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Date: 10 June 2003 00:00 -0500
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 8 Jun 2003 to 9 Jun 2003 (#2003-159)
There are 13 messages totalling 404 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Revelations of a Lady Detective
2. Eyre Defence Committee
3. photography and recognition (3)
4. re Eyre Defence Committee (5)
5. Mayhew (was: photography and recognition)
6. VICTORIA Digest - 6 Jun 2003 to 7 Jun 2003 (#2003-157)
7. race in Collins and Dickens
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Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 08:55:35 +0100
From: Chris Willis <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Revelations of a Lady Detective
Hi!
> According to WorldCat, two copies of this book exist in the US as well: at
> UCLA, and at Indiana Univ., in Bloomington. Sadleir's note explains that
> it was also titled 'Experiences of a Lady Detective,' so searchers may
> want to try that as well. -- James Cornelius, U. of Illinois
I haven't heard of it under this title (possibly an American edition?), but
it was also published as *The Lady Detective: A Tale of Female Life and
Adventure*.
All the best
Chris
================================================================
Chris Willis
[log in to unmask]
http://www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/
"I think all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up
to a point." (Ruth Rendell, The Guardian, 3 August 2002)
Historians Against War
http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/
Campaign Against Compulsory ID Cards
http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/issues/id-cards.shtml
================================================================
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Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 11:48:32 +0200
From: "J.M.I. Klaver" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Eyre Defence Committee
I have come across undocumented information more than once that
Matthew Arnold and Anthony Trollope were amongt those who
condemned the prosecution of Governor Eyre by the Jamaica
Committee in 1866. Can anybody confirm that they indeed sympathized
with Eyre and whether they subscribed to the Eyre Defence Committee.
Best wishes,
J.M. Ivo Klaver
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 09:56:09 +1000
From: Joan Holloway <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: photography and recognition
Kate Flint in her "Victorians and the Visual Imagination" (on page 3)
mentions Mayhew's visit to the photographic studio of a tradesman who claims
he palms off customers with portraits not of themselves. The man claimed
people didn't know what they actually looked like, many having looked in a
mirror only a few times in their lives.(the reference is to Mayhew's "London
Labour"). Flint poses the probability that Mayhew himself was being tricked
by means of this story.
Joan Holloway
[log in to unmask]
>
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 08:01:38 -0700
From: Peter O'Neill <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: re Eyre Defence Committee
Re J.M Klaver's question about the defenders of Eyre: I have also read that
Trollope and Arnold did indeed defend Gov. Eyre, as did Dickens and Ruskin,
who took a leading role on the Defence Committee. Dickens, I understand,
saw Eyre as some kind of savior of the West Indies, even campaigning to get
him a seat in the House of Lords.
Peter O'Neill
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 16:01:26 +0100
From: Michel Faber <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Mayhew (was: photography and recognition)
Joan Holloway wrote:
> Kate Flint in her "Victorians and the Visual Imagination" (on page 3)
> mentions Mayhew's visit to the photographic studio of a tradesman who
> claims he palms off customers with portraits not of themselves. The man
> claimed people didn't know what they actually looked like, many having
> looked in a mirror only a few times in their lives.(the reference is to
> Mayhew's "London Labour"). Flint poses the probability that Mayhew
> himself was being tricked by means of this story.
Mayhew is an interesting challenge to historians who wish to treat
his interviews as 'primary' documentary material. On the one hand
there is no doubt that he and his associates conducted in-depth
interviews with the individuals quoted. On the other hand when
preparing this material for publication, Mayhew turned each episode
into a little Dickensian story, adapting its language and (I am sure)
some of its content so as not to offend too grievously the sensibilities
of his middle-class readers. A number of the uneducated low-lifes in
Mayhew's accounts lapse, at times, into suspiciously elegant,
Fieldingesque phrases, and there's a remarkable absence of sexual
profanity, references to specific acts that might have troubled the
censors, or (most significantly) any sense of anger or resentment
felt by the poor for these well-dressed gentlemen nosing around
their domain. Of course, some of those interviewed would have been
chuffed at the interest shown in them and would have been on their
best behaviour (in all respects) but the overall picture of working-
class (and even destitute) London society that emerges from
Mayhew's work is of a folk who are basically tame -- corrupt, yes,
but not frightening or aggressive or antagonistic towards their self-
styled betters. We goggle at the larger-than-life grotesques and
sympathise with the tragic downtrodden, but we meet nobody who is
so dangerously damaged or malevolent that we can imagine him/her
causing Mayhew and his associates (or us) psychological or
physical harm.
