was taken on as scientific officer to an Antarctic expedition, surveyed a remote Scottish island, studied Canadian lynxes, and then returned to Oxford as a research fellow. Given where he’d been, Oxford must have seemed tame. But to fill up his term times he recruited a small team of graduate students and set about finding out what made Bagley tick. For over 600 nights they neglected the stars and the nightingales to count voles, wood mice, and other small mammals. Besides a real-time census, they dissected about 2,000 of these creatures to find out what they ate and how well, or badly, they prospered. Among their concerns was the impact on Bagley’s natural population of the invasive brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, a half-domesticated rodent whose size and gargantuan hunger threatened Bagley’s natives. Out of this (and other field studies) came Charles Elton’s Animal Ecology (1927), regarded still (there have been many subsequent editions) as a foundational work in environmental science. Of its many strengths, ecologists today focus on its identification of the environmental ‘niche’ that each species occupies, makes its own (and, in turn, strengthens each species’ genetic identity). Some still refer to the “Eltonian Niche” as a guiding concept. When Paulette and I were in Oxford, 1969-1970, Elton, though retired, was still at work. Bagley Wood was closed off to casual visitors (although by rumor not at night) but, as it was girded by commuter routes, we drove by it often. Today it’s bisected by a major highway, and limited access is allowed by the National Forest system. But it’s still owned by St. John’s College, is still a ‘site of scientific interest’ and still, no doubt, inspires poets. ©.

[Stanley]

JETHRO TULL

Fine words will not fill a Farmer’s barn. Jethro Tull

This phrase sounds ancient enough to qualify as a proverb, but Tull’s own ‘fine words’ are cited by scholars as evidence for an “agricultural revolution” in 18th-century England. And not only in England: Tull’s pioneering work, Horse Hoeing Husbandry (1731) sold well in the colonies, and we know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (the second and third presidents of the new republic) each owned a copy. And they recommended it to their friends. Jefferson’s is now in the Library of Congress. Adams’s, a later edition that corrected some errant spellings (e.g. Hoeing for Houghing) can be seen in its original binding at the Boston Public Library website. Jethro Tull was baptized near his father’s farm, in Berkshire, on March 30, 1674. Both parents were of gentry stock, living on their tenants’ rents. They sent Jethro to Oxford, and then to the Inns of Court. Whether they wanted their eldest son to become a lawyer is not clear, but a lung infection slowed his studies and by 1700 he was back at the family seat, helping to manage the Tull acreages. He’d toured Europe, and in France and Italy Tull noticed that farmers used constant tillage to improve the soil and planted their crops (not only grape vines, but field crops) in rows. This made cultivation easier, harvesting too, and Jethro returned to Berkshire determined to try it out. His tenants and laborers, who farmed by custom rather than by experience, resisted. Constant tillage looked like work, and two of Jethro’s inventions, the seed drill and the “horse hoe” (a horse-drawn cultivator) threatened their jobs. Besides, as they might have said, ‘fine words never filled our barns.’ In point of fact, Jethro Tull’s fine words were wrong in several respects, notably his idea about how the soil ‘fed’ his crops: constant tillage would break down the soil into grains small enough for plants to ingest, so manuring the soil was unimportant. And today, in Iowa certainly, science has ruled constant tillage out of fashion. But Tull’s real contribution was to encourage those who worked the land to think about it, to experiment, to understand that each harvest is an effect with discernible causes. He called his own farm “Prosperous Farm,” and so it was. But his book seeded a great harvest of other writings about farming. Among them were the Rev’d Jared Eliot’s Essays upon Field Husbandry, (six of them: 1748-1763), which studied farming in Connecticut and recommended, inter alia, crop rotation, better drainage, and constant enriching of soils. More fine words! But before westwards expansion opened up the richer lands of the ‘old northwest,’ Eliot’s fine words did help to fill Connecticut barns. ©

[Stanley]

CAXTON

Wherin they shalle find many ioyous and playsaunt hystoryes and noble & renomed actes of humanyte gentylnesse . . . chivalry Curtosye . . . frendlynesse hardynesse love Cowardyse Murdre hate vertue and synne. William Caxton, 1485.

Once you transcend its spellings and punctuations, the purpose of this purple prose is clear. It’s a publisher’s blurb, the ‘prologue’ to William Caxton’s edition of Le Morte D’Arthur. Caxton wanted to sell this book. It also stands as a summary explanation of why, today, some people like to read almost any book they can find and why some other people (too many, these days) want to police school or public libraries, to remove volumes that offend their particular (often peculiar) senses of virtue and sin, humanity and murder, friendliness and cowardice. It’s tempting, then, to see the printed book as a revolutionary invention, and Caxton as an apostle of liberty. And that’s how he was celebrated in the 19th century, in statues, stained glass windows, and a stone plaque in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey. And there’s no doubt that William Caxton valued liberty. “He that hath liberty ought to kepe it wel, for nothyng is better than liberty.” But in his day a “liberty” was a piece of property, something you bought into, and he was himself a “freeman” of the Mercer’s Company. His father had been a mercer. William apprenticed as a mercer. And he learned about printing while serving as a mercer’s agent in Bruges and Cologne. Printing looked like a good deal to Caxton. He developed good connections (including with royalty), and brought printing back to England where, for a few years from 1476 he enjoyed a monopoly of it. As if to say, he owned the liberty of printing and the freedom of the press. We can chalk other things up to William Caxton. Just as he smoothed out his own country accents, so he struggled to find spellings that sounded right. Thus he began the very long process of manufacturing “standard English” as a commercial product. There was more than a hint that he knew what he was doing. He didn’t ‘discover’ Geoffrey Chaucer. But he did see Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a pioneer working out of the English language. So Caxton’s press cast the type, printed the pages, and put Chaucer on the market. Of course Caxton the publisher also provided the blurb, promising readers that if they mastered his Chaucer they were also learning what some call, today, ‘The King’s English.’ William Caxton is such an interesting figure, an agent of change. But he was a commoner, so we do not know his birthdate (perhaps the later 1410s, maybe early 1420s). Scholars aren’t certain about his death date. The British Dictionary of National Biography concludes his life by telling us, in print, that he probably died in late March, probably in 1492. Let’s say March 31, 1492, for form’s sake. ©