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Date: 09 June 2002 00:00 -0500
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 7 Jun 2002 to 8 Jun 2002 (#2002-158)
There are 9 messages totalling 215 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. A cement copper (3)
2. Victorian hymns in the 20th-21st centuries
3. Damn the Pinafore
4. Copper (3)
5. Richard Burton and Chinese Gordon
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 07:28:51 EDT
From: Judith Flanders <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: A cement copper
I am reading a biography, with a short section on the subject's early life
set in the East End of London at the turn of the century. The subject's
mother washes clothes in 'a cement copper'. Does anyone have any suggestion
as to what this might mean? I had always assumed that coppers were
originally copper, and later metal alloys. I can't imagine what purpose
cement would have served here.
Best
Judith Flanders
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 12:50:39 +0100
From: K Eldron <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: A cement copper
It sounds a variation of the following, described in From The Private Life
of a Country House 1912-1939:
"The typical [farm labourer's] cottage had........a rear extension which
housed a copper and mangle. The former was a bowl about two feet across
embedded in brick or concrete with a fireplace underneath and it was used
for laundering or for any demand on hot water beyond the capacity of kettles
on the kitchen stove."
The book is by Lesley Lewis and was published by David & Charles in 1980. A
paperback edition by Sutton Publishing/The National Trust came out in 1997
and was still available quite recently.
Cheers
K Eldron
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 08:21:41 EDT
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Victorian hymns in the 20th-21st centuries
Peter Wood writes of the manageable melodies and ranges of such hymns. The
school song of my undergraduate alma mater (Drew University, founded in the
19th century and still affiliated with the Methodist Church) is set to the
tune of the Good Friday hymn "Beneath the Cross of Jesus"!
Herbert Tucker reminds us that contemporary affection for and use of the old
hymns by religious people may not be limited to a particular theological
orientation, piety, or pedagogical mission. I can assure you (as someone
with a forthcoming book that discusses devotional literature in relation to
affectivity, eroticism, and identity politics) that I would be the last
person to reduce the complexity that is spiritual feeling to an either/or of
faith versus period-tourism. My scholarly work engages just that question
in examining how Victorian Catholics used Christian history (Biblical story,
typology, and medieval/Counter-Reformation Catholicism) in both
traditionally "religious" ways, as well as in articulating their own
individual, secular, and indeed sexual identities. So nostalgia for me is
a very complicated thing...
Thanks for your input, one and all.
Fred
Frederick Roden
Assistant Professor, English
University of Connecticut
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 09:05:44 EDT
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Damn the Pinafore
Margot K. Louis wrote:
<< In my recording of Pinafore by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Co. (performed many
years ago), while Hebe sings her lines as transcribed by Matt Demakos, one
can hear in the background the chorus singing softly, "He said Damme!"
(several times repeated, then) "He said Damme, yes, Damme!" That's
presumably what shocked Ruskin. >>
Very helpful. Yes, I can imagine the score having something on it not in
any published libretto. This is extremely helpful. Thanks. But what of
the John Ruskin remark? I know nothing of it. Where is it? What is the
full quotation?
Matt Demakos
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 09:10:38 EDT
From: Sally Mitchell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: A cement copper
K Eldron's reply is convincing to me, though another possibility is that
"copper" had come to mean "washtub" (just as my mother and her generation
never stopped using the term "ice box" although the ice man had stopped
making his rounds 30 years earlier), and that she was using the kind of
fixed washtub that's still in many basements in the US (quite useful for
washing the dog in fact): mine is made out of something like cement, though
the surface is smooth, and it is plumbed for cold water only. Indeed, I
once lived in a house where the basement washtub had a pump and must have
been the only source of water until mains were laid at some later date.
SALLY MITCHELL | ENGLISH DEPT, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY | [log in to unmask]
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 15:08:36 -0400
From: Michael Michie <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Copper
From growing up in my grandmother's house in Wellington in the 1940s I
remember a copper in the washhouse (attached to the kitchen but accessed
from outside): a copper bowl encased in concrete. It had a wringer mounted
over it. Clothes were washed using a large wooden stick and she added
something called "Blue" as a starch (a stick of blue chalk-like substance).
Michael Michie
York University Toronto
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 20:55:28 +0100
From: Susan Hoyle <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Copper
Michael Michie wrote <<she added something called "Blue" as a starch >>
Blue may have had starching properties, but its main claim to fame was as a
whitener -- that is, its blueness made white things seem whiter.
Susan, whose housekeeping began just as blue was going out of fashion....
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 20:49:52 -0400
From: William Denton <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Richard Burton and Chinese Gordon
A little while ago I got to wodering if Burton and Gordon had ever met.
Biographies say they wrote letters, but there was never any mention of a
meeting. Gordon met Isabel Burton twice when Burton was away looking for
gold (not that there was any question of hanky-panky, of course, given her
devotion to Burton and Gordon's avoidance of women). All the published
letters between Burton and Gordon appear in THE ROMANCE OF ISABEL LADY
BURTON (1897), and I decided to type them in. They didn't make much sense
on their own, so I added in some short quotes from modern biographies, and
a few longer bits from THE ROMANCE.
If you want to see it, it's up at
http://www.miskatonic.org/history/burton-gordon.html
It includes Gordon's first letter in 1875, asking Burton for advice about
eastern Africa, and a letter from 1883 where Gordon explains his work on
mapping Biblical events to contemporary Jerusalem.
There's no evidence in any of it all that Gordon and Burton met, though
THE ROMANCE twice says they did, once in a general sense and once about a
specific event that's disproven by a letter Burton wrote to Gordon's
brother.
Any of you Burton/Gordon scholars who know for sure if they did or didn't
meet, please let me know. I'd be happy to hear of any mistakes on the web
page, and if anyone knows an address for Mary Lovell, who wrote A RAGE TO
LIVE (1998) about the Burtons, I'd love to know that too.
Cheers,
Bill
--
William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat
lector.
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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 20:43:28 -0700
From: keith laycock <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Copper
The "Blue" referred to by Michael Mitchie was actually called "Dolly Blue"
and was added to the washing to make the clothes whiter. I can remember
going to the"corner store" to buy it. It was wrapped in a blue transparent
wrapper, Hence I suppose the "blue", which contained a cylinder of solid
white material, maybe an inch or two in length and an inch in diameter.
KML
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End of VICTORIA Digest - 7 Jun 2002 to 8 Jun 2002 (#2002-158)
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