To get this into perspective, we need only read the
articles/interviews that have in more recent times focused on the
inhabitants of housing estates in the slum areas of modern Western
cities. The hardened, casual relationship with random violence, drug
abuse, precocious sexual activity, rape etc, and the interviewees'
alienation from the preconceptions -- and the articulacy -- of the
questioners, is disturbingly clear in such encounters. Realistically,
working-class Victorian London must have had its equivalents;
indeed, it must in some ways have been an even more frightening
and brutal place. This makes Mayhew's somewhat sanitised,
pleasingly shaped pieces (never less than entertaining as
"literature") all the more questionable.
When evaluating Mayhew's interviews as historical material, we have
to struggle with these awkward questions before we even get around
to asking whether (as in the case of the Bermondsey photographer)
he may have been deceived by his subjects. Like the pornographic
diarist 'Walter', Mayhew offers us pricelessly valuable access into
worlds usually distorted/reshaped by fiction, but this access is by no
means unmediated and transparent.
As for Kate Flint's suggestion that the Bermondsey photographer
was pulling Mayhew's leg with his tales of his customers' credulity,
well, of course this is possible. But we should beware of taking the
sheer, barefaced preposterousness of the photographer's scams as
proof that they must be inventions. Granted, it is difficult to believe
that his customers could have been so gullible. But photography was
a new, little-understood technology and people are always ripe for
breathtaking exploitation when dealing with new, little-understood
technologies.
In any case, as the Americans say, "there's a sucker born every
minute". Those Victoria members who, like me, are plagued with
email spams may be bemusedly aware that somewhere out there, in
2003, are educated people who believe that
(1) a wealthy, exiled Nigerian without a bank account is willing to
give them a 25 per cent share in a huge fortune, in exchange for the
lucky samaritan's bank account details
(2) a multinational benefactor (usually Microsoft) is willing to give
them thousands of dollars merely for forwarding a chain email to
their friends
(3) an unspecified but very expensive product will add two to three
inches to the length of their penis
(4) all their debts can be cancelled & a spotless credit rating can be
achieved, free of charge or commitment, at the click of a mouse.
And let's not forget how many people per year give away all their
worldly goods having been convinced by a Cadillac-driving guru that
a spaceship is about to whisk them away to paradise, etc etc.
Compared to such follies, a Victorian's naive trust that his all-black
photographic portrait will, in time, lighten up into clarity seems quite
reasonable to me.
Best wishes,
Michel Faber
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 10:53:33 -0500
From: Kelly Searsmith <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: re Eyre Defence Committee
For an interesting discussion of the Eyre Affair, including the names of
prominent members on either side, a description of their positions, and
intriguing theorizing about the ideological associations of the same, you
might see David Levy and Sandra Peart's contribution to the Contributors'
Forum ("The Secret History of the Dismal Science: The Governor Eyre
Controversy") in The Library of Economics and Liberty at
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/LevyPeartdismal3.html.
____________________________________________
Kelly Searsmith, Ph.D., English
Asst. Prof., U of MD University College
Lecturer, U of I at Urbana-Champaign
www.searsmith.net / [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 16:40:46 +0100
From: Nicola Bown <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: photography and recognition
Lindsay Smith, in a chapter of her book The Politics of Focus (1997) called
'From the Shoe-black to the Crossing Sweeper', discusses the question of the
credulity of nineteenth-century viewers of photography. She looks at
Barnardo's 'before and after' photographs and is interested particularly in
the way photographic practices constructed children as photographic subjects
and viewers of photographs.
