BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

GREENLAND

Encouraged to write something about Greenland and a little of the colonial life over there [let me say] that my many descriptions of the Greenlanders on short story form were quite true. Signe Rink, beginning her autobiographical essay, circa 1907.

Signe Rink was born Nathalie Sophia Nielsine Caroline Møller, in Greenland, on January 24, 1836. Perhaps all those names were attached to her to underline that she was 100% Danish. Her parents were well into their thirties, both Danish born, and her father was an administrator of Danish Greenland. Nathalie spent her first 9 years in Greenland and then was sent ‘home’ to Denmark for her formal schooling. But something called her back north, most obviously her marriage (at 17) to Hinrich Rink (1819-1893), who had returned from his first tour of duty in Greenland. He went there in 1848 as a geologist-explorer but returned (with his new wife, nicknamed Signe) as an agent of the Danish trading monopoly. The couple lived in Greenland for a dozen years (1855-1868) during which time both became anthropologists, students and defenders of the Greenlanders’ ways of making a living, their arts, their stories, and their interactions with Danish officialdom. They even published a local newspaper (using an ancient Lutheran missionary press) in the local language (Kalaallit Inuit) which they called ‘Greenlandic.’ Hinrich Rink is remembered in place names, including a glacier, and by a stone monument. Its inscription reads (in Inuit, or ‘Greenlandic’) “he loved and knew us.” Signe’s monuments are literary, including much (no one knows how much) of their newspaper’s content. But her main monument came in short stories, published in four volumes after Hinrich’s death in 1883. Several stories have been translated into English, and they suggest Signe Rink’s complex and humane interrelationships with Greenland, Greenlanders, Denmark, and Danes Some of it was simple nostalgia (her last volume of stories was entitled “From the Greenland that Was”), but recent scholarship finds much more ‘there there’. While her journalism was all about men, her fictions were all about women. Signe the Danish female, daughter of an imperial civil servant and then wife of a western anthropologist, found liberation in the intimacy of Greenlanders’ families and households, in the wit and autonomy in the native people’s ways of articulating their odd relationship to a European empire—not least its particular Lutheran theology. Even in their mixed metaphors: Greenlanders earned their living through the frost of their brows. Along with Signe’s signal empathies with local cultures, remember that Greenlanders’ long path to political autonomy began with Signe Rink’s father, and then her husband. Of course much else has happened since Signe Rink left the island in 1868. But it’s unlikely that native Greenlanders could welcome a Trumpian liberation, and far less a Trumpian purchase. They are not to be conquered. They are not for sale. ©

[Stanley]

GREENLAND

Encouraged to write something about Greenland and a little of the colonial life over there [let me say] that my many descriptions of the Greenlanders on short story form were quite true. Signe Rink, beginning her autobiographical essay, circa 1907.

Signe Rink was born Nathalie Sophia Nielsine Caroline Møller, in Greenland, on January 24, 1836. Perhaps all those names were attached to her to underline that she was 100% Danish. Her parents were well into their thirties, both Danish born, and her father was an administrator of Danish Greenland. Nathalie spent her first 9 years in Greenland and then was sent ‘home’ to Denmark for her formal schooling. But something called her back north, most obviously her marriage (at 17) to Hinrich Rink (1819-1893), who had returned from his first tour of duty in Greenland. He went there in 1848 as a geologist-explorer but returned (with his new wife, nicknamed Signe) as an agent of the Danish trading monopoly. The couple lived in Greenland for a dozen years (1855-1868) during which time both became anthropologists, students and defenders of the Greenlanders’ ways of making a living, their arts, their stories, and their interactions with Danish officialdom. They even published a local newspaper (using an ancient Lutheran missionary press) in the local language (Kalaallit Inuit) which they called ‘Greenlandic.’ Hinrich Rink is remembered in place names, including a glacier, and by a stone monument. Its inscription reads (in Inuit, or ‘Greenlandic’) “he loved and knew us.” Signe’s monuments are literary, including much (no one knows how much) of their newspaper’s content. But her main monument came in short stories, published in four volumes after Hinrich’s death in 1883. Several stories have been translated into English, and they suggest Signe Rink’s complex and humane interrelationships with Greenland, Greenlanders, Denmark, and Danes Some of it was simple nostalgia (her last volume of stories was entitled “From the Greenland that Was”), but recent scholarship finds much more ‘there there’. While her journalism was all about men, her fictions were all about women. Signe the Danish female, daughter of an imperial civil servant and then wife of a western anthropologist, found liberation in the intimacy of Greenlanders’ families and households, in the wit and autonomy in the native people’s ways of articulating their odd relationship to a European empire—not least its particular Lutheran theology. Even in their mixed metaphors: Greenlanders earned their living through the frost of their brows. Along with Signe’s signal empathies with local cultures, remember that Greenlanders’ long path to political autonomy began with Signe Rink’s father, and then her husband. Of course much else has happened since Signe Rink left the island in 1868. But it’s unlikely that native Greenlanders could welcome a Trumpian liberation, and far less a Trumpian purchase. They are not to be conquered. They are not for sale. ©

[Stanley]

DOBZHANSKY

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1973.

Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky, one of the most creative thinkers of the last century, was born on January 25, 1900 in Ukraine, then a province of the Russian empire. His middle-aged parents, devoutly Orthodox in faith and longing for a child, had prayed to St. Theodosius for one, and so gave their boy the saint’s name. At the University of Kyiv, he studied entomology, primarily beetles. This may have been because, as Darwin said, there were so many of them, but it’s also worth pointing out that in 1924 Dobzhansky married a genetics researcher, Natasha Sivertseva, and with her moved on to Leningrad to do doctoral research on the genetics of fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster. His work there brought him a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Columbia, in New York, where he worked in the fruit fly labs of Thomas Hunt Morgan. In 1930, Dobzhansky followed Morgan to the California Institute of Technology, first as a research assistant and then, from 1937, as a full time member of faculty. Then, in 1939, Dobzhansky published Genetics and the Origin of Species. It would go through two substantial revisions (1941 and 1951), and through these editions we can follow the creation (pardon the pun) of the ‘modern Darwinian synthesis’. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had made a compelling case for evolution (natural selection) as the progenitor of all species, living and extinct. But Darwin did not provide an experimentally verifiable mechanism for this process. Dobzhansky’s 1939 publication marked the culmination of decades of work to fill this gap. Speciation, evolution, whatever you call it, was a material process embodying causes (variations or mutations in the ‘genetic material’) and effects (alterations in the organism which might effect its environmental viability). Much of this was based on Dobzhansky’s own research, but it had been a joint effort. The 1939 edition of Genetics and the Origin of Species included over 600 citations of other works, and subsequent editions doubled that. It only remained for Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin to tell us exactly how the genetic material was constructed. As subsequent research has demonstrated, that was a big “only,” but there’s no doubt that the founding father of modern genetic research was a Ukrainian immigrant named Dobzhansky. He exchanged his student visa for citizenship in 1937. Luckily, there were no ICE officers around to kidnap him, deport him to Latin American prisons, or shoot him in the street. And it’s worth noting, too, that Theodosius Dobzhansky retained his Orthodox faith throughout. Evolution, he insisted, should be seen as God’s gift: Theodosius was, after all, his baptismal name. ©.

[Stanley]

A CARROT AT COURT

And, dear Englond, if ought I understond,

Beware of Carrots from Northumberlond.

Carrots sown Thynne a deep root may get,

If so they are in Somer set.

Their Coynings mark thou; for I have been told,

They assassine when young, and poison when old.

---from Jonathan Swift, “The Windsor Prophecy,: 1711.

Luckily for English literature, Swift got better at both political satire and scurrilous poetry, but this one got him in trouble with Queen Anne (here personified as “dear Englond”). Worse, the barb missed its target, the red-headed ‘carrot’ from Northumberland, who was none other than Elizabeth Seymour, Duchess of Somerset. The duchess not only retained her position as groom of the stole but solidified her informal place as Queen Anne’s best friend at court. By the end of the year, Swift was calling her “the d-----d Duchess.” But that was in a private letter, not a published satire, for Jonathan Swift was, after all, smart enough to get in out of the rain. And there had been a downpour. Queen Anne refused Swift preferment within the Church of England, while the duchess of Somerset finished out the reign as the queen’s undisputed favorite. Elizabeth Seymour, duchess of Somerset, was born Lady Elizabeth Percy on January 26, 1667. She was well-placed at birth, granddaughter of the earl of Southampton (then still Charles II’s Lord High Treasurer) and daughter of the fabulously rich earl of Northumberland, Joceline Percy. Elizabeth survived her siblings and so, when Northumberland died, she became (at age 3) the hottest marriage property in England. Her first, to the much older Thomas Thynne in 1681, was desperately unhappy. “Sown Thynne,” perhaps, but he was murdered in 1682. Rumor was that she arranged the murder, and Swift took advantage of the rumor in 1711. Elizabeth than married the impecunious earl of Somerset (“Somer Set”), and (financed by her Percy wealth) the two embarked on a career at the court of the Princess Anne, who became queen in 1702. Queen Anne was rendered poorly by repeated pregnancies (no child survived), and had her eccentricities (which, by the way, did not include keeping rabbits as proxies for all her dead children), but she was no one’s fool and recognized the duchess as a proper friend. Thus Swift’s libel (or, if you prefer, satire) only offended the queen. And when Swift suggested that the Duchess of Somerset, having assassinated her husband Thynne, might now poison the queen, he had overstepped himself. For her part, the duchess of Somerset survived as court favorite until Queen Anne’s death, in 1714. At Anne’s funeral the duchess was named chief mourner. As for Jonathan Swift, he licked his wounds to became a better satirist. I like to think of the fun he might have made of the court of our King Donald. ©.

[Stanley]

BRIDGES

Mr. Modjeski’s engineering designs are characterized by sincerity, which is the basis of true art. [His bridges] demonstrate the beauty which is inherent in steel construction. when freed from attempts at embellishment or concealment by means of masonry and concrete. Editorial tribute to Ralph Modjeski, 1940.

Ralph Modjeski died in 1940, but if you live in North America the chances that you will have seen a Modjeski bridge. Many survive to this day, and you’ll find them in places that carry (or cross over) heavy traffic. Not all of them will call forth comments about their “sincerity.” But recently the Chicago Tribune called even his bascule bridges on the Chicago River “elegant.” I’ve crossed over (or been stopped by) quite a few of those, and never once thought of their elegance. Nor is Modjeski’s first major contract (the 1909 Arsenal Bridge across the Mississippi at Davenport) a thing of aesthetic note. But it does its job, which is a complicated one, including a swing span over one of the river’s barge canals. I crossed it by rail (on the Rock Island “Rockets”) many times in my misspent youth. The Rockets are no more, nor is my youth, but Modjeski’s bridge still swings when needed. More famous Modjeski bridges cross the St. Lawrence (at Quebec City), the Delaware (at Philadelphia), San Francisco Bay (from Oakland to SF), and the Columbia (at Portland). There’s even one at St. Louis, also across the Mississippi. That’s the McKinley Bridge (1910) which was designed to carry an interurban railway and those pesky new motor cars. Its very long spans (each over 500 feet) make it a subject for modern engineering students (and maybe even aspiring sculptors). Bridges in general have for a long time been a favorite metaphor for poets and politicians, not least nowadays when American politics have produced unbridgeable (if you’ll excuse the pun) gaps. Therefore it’s particularly appropriate, and timely, to note that Ralph Modjeski was an immigrant and (moreover) one who obtained his US citizenship by dubious means. Today he might be kidnapped, deported, perhaps even shot in the street. But in a more civilized era, we welcomed him and, ultimately, called him the ‘father of American bridge design.’ We did ask him to change his name, however, and he complied. Ralph Modjeski was born (as Rudolf Modrzejewski) on January 27, 1861. This was in Galicia, today a part of modern Poland, and to the end of his days our American bridge builder stressed his Polishness. His mother, an actress, first came to the US in July 1876 and it was then that her son became Ralph Modjeski. But the boy returned to Europe (Paris) for his education in bridge design. There also he obtained his citizenship papers and, luckily, returned to build his bridges and his successful company. Most of his bridges still do their work, some beautifully and sincerely, and his company still stands, with branch offices everywhere, including in St Louis. It’s called Morris & Modjeski, and it’s an American artifact. ©

[Stanley]

SERENDIPITY

This discovery, indeed, is almost of the kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word which . . . you will understand better by the derivation rather than the definition. Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, January 28, 1754.

There are a great many words better understood through studying their history than by looking them up in a dictionary. That likely will tell you only what the word means today. But all words in any language have histories, including (surprisingly often) first coinages as well as changing meanings and contexts. Above, I’ve quoted the first coinage, in English, of “serendipity,” which came full-blown from the pen of Horace Walpole on January 28, 1754. Appropriately, Horace Walpole (1717-1797) lived a fairly serendipitous life. Probably the youngest son of Britain’s very first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, Horace survived rumors that he was not really Robert’s son to become London’s best-known Man About Town when London was full to bursting with such men-and such women. He served not very assiduously in parliament, representing three of the rottenest of boroughs (he never even set foot in one of them) for thirty years. More significantly, Horace enjoyed his father’s favor through patronage offices which required no labor but returned substantial incomes. (Indeed, Horace Walpole is one of the reasons for Article 1, Section 6, clauses 2 and 3, of the US Constitution.). So Horace always had enough money to dress stylishly, enjoy an entertaining circle of friendships, and build one of London’s most fanciful mansions (Strawberry Hill, which still stands). Thus it was that Horace Walpole became one of the best sources for scholars who study Georgian London, its art and architecture, its literature, its politics, its high society. Horace knew everyone worth knowing, and he wrote about them: elliptically in his novels and directly in his letters. And they wrote about him, too. Thus gossip can become history. But there is more in Walpole’s letters than sharp-nibbed gossip. In the same letter to his friend Sir Horace Mann, where he takes credit for coining “serendipity,” he also hints at the word’s prehistory. “I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip . . .as their Highnesses travelled they were always making discoveries by accident and sagacity.” That ‘silly fairy tale’ was a 1557 translation and reprint of an old Persian story, in which we find that “Serendip” was the old Persian name for the mysterious (and presumably happy) island of Ceylon, which we know now as Sri Lanka, which in turn can be translated as “resplendent island.” So, please, enjoy today through making serendipitous discoveries and adding to your resplendent vocabulary—in whatever language you wish, for Horace Walpole read it in Italian. There are now a couple of editions in English. ©.

[Stanley]

NEVERMORE

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’tis some visitor,”I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door-

Only this, and nothing more.”

First stanza of “The Raven.” By Edgar Allan Poe.

If one wants to learn of the rhyming and rhythmic potentials of the English language, there can be few better poems to begin with than Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” which was first published in The American Review on January 29, 1845. That may be why the poem, in its 18-stanza entirety, was included in my high school literature text. And there could have been no one better suited to read it to me than Oakley V. Ethington, whose rich baritone (suitably voiced in one of its lower registers and accompanied by banging base notes from Oakley’s baby grand) added immensely to the poem’s doom-laden story. It’s like fate, aka Death, rapping its dark message repetitively, insistently—and I still wonder whether a bunch of teenagers in Des Moines, Iowa, were really up to it. Be that as it may have been, the poem was in 1845 a sensation. Too bad, I guess, for Poe was on his last legs. He would die in three years’ time, a wreck of dreams, drink and drugs. Poe’s gloom fed also upon his tragic losses, notably of his beloved mother, an English actress who died of tuberculosis when he was a toddler and then his child bride Virginia Clemm, his beautiful Baltimore cousin whom he married too early (she was only 14) and who then died too soon (at 24). In “The Raven” these lost and lorn females are represented by “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—nameless here for evermore.” As for the tapping, rapping Raven, the gruesome truth is that there might actually have been one, already doornail dead, mounted on the darkly glowering mantel that overlooked Poe’s writing table in his tiny cottage at the (then) rural northern end of Manhattan Island. The mantel itself hasn’t moved far, for it’s preserved in the rare book room of the Columbia University library. The raven itself flew further. You can find it at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Poe’s raven also hovers in the name and shield of Baltimore’s professional football team, an unlikely roost but a popular favorite. And Poe’s poem, itself, continues to wing its way around the world as (probably) the best-known piece of American verse, despite the wonderful works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes, et cetera. When you consider that Poe got only $9 for it (or $300 in today’s money), one has to consider irony as well as tragedy, gloom, and pathos as among “The Raven’s” lasting themes.. ©.

[Stanley]

MICE

The complexity and urgency of the problems faced by us earth-bound humans are increasing much faster than our combined capabilities for understanding and coping with them. This is a very serious problem. Luckily there are strategic actions we can take, collectively. Douglas Engelbart, 2004.

The quotation figures prominently in the mission statement of the Douglas Engelbart Institute, a privately endowed foundation that today operates out of Sebastopol, California, but has its roots in ‘Silicon Valley,’ Douglas Engelbart himself was born in Portland, Oregon, on January 30, 1925. He graduated from high school in 1942, at just the right age to take part in World War II. He became a radar and radio tech in the US Navy. It was then, in the most primitive of circumstances (in a traditional beach hut on Leyte Gulf in the Philippines), that he took time off to read Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (in The Atlantic, July, 1945). Bush was then well on his way to becoming the presiding genius of what Dwight Eisenhower would call, pejoratively, our ‘military-industrial complex,’ but in the fullness of time we might better see Bush as a seminal figure in the formation of the information society. That’s certainly how Engelbart read Bush, and so the 20 year old seaman returned stateside to earn degrees (BS, MS, and PhD) in electrical engineering. It was really all about computing, though, and over his working lifetime Engelbart found lodging with a variety of think tanks and research institutes. Today he’s most famed for his role as inventor (or coinventor) of the computer “mouse”: so named because, before ‘bluetooth,’ it had to have a tail. Engelbart never made much money from it, selling the patent for a mere $40K to a startup called “Apple,” but he was much more interested in creating workable interfaces between computers (machines), and the human beings operating them. And the interface was the thing, not really for ‘personal’ computing but for ‘group’ computing. Computers and their operators, in the mass, made possible an exponential growth, as in 10xxxx, of the human intellect. It’s what the Engelbert Institute calls, today, “augmenting the collective intellect.” Engelbart himself unveiled the concept in a 1968 conference (later called “the mother of all demos”). His name for it was “bootstrapping.” But his wasn’t the 19th-century social Darwinist chant ‘to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstrap.’ Instead, Douglas Engelbart urged, we should share bootstraps. We would pull ourselves up by pooling information, all of it, and use computer technology to open it to our shared intellect. The key word here is ‘collective,’ still used repeatedly in the Engelbert Institute’s publicity. Engelbart’s was an interesting potentiality, radically different from the vision of too many of our current Silicon Valley technocrats. Seeing themselves as Lords of Creation, they don’t share their bootstraps, unless maybe with Donald J. Trump. ©

[Stanley]

PUZZLER

As a school for cleverness and ingenuity designed to make of study a recreation, and as an aid to both scholar and teacher, I dedicate this work to the school-children of America. Sam Loyd, “Preface,” The Cyclopedia of Puzzles, 1914.

This was a posthumous publication, for Sam Loyd died in 1911. His son, also Sam Loyd, put together the Cyclopedia, but it’s probable that most and possible that all the puzzles therein were, indeed, his father’s fruits. Probable? . . .possible?: you can sort that out for yourself at the website of the Sam Loyd Company, New York, which still makes new puzzles and preserves old ones, thousands, most of which came from the prolific mind of the elder Sam Loyd. He was born in Philadelphia, probably of Welsh stock, on January 31, 1841. It was the eve of America’s industrial revolution, and when the family moved to New York young Sam announced his intention to become a steam and traction engineer. He entered adulthood with the paper qualifications to do that, but already, as a child, he’d displayed a hyperactive ability to invent. He imitated natural sounds. He parodied his elders (in the family and on the block). He ventriloquized. He devised puzzles. And, from very early, he played chess. Soon these side shows interested him more than steam power. He published his first puzzle in 1855, and then never stopped. Sam Loyd is still celebrated today as America’s puzzle king. Disputes linger over whether he invented all of his puzzles and games. Certainly he patented many of them. Probably some were plagiarized. It’s a puzzle. And it’s entertaining. Some puzzles required paper, pencil, rulers, and scissors, for instance the ‘Trick Donkeys Problem’ and a whole set of geometric ‘vanishing area’ puzzles. Some came ready-made, on heavy card, like ‘The Disappearing Bicyclist.’ Some were word puzzles. And there were board games, too, notably Parcheesi. That was NOT Sam’s invention, though he claimed it. Parcheesi still exists, but as far as board games are concerned Sam Loyd’s great love was chess. He was good at the game, and competed credibly in Europe, notably in Paris in 1867, but was better at devising end-game puzzles and publishing them in newspapers (syndicated, of course) and in special books. A fanciful chap, Sam Loyd invented legends to go along with some of his end-games, and named another after one of Longfellow’s most famous poems. Whatever their origins, they have become classics. Puzzling as practiced by Sam Loyd was a good business. I know that puzzling was popular in my grandmother’s family. For her (b. in 1875) and her six siblings, growing up in Grundy Center, Iowa, parlor puzzling allowed young people to socialize, perhaps as form of acceptable intellectual intimacy. In the 1950s I found many old, yellowing puzzle books in her attic. But they all burned (with her house) in January 1967, so today I cannot tell you that they were Sam Loyd’s puzzle books. Probably, some were. Probably some were not. It’s a puzzler. ©.

[Stanley]

APPLEBY

The cheese she has bequeathed to us . . . never shouts its flavours from the rooftops: it is simply and quietly a lovely cheese. . . . Its flavours are delicate, almost elusive but they last in the mouth - a long, lingering, delightful reminder of a summer's day. From The Guardian’s obituary for Lucy Appleby, May 29, 2008.

Lucy Appleby was born Florence Lucy Walley on February 1, 1920, at her parents’ farm in Shropshire. Sadly for those who like their legends to be legendary, she did not learn cheesemaking on the farm, but at a nearby agricultural college, where the master cheesewright, a Miss Bennion, made Cheshire cheese, and required her students to do it traditionally. Having learned the art, Lucy returned home, married a neighbor, Lancelot Appleby, just her age, and the young couple set about farming at Hawkestone Abbey Farm, also in Shropshire but closer to the Cheshire line. There was some cheesemaking, but mostly it was birthing and raising seven children and making a go of the farm as a (milk) dairying operation. Then, in the early 1950s Lance and Lucy decided to make traditional Cheshire cheese. Theirs was a reactionary decision, a rebellion against the progressive tendencies of the national milk marketing board. So they used raw milk. They got the cheese going with vegetable rennet. They colored it, subtly, with annatto seeds (an un-English element) They aged their cheeses in calico, not sealed in wax. With Lucy as the presiding genius in the dairy, ‘Appleby Cheshire’ became regionally famous. Then, in the early 80s, came heavier pressure to ‘modernize.’ The Milk Marketing Board and big supermarkets, health-crazed by Mad Cow disease, wanted to ban raw milk, sanitize cheese making, require wax sealing and vacuum packing. At first the public went along with this, but Lucy stuck to calicos and raw milk, and eventually the worm turned. She made friends, too, including Randolph Hodgson of the now-famous Neal’s Yard Dairy (in London of all places), and with Neal’s Yard Lucy founded the Specialist Cheesemakers’ Association with its frankly reactionary devotion to making great cheeses in traditional ways. And it caught on. In 1994, with great fanfare, the Prince of Wales visited Hawkestone Abbey. In 2003 both Lance and Lucy were made MBEs in the Queen’s honors list. Traditional Cheshire remains the queen of all English cheeses. At its best, it’s too crumbly to be a ‘sandwich’ cheese. It’s sharp but in a gentle, subtle way. In 2008, Lucy’s obituarist said that her Cheshire cheese reminded him of a summer’s day. Here in St. Louis one cannot find the stuff. The best shops offer English Cheddar of course. And there’s always Blue Stilton at Christmas time. Sadly, I haven’t had traditional Cheshire for decades. But I remember its tastes (plural) and texture with stunning clarity. It was always the centerpiece at Grizedale College’s wine and cheese parties, 1978-1993, so I think of it as a winter cheese with a warming heart. ©

[Stanley]

BALCHEN

Young as he was, William had already seen a great deal. He had been in the Mediterranean - in the West Indies - in the Mediterranean again - had been often taken on shore by the favour of his Captain, and in the course of seven years had known every variety of danger, which sea and war together could offer.

Thus in Mansfield Park (1814) Jane Austen limns the character of William Price, midshipman. Of course Mansfield Park is not about William, rather about his younger sister Fanny, her trials, tribulations, and ultimate triumph. Jane Austen’s novels are about women, not men, so in Mansfield Park we don’t learn much about William. But we know that the Price siblings needed strokes of luck to get ahead, and that they both had sufficient virtue to make the very best of whatever luck came their way. Both pass that more exacting test. Fanny Price resists the easy temptations of Henry Crawford (a flawed vessel). Sadly it is Henry Crawford, seeking an easy way to Fanny’s heart, who aids William, calling him to the attention of Henry’s uncle, an admiral. William secures a lieutenancy and, we are confident, embarks on a promising career as an officer, not a “poor, scrubby mid”. What little we learn about William’s career conveys the impression that Jane Austen knew quite a lot about midshipmen, captains, and admirals. She had a model, midshipman Tom Fowle, younger son of an impoverished vicar, who entered the navy near the bottom, in 1806, but by 1812 had won his lieutenant’s commission: by examination of course. But Tom’s success also came through his friendship with the Austen family, more particularly through the patronage of Jane’s brother Charles, his captain, his protector, his mentor. Charles Austen would in time become an admiral, thus completing the story, albeit after Jane’s death. But Jane Austen could have known of the legendary rise of John Balchen, born the son of a Surrey yeoman on February 2, 1670. Balchen ran off to join the navy in 1685, just before Britain embarked on a series of imperial wars. So there was “every variety of danger” to face, but if one survived there were plenty of openings too, and at only 22 Balchen was a lieutenant. Five years later he was Captain Balchen, commanding HMS Virgin. Many captaincies (and dramatic sea battles) later, in 1728, the yeoman’s son was an admiral. Along the way, he’d married well, ingratiated himself with more senior officers, and seen his share of courts martial (for not all his battles were glorious victories). In service as a captain, then as admiral, Balchen was known as a good commander, especially solicitous of his crews and, one assumes, of his midshipmen. He had been one himself, once upon a time. No doubt Austen’s characterization of the sterling young William Price owed mainly to her knowledge of Tom Fowles’s career and character. But there may have been something of John Balchen’s. Jane Austen’s fictions always rewarded real virtue. In her era, the Royal Navy did so, sometimes. ©.

[Stanley]

SWEIN

A.D. 1014. This year King Sweyne ended his days at Candlemas, the third day before the nones of February, and the same year Elfwy, bishop of York, was consecrated in London . . . The fleet all chose Knute for king, whereupon advised all the counsellors of England, clergy and laity, that they should send after King Ethelred, saying, that no sovereign was dearer to them than their natural lord if he would govern them better than he did before.

It’s a fascinating passage from The Peterborough Chronicle, probably written much later in the 11th century (and then revised several times), but from it we do learn the likely date of the death of Swein Forkbeard, February 3, 1014. Otherwise known as Sveinn Tjûguskegg, we don’t know his birthdate, but he was the son of Harald, Denmark’s first Christian king, and was duly baptized in 965 A.D. His enemies chronicled him as barbarous, which owed mainly to his behavior but partly to his refusal to accept German overlordship in religion or politics. Meanwhile, Swein Forkbeard set about consolidating his rule in Denmark and extending it to cover most of Norway and parts of Sweden and Poland. Compared to this monumental achievement (Denmark’s present royal family claims direct descent from Swein Forkbeard), Swein’s raids on England were small beer. These began in 990 or 991, and the ransom payments Swein collected helped to finance his Scandinavian conquests. So the English raids continued, at first as profitable sidelights, but increasingly developing their own logic. Swein’s forces, once landed from their “fleet,” careered around England, sacking towns and monasteries, taking hostages, demanding tribute: huge payments in English grain and gold (much gold, back in Denmark, was struck into coinage modeled after English coins but honoring Swein as a Scandinavian sovereign in his own right). There were four big raids, 991, 994, 1003, and 1013. Only the last one, 1013, can be seen as a campaign of conquest. Thanks to Ethelred’s misgovernment (his nickname is Ethelred the Unready), London fell, then Oxford, then Bath and the southwest, There were complications, of course. One of Swein’s captains, Thorkill, defected to “the English”, apparently for payment, but by the winter of 1013-1014 Ethelred (and Thorkill) fled to Normandy and “all the nation accepted” Swein as king. No sooner had this happened than Swein died, perhaps of surfeit, at his winter HQ near Gainsborough. His bones eventually found their way back to Denmark. There (and in Norway and Sweden) Swein’s son Harald succeeded to the throne. In England, his warrior son (Canute, he of tidal fame) took the helm. But, reading between the lines of the Peterborough Chronicle, the English had begun to feel that they wanted a “natural” (English) overlord. In 1066, they got, instead, another ‘northman.’ In this sense, it’s important to note that the chief scholarly value of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles is the evidence they inadvertently contain of the maturation of the English language. As political narratives, they provide only conjectures. ©.

[Stanley]

DART

It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection Related to Sex(1871).

Darwin couched his idea in tentative language, for he had learned that any such notion would raise hackles. That man, homo sapiens, was just another evolved species was revolutionary enough. The idea that ‘we’ might have begun as apes had already (in 1859-1860) been picked out as one of Darwin’s most objectionable ideas, but to add that ‘we’ were of African parentage made it worse. During and after Darwin’s lifetime, discoveries in Germany, China, and Java offered more comforting ideas about humanity’s European or, failing that, Asian origins. Africa, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, where gorillas and chimps abounded, was the “Dark Continent” in too many ways to be ‘our’ birthplace. The easy acceptance of the “Piltdown Man”—a hoax skull ‘found’ in an English sandpit in 1912—confirmed that leading scientists preferred to think of themselves as emerging from more civilized racial stock. And then along came Raymond Dart with his discovery of a fossilized skull, in southern Africa, a skull that looked to him like a ‘missing link’ between ape and man. He classified it Australopithecus africanus, ‘southern ape of Africa,’ and in Nature (1925) identified it as a link between apes and humans. The classification stuck. Dart’s “Taung Child” has since been joined by other fossil evidences that the transition from primitive ape to primitive human did occur in Africa. There have been efforts to prove otherwise, even that humanity had multiple “origins,” but ‘out of Africa’ is now dominant and should be regarded as proven. And it is some satisfaction that Raymond Dart lived long enough to see this idea triumph. He was born in Brisbane, Australia, on February 4, 1893, and (after some work in geology) qualified as a medical doctor with a specialty in anatomy. (Indeed for a brief while he taught anatomy at Washington University in St. Louis). So he was well qualified to see human (more accurately, ‘hominin’) characteristics in the Taung skull. His Nature article roused a chorus of objections, and not a few ho-hums, for in 1925 ‘we’ in the west were (like Bishop Wilberforce, in 1860) still proud of ‘our’ Europeanness and ‘our’ pale skins, but Raymond Dart was less wedded to that civilizational myth. After all, he’d been a medic in WWI, an arena in which ‘our’ savagery had proven all too evident. That particular experience led Dart on a wild goose chase to prove that savagery and aggression (and cannibalism) had been vital elements in human evolution. But he spent much more time building up the medical school at Witwatersrand University, South Africa. He did not live long enough to see the end of apartheid, but when Dart died in 1988 he was regarded as the progenitor of the African model of human evolution. As for ‘us’, ‘we’ are all Africans. As usual, part of the problem lies in the pronouns. ©.

[Stanley]

LADY DAVY

You will be annihilated the moment you do, and, instead of an alkali or an acid, become a neutral salt. Reverend Sydney Smith to Jane Apreece, 1812.

Smith advised the wealthy widow Jane Apreece against marrying Humphrey Davy. Since Davy’s fame (already considerable) rested mainly on his achievements in chemistry, the letter helps us to understand why Sydney Smith was the leading wit and aphorist of his time. His maxims (like Franklin’s in America) would become staples of English middle-class morality throughout the 19th century. Humphrey Davy, too, was an item. A pioneering chemist, he was a promising poet (seen so by both Wordsworth and Coleridge) and a dab hand with brush and oils. But today we’re more interested in the recently widowed Jane Apreece, who rejected Smith’s counsel to become, on April 11, 1812, Mrs. Davy. To be exact, she became Jane, Lady Davy, for only three days before Humphrey Davy had been made a baronet. So it was for her a good match. Davy was of humble birth but a new breed, a ‘celebrity scientist’ and recently made Professor at the Royal Institution. But Lady Jane was no slouch. Jane Davy was born Jane Kerr on February 5, 1780, the only daughter and (as it turned out) heir of a wealthy Scots merchant. Aged 19, she married Shuckburgh Apreece, the elder son of an English baronet. He died before his father, so she never became Jane, Lady Apreece, but even before Shuckburgh’s death she’d made a reputation as a wealthy woman who knew her own way about town (Edinburgh, London, Rome, and Paris), and then followed in that way with (or more often without) her husband. She was wealthy enough to do that, attractive and intelligent into the bargain, and thus on Apreece’s demise became, again, a hot property on the marriage market. Jane had several suitors, and much advice, too, from a circle of friends that (besides Sydney Smith) included her distant cousin Walter Scott, the novelist Maria Edgeworth and, very possibly, Madame Germaine de Staël. So in 1812 Sir Humphrey Davy landed a package. No ‘neutral salt’ she: Lady Davy and Sir Humphrey traveled around Europe, going on their extended honeymoon in 1813 with young Michael Faraday (Sir Humphrey’s scientific assistant) as valet and aide-de-camp. Faraday didn’t like her at all, and after Humphrey Davy’s death her reputation was further besmirched by Davy’s early biographers, but Jane Davy was at the very least faithful to her husband’s memory. She traveled alone to Geneva to be with him in his last illness (1829), then generously oversaw his funeral and burial. As Davy’s executrix, she kept his memory alive (and his patents), and returned to a life as one of London’s most attractive widows, a society hostess, and the doyenne of literary salons. Jane Davy was herself, no small achievement for a woman of her era, and it helped that at her death (in 1855) she was worth £180,000 (about £25 million today). It was her patch, and she’d minded it. ©.

[Stanley]

MARY LEAKEY

Unlike Louis, I have never believed that knowledge of the past would help us to understand and possibly control the future . . . basically, I have been impelled by curiosity. Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past: An Autobiography (1984).

Having in 1968 separated from her husband, Louis, and then buried him in 1972, Mary Leakey continued their work searching for evidence of human ancestry in East Africa. During the years left to her she made clear her unique contribution to our species’ story. In belated recognition, in 1981, Oxford conferred an honorary DLitt on her. It had already honored Louis in 1950, with a DSc. The difference in classification is as interesting as the 31 year gap, for in retrospect Mary was the better scientist. Another oddity is that a half-century before, Oxford had advised that young Mary not even bother to apply for admission. Mary Leakey was born Mary Nicoll on February 6, 1913, her father a peripatetic water-colourist. Before and after he died (in 1926) her mother’s main aim was to get Mary into shape for a good education and a better husband. It did not work out. Mary resisted every teacher thrown at her, and instead self-educated, with an interest in archaeological digs and a talent for making drawings of what she found. In 1934, Louis Leakey (1903-1972), asked her to do some drawings for him. In 1938 they married, having broken up Louis’s marriage and torpedoed his Cambridge career. The couple moved to East Africa (Louis had been born in Kenya) to take up archaeology on their own. Working together, they made discoveries which pushed (pre)human history back more than 2 million years and gave Louis international celebrity. But it did not make him a faithful husband. There were ‘affairs,’ including with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, and Mary had had enough, although she often appeared as archaeological assistant, even co-author, to Louis, and was the mother of their three sons. After Louis died, Mary’s findings continued. Perhaps the most dramatic of these were the fossilized footprints at Laetoli, clear and very early evidence of hominins walking upright. Throughout, her tendency was to let her findings ‘speak’ for themselves, and not to get involved in theoretical speculations, but those footprints (and the stone tools she’d found at Olduvai Gorge) spoke loudly. She also set her sons (and a daughter-in-law, Maeve) on important careers in East African archaeology and politics. There were many awards, from postage stamps to honorary degrees. When it came time for a “Google Doodle” on Mary Leakey, February 6, 2013, the artist tried several themes, but settled on one showing Mary Leakey, trowel in hand, kneeling over those amazing footprints at Laetoli, attended only by two of her many dalmatians. These were good choices—although word has it that the dogs might better have been hyraxes. Mary loved these primitive mammals, incorrigibly wild; she welcomed them at her digs and in her houses. She also discovered much about their ancestries. ©.

[Stanley]

MARY LEAKEY

Unlike Louis, I have never believed that knowledge of the past would help us to understand and possibly control the future . . . basically, I have been impelled by curiosity. Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past: An Autobiography (1984).

Having in 1968 separated from her husband, Louis, and then buried him in 1972, Mary Leakey continued their work searching for evidence of human ancestry in East Africa. During the years left to her she made clear her unique contribution to our species’ story. In belated recognition, in 1981, Oxford conferred an honorary DLitt on her. It had already honored Louis in 1950, with a DSc. The difference in classification is as interesting as the 31 year gap, for in retrospect Mary was the better scientist. Another oddity is that a half-century before, Oxford had advised that young Mary not even bother to apply for admission. Mary Leakey was born Mary Nicoll on February 6, 1913, her father a peripatetic water-colourist. Before and after he died (in 1926) her mother’s main aim was to get Mary into shape for a good education and a better husband. It did not work out. Mary resisted every teacher thrown at her, and instead self-educated, with an interest in archaeological digs and a talent for making drawings of what she found. In 1934, Louis Leakey (1903-1972), asked her to do some drawings for him. In 1938 they married, having broken up Louis’s marriage and torpedoed his Cambridge career. The couple moved to East Africa (Louis had been born in Kenya) to take up archaeology on their own. Working together, they made discoveries which pushed (pre)human history back more than 2 million years and gave Louis international celebrity. But it did not make him a faithful husband. There were ‘affairs,’ including with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, and Mary had had enough, although she often appeared as archaeological assistant, even co-author, to Louis, and was the mother of their three sons. After Louis died, Mary’s findings continued. Perhaps the most dramatic of these were the fossilized footprints at Laetoli, clear and very early evidence of hominins walking upright. Throughout, her tendency was to let her findings ‘speak’ for themselves, and not to get involved in theoretical speculations, but those footprints (and the stone tools she’d found at Olduvai Gorge) spoke loudly. She also set her sons (and a daughter-in-law, Maeve) on important careers in East African archaeology and politics. There were many awards, from postage stamps to honorary degrees. When it came time for a “Google Doodle” on Mary Leakey, February 6, 2013, the artist tried several themes, but settled on one showing Mary Leakey, trowel in hand, kneeling over those amazing footprints at Laetoli, attended only by two of her many dalmatians. These were good choices—although word has it that the dogs might better have been hyraxes. Mary loved these primitive mammals, incorrigibly wild; she welcomed them at her digs and in her houses. She also discovered much about their ancestries. ©.

[Stanley]

DEERE

Such are the facts. . . and if they do not show a deliberate conspiracy against Northern interests, against a Northern route to the Pacific, against Northern enterprise, then we confess ourselves utterly incompetent to judge in the premises. Editorial, The Davenport Gazette, February 13. 1855.

The controversies surrounding the railroad bridge at Rock Island (the first to cross the Mississippi) offer a prediction of the coming Civil War. It was a northern bridge, uniting Moline, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa, and it was opposed by a galaxy of southern interests. Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of War, came to oppose the bridge. Robert E. Lee, an engineer in the US Army, helped to design it. Supreme Court Justice John McLean (who’d written the dissent in the Dred Scott case) decided twice in favor of the bridge company. In the second one, contested after a steamboat had crashed against the completed bridge, Abraham Lincoln served as a lawyer for the bridge and the Rock Island Railway company. Lincoln’s case, Hurd v. Rock Island Bridge Company (1857), clarified the oppositional ideologies of North and South. On the southern side we find (among others) the city of St. Louis, recruiting and financing witnesses for the steamboat company. And it’s as important than among the witnesses for Honest Abe was a Moline entrepreneur named John Deere. Deere offered his opinion that the bridge had not caused the wreck, but he admitted that he was no expert on river currents. What he did know about was the importance of the Rock Island bridge to the development of the west and to the success of northern enterprise. John Deere, generally credited as the inventor of the plow that broke prairie sod, was born in Rutland, Vermont, on February 7, 1804. A younger son, he would not take up his father’s trade (tailoring). Instead, he apprenticed as a blacksmith, and became a good one. Expert at his craft, burly enough to do it right, Deere was also smart enough to move west with his young family and grow up with the country. In 1836, Deere set up a large smithy in Grand Detour, Illinois, where much of his business had to do with repairing the cast iron and wooden plows prairie farmers had brought with them. They broke against the strong, rich prairie sod. While tinkering with repairs, Deere designed a new plow. It’s polished steel share cut cleanly and its mold board turned the soil over and away. It caught on, and soon John Deere was making, marketing, and selling over 100 steel plows per year. In 1848 he broke his partnership with Leanard Andrus and moved to Moline. There, on the east bank of the father of waters, John Deere looked across at the richer prairies of the new state of Iowa and saw it as a most promising market. By the time the Rock Island bridge was completed he was producing 10,000 plows annually, he knew better than most the entrepreneurial potential of the Rock Island’s innovative span. ©.

[Stanley]

I got mail from Uncle Bob saying that he was coming to Lancaster and could he visit me at home here in East Hill Street on March 20th.
When I got over the surprise I responded Yes! Yes! Yes! What a treat!

[Stanley]

BACKHOUSE

Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent; for they introduce words by the eye, not by the ear. Isadore of Seville, 7th century A.D.

The illuminated manuscript is, as it was meant to be, a thing of wonder. ‘The word’ (text) was the main thing, but before widespread literacy, before the printing press, before (god help us) ‘pulp fiction,’ illustrations offered instant illumination. Words themselves, even individual letters, were made part of the art, but increasingly pictures predominated, on the top of the page or strategically placed in the widening margins, Illuminations were footnotes, lending authority or truth to the words. Or immediacy: only a few decades after the assassination of Archbishop Becket, at Canterbury, the story was retold in a devotional manuscript, in Latin of course, but alongside the words was a picture of three knights, in chain mail, cutting the saint down while he knelt at the altar. Two monks, or perhaps a monk and a nun, look on, in horror. To see is to believe. By that time, in medieval Europe, illuminating manuscripts had become big business. They were great ways of getting the word to the many-headed. There were also patrons, nobles, kings and queens, great merchants, who wanted illumination for themselves, and paid well for the privilege. Monasteries sprouted scriptoriums, where specialist monks ruined their eyesight and palsied their fingers to produce the things. Today, the manuscripts engage scholars in tracing their history, even (in amazing detail) showing how they were produced. These studies are done for other scholars, but one specialist in illuminations made it her life mission to bring the things to wider audiences. This was Janet Backhouse, born in Wiltshire on February 8, 1938, who in 1962 took a job as assistant keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum (the BM was then also the home of the British Library). She stayed there her whole working life. It was an odd berth for the daughter of a cattle food salesman, but Backhouse was well prepared for it, having studied medieval history and iconography at Bedford College, London. At the BM, she made the department her own. Backhouse produced many scholarly works, but she became better known for her museum exhibits, tours, and talks and demonstrations for school children. She also produced the better kind of illustrated pamphlets one could buy at the BM’s bookshop. If the illuminated manuscript needed a modern evangelist, Janet Backhouse was it. Perhaps her most characteristic hour came in 1987, when she carried the BM’s precious Lindisfarne Gospel north to Durham Cathedral for the 1300th anniversary of St. Cuthbert’s death. In her own act of homage, Janet Backhouse placed the gospel on the saint’s tomb for a moment of silence before it went to its exhibition setting. Backhouse retired the year the manuscripts division moved north in London to the new British Library. I imagine she liked the old place better. ©

[Stanley]

JACOBS

This is the only monument in Groningen dedicated to a woman, namely to doctor and activist Aletta Jacobs. From the website “Art in Groningen” (www.kundspuntgroningen).

This bronze bust stands outside the faculty of arts at Groningen. It’s unusual in several ways, not least that the sculptor deliberately left her own fingerprints on the clay model. Aletta Jacobs was (with her sister) the first woman to attend Groningen and was, all by herself, the first woman to graduate there, in 1879, with a medical degree and, for good measure, a PhD. Immediately, she became the first woman medical doctor in the Netherlands, and went on to establish, in Amsterdam, a free clinic for women. There, controversially, she urged her patients to plan their families and (to that end) prescribed and fitted pessaries (diaphragms) to ensure that the woman’s family planning would be sovereign. Born into an assimilated Jewish family on February 9, 1854, Aletta Henriette Jacobs was always something of an outsider. She tried the ‘correct’ path, learning the domestic arts, attending a ‘finishing’ school, but then chose a profession (pharmacy) for herself before entering Groningen as a medical student in 1871. There she bravely tangled with her (male) professors and established her character as a woman with strongly held opinions. In 1892 she did marry, a grain merchant named Carel Victor Gerritsen, but retained her maiden name. Together they worked for various reforms, collected huge libraries (thousands of books and even more radical pamphlets), and through their travels made connections with English, American, and South African reformers and radicals. After Gerritsen’s death (in 1905) Aletta Jacobs gave up her medical practice to devote herself to the causes of women’s suffrage and civil rights (in Holland) and to world peace. Aletta translated and privately financed the publications (in Dutch) of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics and Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labor . European crises, culminating in The Great War (1914-1918) raised Aletta’s profile as an international peace campaigner, and in 1915, at The Hague, she was a cofounder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Jacobs enjoyed better success on the home front, where Dutch women won the right to stand for office in 1917 and then the right to vote in 1922. In all these years she traveled the world, often with leading feminists (including the American Carrie Chapman Catt). In 1904, having decided that action was better than reading, Aletta Jacobs and Carel Gerritsen sold their huge library to the University of Chicago. The library has since found its way to the University of Kansas where it serves as a resource for feminists and radicals of several stripes. And Aletta Jacobs in bronze has, since 1988, sternly welcomed students of any gender to the faculty of arts at Groningen. ©.

[Stanley]

HILL

Gone though she is, she left her soul behind,

In four dear transcripts of her copy’d mind.

They chain me down to life, new task supply,

And leave me not , at leisure, yet, to die.

Busied, for them, I, yet, forego release;

And teach my wearied heart, to wait for peace.

--Aaron Hill, “Alone, In An Inn, At Southampton.”

This widower’s mourning was written after the death—in 1731—of Hill’s wife Margaret. They’d married in 1710. There followed, the poem laments “twenty lost years”. Whether or not the poet actually revisited the inn, “e’n in this room” where, once, they lay in passion, he now remembers her image in the mirror. Now, “not one dear footstep tunes th’ unconscious floor.” The poem is exact, right down to the fact that of their nine children “four dear transcripts” survived, four children whose care now occupies his mind. Three of the “transcripts” were daughters. Their baptismal names were Urania, Astrea, and Minerva, goddesses all (of, respectively, the heavens, the stars, and wisdom). So one imagines that Aaron Hill (and Margaret) thought well of the female gender, and that their marriage was a happy one. Aaron Hill was born on February 10, 1685, in London. His father was from Malmesbury, Wiltshire. That was Thomas Hobbes’s old stomping ground, but Aaron Hill developed a sunnier outlook, perhaps because. owing to his father’s declining fortunes, Hill was ‘adopted’ by his maternal grandmother, who saw to his education (at Westminster School) and then financed his very own “Grand Tour,” which in 1709 issued in Hill’s published memoir of his visit to the English embassy at Constantinople. So Aaron Hill became a writer. This was an era in which ‘scribblers’ could make a living from putting pen to paper, and so a good marriage could be made to a prosperous grocer’s daughter, Margaret Morris (even though Hill’s father died a bankrupt). Hill was a writer (playwright, poet, essayist), but he was also an entrepreneur, especially in theater but also, oddly, in extracting oil from beechnuts. Given the content of the mourning poem, not to mention his daughters’ names, it’s also worth noting that he became the publisher of The Plain Dealer, an occasional periodical that (among other reforms) campaigned for a better deal for women. That newspaper title lives on in Cleveland, Ohio, but in 1731, after Margaret’s death, Aaron Hill used his talents (and her £800 dowry) to become a leader and in some ways the center of London’s literary life. He quarreled in print with Alexander Pope, as almost everyone did, and the two later enjoyed a public reconciliation. Aaron Hill staged Handel’s first London opera and Voltaire’s first London play. Literary scholars now judge him a “minor” poet, and that’s fair. But his mourning of Margaret is worthy verse. On your next time in London you might visit their grave. Since 1750 they have lain together in Westminster’s west cloister. ©