BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Stop beating yourself up! I didn't see it as a blunder just a different viewpoint.
I think the general view amongst historians is that colonisation was possibly inevitable as Western nations developed and some benefits like modernisation were conferred there was also a lot of injustice and exploitation of indigenous people and this is to be regretted.

[Stanley]

X OR Y?

Miss Stevens’s work is characterized by its precision and by a caution that seldom ventures far from the immediate observation. Her contributions are models of brevity—a brevity amounting at times to meagerness. Thomas Hunt Morgan, 1912.

So wrote Professor Morgan in a Science obituary of Nettie Stevens, who had died at only 51, of breast cancer. Morgan was himself an eminent cytologist and would in 1933 win a Nobel Prize for his work on genetic transmission in fruit flies (Drosophila). Some say it was Stevens herself that recommended Drosophila to him, and that could be true. Certainly they had worked closely together at Bryn Mawr, where Morgan was professor of biology and Stevens, at first, a PhD candidate. For Nettie Stevens it was a move ‘back east’, for she’d been born in Cavendish, Vermont, on July 7, 1861. Her father was a carpenter turned builder and property owner with enough money and enough sense to encourage his very bright daughter in her studies. But it took her a long while to find her feet. First a private school, Westfield Academy, then 15 years of school teaching in whatever subjects were assigned to her (English and Latin as well as science) and then finally, financing herself, at Stanford, a new university out west that thought women could be scientists. She did well enough there (bachelor’s and master’s degrees) to win a PhD scholarship to Bryn Mawr, where at first Morgan thought her too cautious, too meager, more interested in lab technique than in ‘real’ science. Stevens studied the animal cell, with particular emphasis on the mystery of sex. Why did some fertilized eggs turn female, others male? Leading theories at the time (following folk wisdom, perhaps?) thought it happened because of this or that external circumstance. Stevens proved otherwise. Working with aphids, a species good at producing new generations quickly, and working with precision and caution, she it was who discovered the great game between what came to be known as the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ chromosomes. Sex was generated internally, inside the embryo, and it seemed certain that the same was true of larger, more complicated embryos, like those of humans and hippos. Her discovery (in 1905) was made nearly simultaneously with that of Edmund Wilson, at Columbia University. Indeed his paper on the subject was already in press when he read her results. In the end, which for Nettie Stevens came with tragic speed, Edmund Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan recognized her work as fundamental and conceded her priority. But both were slow to do so. Sex determination in aphids might proceed by the flip of a chromosome, but sex discrimination in the human profession of biological science was more deeply rooted, a problem that would take more time to address and solve. Nettie Stevens’s ‘caution’ and ‘precision’ had been environmentally determined. ©

[Stanley]

BRITANNIA

Rule, Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,

Britons never never never shall be slaves.

“Rule Britannia” was first performed in 1740, part of a masque produced for Frederick, Prince of Wales, at Cliveden House, his country place in Berkshire. Great hopes were placed with Prince Frederick, who might have become the first Hanover king comfortable with English and was certainly a hale fellow, a patron of the arts, and a dabbler in opposition politics. Meanwhile, Britain itself was becoming the European imperial power. The court masque underlined these potentials by celebrating the Saxon king Alfred the Great. And, perfectly, the words of “Rule, Britannia” were supplied by a Scottish poet, James Thomson, then set to music by an Englishmen, Thomas Arne: perhaps even poetically, for Frederick himself had been born in 1707, the very year of the Act of Union. Frederick himself was to die young, leaving the field to George III, but “Rule, Britannia” has lived on to become a favored song of the patriotic Briton. Meanwhile, the goddess Britannia herself has been made a central figure in British iconography. Usually she’s majestic, in statuary and on the currency: a symbol, like Athena in ancient Greece, of strength, beauty, and wisdom. But in classical Roman coinage and medals, Britannia made her first appearance in defeat, seized by her hair (by the emperor Claudius, no less) and about to be skewered. Before the end of Roman rule (circa 410CE) Britannia had recovered her dignity, at least in imperial coinage. But as a symbol of the island she slept for centuries (during which there was no “Britain” to represent), then to be revived during the long reign of the great queen, Elizabeth I, in the 16th century. The reviver was John Dee, alchemist and astrologer. In my time, Britannia was used, or misused, as a Margaret Thatcher figure, and then comically at the summer Proms concerts, during the singing of “Rule, Britannia.” Young enthusiasts, not all of them female, dressed the part and sang and swayed along with the music. The goddess was even used to symbolize Britain’s membership in the European Union, before Brexit made her incompatible. But why bring her up on July 8? Well, Britannia’s modern images have, since the 1670s, been based on one of King Charles II’s mistresses, Frances Stewart, who was born in Paris on July 8, 1647. She came to London in 1663 as lady-in-waiting to Charles’s queen. Samuel Pepys thought her the greatest beauty of the age. The French ambassador thought her brainless. The queen cannot have approved. But, goddess-like, Frances Stewart conquered the merry monarch. Unfaithful to her lawful husband, the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, the duchess became (via her portraits) the modern model for Britannia. ©.

[Stanley]

FANNY FERN

The coming woman . . . shall be a bright-eyed, full-chested, broad-shouldered, large-souled, intellectual being; able to walk, able to eat, able to fulfill her maternal destiny, and able—if it so please God—to go to her grave happy, self-poised and serene, though unwedded. From “A Little Talk with the Other Sex,” in Folly As It Flies, by Fanny Fern (New York and London, 1868).

“Fanny Fern” was the pen name of the then highest-paid columnist in the USA, who in 1868 was calling herself (on legal documents) Sara Payson Willis Parton. She’d been born Greta Payson Willis on July 9, 1811, in Portland, Maine. Her father was a journalist and publisher; three of her brothers became famous, at least moderately so, as writers; so why not Greta? First, she didn’t like her baptismal name and appropriated “Sara” instead. Then she went to Catharine Beecher’s famous girls’ school in Hartford. Miss Beecher, herself a woman of strong opinions, thought this Sara her most ill-behaved and yet best-loved pupil. After Beecher’s female seminary Sara went back home, wrote a bit for Christian weeklies, married a banker, and then became a destitute widow in 1851. The best a poor widow with two daughters could do in 1851 was to marry again. That turned out badly, but (unusually) Sara had the backbone to end it herself, and won a divorce. She then went on the market as a writer, “Fanny Fern”, and performed miracles, becoming (by 1857) a weekly columnist for the New York Ledger at the then stupendous salary of $100 weekly (that would be about $175,000 annually in 2025). The Ledger editor’s secret formula in handling his favorite columnist, “Fanny” boasted on the title page of her Folly As It Flies, was “plenty of oats and a skillful rein,” which may have been the rule “Fanny” laid down when she married, thirdly (and finally) the biographer James Parton. Her pictures suggest she was a woman of strength and strongly-held opinions, the latter of which she vented, wittily, in her columns and in several books, including a couple of now highly-regarded novels. Her advice, always delivered straight from the shoulder, was not conventional in her own time, but she was paid well for it, in oats and cash. In her columns, she urged young women to be themselves, not to swoon for their first swain, and if they wanted to marry to wait until they found a man who could blush and be happy while taking the kids out for a day in the park. And if they didn’t marry, that would be OK, too. Clearly self-liberated, Fanny Fern also championed the revolutionary poetry of Walt Whitman, another self-liberated writer, and one who blushed. One is not surprised to find Fanny Fern in 1868 acting as one of the 14 co-founders of the Sorosis club for professional women. And “sorosis” did not mean “sisters.” It came from the Greek word for “heap.” As in, perhaps, ‘a heap of trouble’? ©

[Stanley]

DUBLIN

Did you ever hear tell,

said Jimmy Farrell,

of the skulls they have

in the city of Dublin?

From “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces,” by Seamus Heaney (1975)

The poem goes on to speculate that one of those skulls belonged to “an old Dane . . . drowned in the Flood.” As far as we can know, Dublin’s real history doesn’t incorporate Noah and his Ark, but we’ve long since granted Heaney poetic license. Then, in 1988, Dublin itself brought us down to brass tacks by celebrating its millenium. For it was on July 10, 988, that an old Dane (actually the Norse King Giúniairn) of Dublin recognized the overlordship of the High King of Ireland, Máel Sechnaill. Giúniairn agreed to pay tribute and, more to the point, accept the rule and sovereignty of Irish law, “Brehon Law.” So 1988 saw the anniversary of the year in which Dublin became Irish. There had been settlements at the mouth of the Liffey well before the Norsemen moved in, one of them possibly founded by Saint Patrick himself. And when the Vikings conquered the place in 841 they called it Diflin, a Norse attempt at the Old Irish Duibhlinn (probably ‘blackwater’ or ‘blackpool’ in modern English). The Norse ruled the place long enough for it to become, in effect, a Norse-Gael enclave in a more entirely Gael island, until the year 980, when Ireland’s High King, Máel Sechnaill, conquered the then King of Dublin at the Battle of Tara. It took another 8 years of cultural skirmishing before Giúniairn accepted Irish sovereignty and Irish law. That agreement didn’t really bring peace, for the Gael “High Kingship” was itself often a cause for warfare, and Brehon Law recognized that problem, or rather incorporated it, by making the High King himself a subject of traditional law, not a “sovereign” ruler in the sense of, say, the Saxon or Norman kings of what became England. It didn’t make Ireland into a parliamentary system, however. Rather Brehon Law recognized an elaborate social hierarchy. It regulated a society, or a culture, that was patriarchal, familial, and tribal, one in which men (unless enslaved) were arranged according to their “honor price.” Women and children had no “honor price”, subject as they were to husband or father, but a woman could sue for divorce and take back home her bride price if, for instance, her husband beat her badly enough to leave a mark on her body. Brehon law disapproved of capital punishment as such, although revenge killing was countenanced. Some scholars think that Brehon Law was made by poets, which is, in a rather charming way, where we began, with the Nobel Prize winning Irishman, Seamus Heaney. ©

[Stanley]

BOWDLER

My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of Shakespeare, some defects which diminish their value; and . . . to present an edition. . . [which we]may place without fear in the hands of the pupil. Thomas Bowdler, from an advertisement for a new edition of The Family Shakespeare (1819).

These days school and library committees have been infiltrated by pecksniffs desperate to prevent children from reading freely. Their motives vary, but taken together they’ve once again made ‘Bowdler’ a bad name. As a blanket term, “Bowdlerization” applies to almost any effort to restrict access to knowledge, especially when “knowledge” is delivered via the printed page. And Thomas Bowdler does seem to have been an odd bird. He was born into wealth, near the spa town of Bath, England, on July 11, 1754. He qualified as a medical doctor, traveled in Europe, became an adept at chess, fell prey to chronic ill health, and abjured forever the practice of medicine. But he remained a scholarly observer of the world around him, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and collected a remarkably large library made up of unexpurgated books. He wrote about children’s health, the treatment of chronic illness in adults, about spa cures, and war. Along the way, aged 52, he married, but it didn’t last long and seemed to leave very bad memories. His wife was, so to speak, expurgated from his memory and was never mentioned again. Meanwhile, he worked with an unmarried elder sister, Harriet (1750-1830) to produce The Family Shakespeare. The first issue (1807) expanded in subsequent editions to include almost all the plays, comedies, tragedies, and histories. Many of their expurgations are famous, and obvious. The strumpet Doll Tearsheet was completely disappeared from Henry IV, part 2, along with her earthy name and her earthier libels. The word “prick” disappears from several plays, including Romeo and Juliet. References to Othello’s sexual prowess were omitted from that eponymous tragedy, and in Hamlet the prince’s sister, Ophelia, drowns accidentally. So there’s no doubt that some meanings were lost, some darknesses concealed, and one could hardly call Bowdler’s Shakespeare an improvement on Shakespeare’s Shakespeare. One could never learn, from Bowdler, that in Will Shakespeare’s time the old Anglo-Saxon word “prick” was beginning to be used to describe a “penis” and, generally, a far too cocky fellow. On the other hand, would you want to explain that to a ten year old kid? Later, Algernon Swinburne (no prude he) thought Bowdler had done a pretty good job. On balance, I think it unfair, distorting, to link Thomas Bowdler (and his sister Harriet) with today’s ideological censors. Both Bowdlers were, after all, social reformers in their own time, and they would have had little in common with our contemporary ignoramuses. ©.