--
Nicola Bown
Birkbeck College
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 09:27:10 -0700
From: "Peter H. Wood" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: photography and recognition
Joan Holloway wrote relating to Mayhew's account of a fraudulent street
photographer in Victorian London:
> The man claimed people didn't know what they actually looked like, many
> having looked in a mirror only a few times in their lives.(
A sidelight on this point occurs in the evidence files in the Ripper
murders, where the few possessions found by the body of Polly Nichols
(Victime #1) included a piece of broken mirror, which was cited as evidence
"she had been dossing in a common lodging-house where mirrors were a luxury
not normally provided" (Rumbelow, Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook.
ch. 2 "Bloody Knife").
Indeed, Mayhew's informant might well be speaking the truth. Mirrors
were heavy, fragile and not easily portable; the poor who did not possess a
permanent lodging would be unlikely to own one for lack of a place to hang
it and the risk that it would be stolen and pawned for a few shillings to
buy gin. And psychologically I think that the less they saw of themselves
the better for their self-esteem as we say; if indeed they had any at all.
Peter Wood
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 13:23:49 -0400
From: Daniel Hack <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: re Eyre Defence Committee
I am happy to see nineteenth-century political economists defended
against their demonizers, but the article cited below is remarkably
tendentious. Sample quotation (from its sequel, actually; I was so
fascinated that I read on):
"For Carlyle, and for those today who follow his hatred of the
decentralized, spontaneous nature of the market, the end to hierarchy
was a terrible fate. The events in Jamaica in late 1865 and in
America on 11 September suggest what the hierarchicalists are willing
to avow to avert such an end."
Caveat lector.
> For an interesting discussion of the Eyre Affair, including the names of
> prominent members on either side, a description of their positions, and
> intriguing theorizing about the ideological associations of the same, you
> might see David Levy and Sandra Peart's contribution to the Contributors'
> Forum ("The Secret History of the Dismal Science: The Governor Eyre
> Controversy") in The Library of Economics and Liberty at
>
> http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/LevyPeartdismal3.html.
>
--
Daniel Hack
Assistant Professor
Dept. of English
State Univ. of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260
716-645-2575 x1038
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 10:42:50 -0500
From: Mary Lenard <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: VICTORIA Digest - 6 Jun 2003 to 7 Jun 2003 (#2003-157)
Dear VICTORIA,
I'm sure someone else is going to mention this, but one of the Sherlock
Holmes stories is about a woman who was previously married to an
African-American man, and has a mixed-race child she is trying to hide from
her new English husband. It's been a long time since I read the story, and
my copy of Doyle of course is in my office, but I think the story is called
"The Yellow Face"?
--
Mary Lenard
English Department
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
900 Wood Road
Kenosha, WI 53141-2000
(262) 595-2644
FAX (262) 595-2271
"People mutht be amuthed." Charles Dickens, Hard Times
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 14:55:03 -0500
From: james murray cornelius <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: re Eyre Defence Committee
The link to ideas in political economy is very interesting. Note too that
G.O. Trevelyan's biography of John Bright (1914) found the more
interesting division of opinion to be that between literary-humanists such
as Dickens, Tennyson, and Ruskin [pro-Eyre] and the leading scientists of
the day, Darwin, Huxley, H. Spencer [anti-Eyre]. And in political
circles, the Eyre case cut across party lines in many cases.
James M. Cornelius, U. of Illinois
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 14:39:33 -0700
From: Peter O'Neill <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: re Eyre Defence Committee
James Cornelius wrote:
"The link to ideas in political economy is very interesting. Note too
that
G.O. Trevelyan's biography of John Bright (1914) found the more
interesting division of opinion to be that between literary-humanists
such
as Dickens, Tennyson, and Ruskin [pro-Eyre] and the leading scientists
of
the day, Darwin, Huxley, H. Spencer [anti-Eyre]. And in political
circles, the Eyre case cut across party lines in many cases."
Or, to cut through euphemism and other diversionary rhetoric, some who
disapproved of Eyre's actions were simply far more enlightened on the moral
and political issues of this case: John Stuart Mill comes quickly to mind.
Peter O'Neill
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 20:21:37 -0500
From: "Hughes, Linda K" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: race in Collins and Dickens
There's also Collins's and Dickens's collaborative story, "The Perils of
Certain English Prisoners" (1857).
Linda K. Hughes
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End of VICTORIA Digest - 8 Jun 2003 to 9 Jun 2003 (#2003-159)
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