-------- Original Message --------
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 2 Dec 2003 to 3 Dec 2003 (#2003-127)
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, December 4, 2003 5:00 am
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
There are 25 messages totalling 684 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Sherlock Holmes and cocaine (2)
2. Social Protest
3. Use of rural (or pastoral) in Victorian social protest novels (4)
4. female sea captains (3)
5. More oblique Rousseau (2)
6. Female sea captains (2)
7. Harriet Martineau on women's lodgings
8. L.T. Meade (4)
9. Scottish Identity during the Fin de Siecle
10. Rousseau and Victorian intellectuals
11. Rural/Pastoral
12. Holmes and the Pastoral
13. the suburban at the pastoral/urban intersection?
14. Rousseau, Deronda, and the pastoral
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 06:45:22 EST
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Sherlock Holmes and cocaine
The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Baring-Gould has a note about this:
The fact that Homes was resorting to cocaine injections "Three times a
day" at this time is disturbing, but "a seven-percent solution" is not
in itself an extraordinarily heavy dose, according to F. A. Allen,
M.P.S., in his article "Devilish Drugs, Part I." "The strength of
*injecto cocainae hypodermica*," he says, "became official in the B. P.
in 1898 at ten per cent. May it not be presumed that, at least, Holmes
was trying to 'cut down'? ..."
Well, here Allen gets into its annoying habit of pretending Holmes was
real and all. Actually, the question is did Doyle make a mistake by
writing such a low number. I would say so, like Faber has mentioned.
The note does say that cocaine was introduced at this time as a cure for
the morphia habit. But this was only condemned in 1906.
Matt Demakos
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 06:17:51 -0600
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Social Protest
This "frame of mind" of Matthew Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" may indeed have
"coloured Britain's attitude towards industry right through to the
present day," for better or worse, but this poem continues to be one
that I teach every chance I can, in the year 2003, on an island over
2000 miles away from much else. An "attractive poem"? Surely, sir, you
understate the case!
G. Sibley
Associate Professor of English
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 13:37:42 -0000
From: Michel Faber <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Use of rural (or pastoral) in Victorian social protest
novels
Beth Sutton-Ramspeck discussed the urban, upper-class origins of
pastoral conventions. This is true, and it may lead some observers to
criticise Victorian social protest novels as peddling an ignorant
nostalgia for a rural paradise that never existed.
This is not to say that the anxieties about rampant capitalism felt by
the authors of such novels were ill-founded or ill-thought-out. Perhaps
the mistake that some of these authors made was to focus on city versus
country per se. From a narrative point of view, the symbolism of this
contrast is rich and convenient, so it's no wonder that so many authors
resorted to it. It would have been much trickier, in narrative terms, to
focus on the issue that underlies this urban/pastoral tension -- an
issue that remains unresolved and crucially important today -- that of
the contrast between pre-Industrial Revolution modes of work and
post-Industrial Revolution ones.
Seen through this prism, the rural characters may indeed be idealised,
but what's important about them is not their supposed closeness to
nature or their supposed moral straightforwardness, but their connection
with a labour system in which the work one did was of clear and direct
benefit to oneself and one's neighbours. Similarly, while the horror of
industrialised urban existence was most easily evoked by lurid images of
poverty and crime among the dark satanic mills, the authors were not
necessarily unaware of a more fundamental problem -- that of people
performing fragmented, infinitely repetitious labour with no discernible
benefit to anyone they knew.
What a shame Marx never wrote a three-decker!
Best wishes,
Michel Faber
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 15:16:19 +0100
From: Timothy Mason <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Use of rural (or pastoral) in Victorian social protest
novels
Can one still read Raymond Williams? If so, I'd recommend 'The Country
and the City' on this question. His distinction between Pastoral and
Counter-pastoral might be helpful.
Best wishes
Timothy Mason
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 10:40:41 EST
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: female sea captains
I am wondering if there were any female sea captains in the 18th and
19th centuries. The question arose from the circumstance of a journal
editor (rather officiously) changing a reference to "he" to "he or she."
Was he (or she) just being PC or were there women commanding ships?
Does anyone know for sure? A date would be helpful.
Cynthia Behrman
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 11:14:41 -0500
From: Lillian Nayder <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: female sea captains
Dec. 3
Yes, there were female sea captains in the nineteenth century. For
example, Betsy Miller, who was the daughter of a ship owner from
Saltcoats, commanded the vessel _Cloetus_ in the 1840s and 1850s. I
discuss her briefly in my book _Unequal Partners_ because Dickens
published an article referring to her in _Household Words_ in 1854; the
article ("Rights and Wrongs of Women") was written by Eliza Lynn.
Neither Dickens nor Lynn approved of the profession of sea captain for
women, as you can probably imagine.
Best,
Lillian Nayder
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 09:46:18 -0800
From: Sheldon Goldfarb <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: More oblique Rousseau
In chapter 7 of his novel _Catherine_, Thackeray takes a passing jab at
"Miss Edgeworth and the philosophers" for their view "that in intellect
and disposition all
human beings are entirely equal, and that circumstance and education are
the causes of the distinctions and divisions which afterwards unhappily
take place among them."
Miss Edgeworth was Maria Edgeworth, who besides writing fiction
collaborated with her father on a book called _Practical Education_, a
guide for raising children in which one can find the Rousseauist
statement that virtue and abilities are "the result of education, more
than the gift of nature."
Thackeray also criticized Edgeworth's educational views in a letter of
1839, in which he says she over-emphasizes rationality and factual
matters at the expense of imagination, which seems to be leading us into
Gradgrind territory rather than Rousseau, actually.
Sheldon Goldfarb
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 09:30:23 -0800
From: Sheldon Goldfarb <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Use of rural (or pastoral) in Victorian social protest
novels
Michel Faber's remark about the contrast between pre-industrial and
industrial
modes of work takes me back again to Dickens's _Barnaby Rudge_.
In this novel, which as I mentioned before contrasts the fresher rural
life of 1775 with the squalid London of 1841, there is a mostly positive
portrayal of Gabriel Varden the locksmith, who works and lives in a
combined house and workshop called The Golden Key.
The Golden Key is mostly portrayed as a jovial place of honest labour,
and one might see in this a celebration of pre-industrial modes of work,
in contrast perhaps to the sort of work Dickens himself had to do as a
boy in Warren's Blacking Warehouse: interestingly, there is a decaying
mansion in the novel called The Warren.
(But Dickens does complicate the positive picture of the Golden Key by
portraying antagonisms between Varden and his apprentice, not to mention
conflicts between Varden and his wife and her maid. The reader is also
made aware of the fact that Varden's jovial labour is in the service of
producing locks for places like Newgate prison.)
Sheldon Goldfarb
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 09:49:26 -0800
From: "Peter H. Wood" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Female sea captains
Lillian Nayder wrote:
> Yes, there were female sea captains in the nineteenth century.
Though she did not ship as the captain, one captain's wife, Mary
Patten,
sailed with her husband on the clipper "Neptune's Car" in June 1856,
bound from New York to San Francisco. Off Cape Horn her husband
collapsed and was confined to his bunk for the rest of the voyage. The
first mate had been dismissed from duty for incompetence, and the second
mate knew nothing of navigation. Mary Patten, however, had studied the
subject to pass the time on long voyages with her husband.
For the next fifty-two days, from the Horn to the Golden Gate
through
some of the worst winter seas in the world, Mary Patten navigated the
vessel to a safe landfall, at the same time nursing her husband. She
became a hero of the Women's Rights movement, and I think rightfully so.
As a footnote to her achievement; the record passage time from the
Horn
to San Francisco was just over forty-eight days.
Peter Wood
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 01:17:49 -0500
From: Susan Brown <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Use of rural (or pastoral) in Victorian social protest novels
>
> >Half a century before, W J Linton published an illustrated narrative
> poem of booklet length, *Bob Thin*, that tells of an urban worker's
> escape to a rural commune that lifts pastoral to its utopian
> potential, which of course brings this sentence to its natural rest
> with mention of Gissing's contemporary Wm Morris, *News from
> Nowhere*.
Another early but pertinent narrative poem that I don't believe has been
mentioned is Sarah Stickney Ellis' _Sons of the Soil_ (1840), which
present a critique of contemporary materialism through an idealisation
of rural life and values.
Susan Brown
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 09:00:02 -0800
From: Elaine Musgrave <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Sherlock Holmes and cocaine
Dear VICTORIA:
In response to Liz Miller's question about the seven-percent solution of
cocaine that Sherlock Holmes injects himself with at the beginning of
_The Sign of the Four_, I wanted to point to the following sources:
In volume 1 of William S. Baring-Gould's _The Annotated Sherlock Holmes_
(Clarkson N. Potter, 1967, 2 vols.) note 4 on page 611 of _The Sign of
the Four_ reads partly as follows:
"The fact that Holmes was resorting to cocaine injections 'Three times a
day' at this time is disturbing, but 'a seven-per-cent. solution' is not
in itself an extraordinarily heavy dose, according to F. A. Allen,
M.P.S., in his article 'Devilish Drugs, Part I.' 'The strength of
_injecto cocainae hypodermica,' he says, 'became official in the B. P.
in 1898 at ten per cent. [ . . . ].'"
Christopher Keep and Don Randall have a interesting reading of Holmes's
use of cocaine, "Addiction, Empire, and Narrative in Arthur Conan
Doyle's _The Sign of the Four_," which appears in _Novel_ 32 (1999):
207-21. As I remember (not being able to lay my hands on my copy of the
article right now), they explain Watson's vehement objections to
Holmes's cocaine habit in the context of a reversal of medical opinion
about cocaine occurring in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The article
is well worth a look for much more than this historical background, and
its sources might be able to point those who want to dig deeper in
useful directions.
Elaine Musgrave
[log in to unmask]
Department of English
University of California, Davis
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 13:12:34 -0500
From: Julia Chavez <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Harriet Martineau on women's lodgings
Dear Victorianists,
I am trying to find the following quotation from Clementina Black's
essay, "The Organization of Working Women," which appeared in the
Fortnightly Review in 1889:
"Of course I do not propose to live in lodgings by myself. It would not
be respectable."
Black goes on to say that Harriet Martineau wrote this to her mother
when she (Harriet) was more than thirty years old. Does anyone know if
this letter is available in any of the collected works of Martineau? I
have looked in Harriet Martineau Selected Letters, ed. Valerie Sanders
(1990) without any luck.
Best,
Julia Chavez
graduate student, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 12:06:13 -0600
From: "Kara M. Ryan" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: More oblique Rousseau
Having just finished writing a manuscript that regards The Absentee as
in discourse with Rousseau over the concepts of justice and rationality
(particularly as the novel views the Irish peasantry and women), I am
really enjoying this thread on Rousseau and I am thrilled that Maria
Edgeworth has now been brought in.
I would be interested in mining the brilliance of this group for its
further insights concerning Rousseau's influence on Victorian novelists
and intellectuals. (Martineau? George Eliot?) Let me apologize in
advance if I am overlooking any obvious connections--I admit to writing
this on a whim, not having engaged in any preliminary research.
Thanks,
Kara M. Ryan
Instructor
Department of English
University of Tulsa
"It is the job of thinking
people not to be on the
side of the executioners."
Albert Camus
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 14:26:36 -0500
From: Anna Jones <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: L.T. Meade
Hello VICTORIAnists. Can anyone tell me when L.T. Meade's novel _The
Medicine Lady_ was first published? My Google search has come up a
blank, as the one site that says anything about the novel seems
incomplete, and I'm afraid to trust it (it says 1901).
Many thanks in advance!
AMJ
Anna M. Jones
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL 32816-1346
407-823-3406
----------
"To a man not accustomed to thinking there is nothing in the world so
difficult as to think. After some loose fashion we turn things in our
mind and ultimately reach some decision, guided probably by our feelings
at the last moment rather than any process of ratiocination;--and then
we think that we have thought." --Anthony Trollope
>
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 03:40:55 +0800
From: Allison Machlis <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Scottish Identity during the Fin de Siecle
I am looking for books or articles dealing with issues of Scottish
identity or heritage during the Fin de Siecle. Any help would be
appreciated. Thank you.
Allison Machlis
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 13:02:43 -0800
From: Peter O'Neill <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Rousseau and Victorian intellectuals
In _On Heroes_, Thomas Carlyle claims Rousseau as a worthy man of
letters, if only for the importance of being earnest:
"Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too great for his otherwise
sensitive , rather feeble nature; and which indeed in the end drove him
into the strongest incoherences, almost delirations. There had come, at
last, to be a kind of madness in him: his ideas possessed him like
demons; hurried him so about, drove him over steep places!"
Later in the essay, Carlyle unmans Rousseau further, leaving the reader
to wonder: is this any way to treat a hero?
"Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his
countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I call
unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in
Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes
pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not
genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something operatic; a kind of
rosepink, artificial bedizenment."
Peter O'Neill
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 21:02:37 -0000
From: Lesley Hall <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: L.T. Meade
> Hello VICTORIAnists. Can anyone tell me when L.T. Meade's novel _The
> Medicine Lady_ was first published
The British Library online catalogue
http://blpc.bl.uk/
gives 1892 for the 3 vol edition, published in London
Lesley Hall
[log in to unmask]
website http://www.lesleyahall.net
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 21:10:12 -0000
From: Valerie Gorman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: L.T. Meade
RLIN says the first American edition was published by Cassell in NY 1892
and the first English edition, also by Cassell in London 1893.
Valerie Gorman
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 21:15:38 -0000
From: Malcolm Shifrin <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: L.T. Meade
The Library of Congress catalog gives an entry for Mrs Elizabeth Thomas
(Meade) Smith's The Medicine lady as being published c.1892 (NY,
Cassell) so that takes it a bit earlier.
Malcolm
Malcolm Shifrin
Victorian Turkish Baths Project
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Visit our website:
http://victorianturkishbath.org
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anna Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 7:26 PM
Subject: L.T. Meade
> Hello VICTORIAnists. Can anyone tell me when L.T. Meade's novel _The
> Medicine Lady_ was first published? My Google search has come up a
> blank,
as
> the one site that says anything about the novel seems incomplete, and
> I'm afraid to trust it (it says 1901).
>
> Many thanks in advance!
>
> AMJ
>
> Anna M. Jones
> Assistant Professor
> Department of English
> University of Central Florida
> