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. ©.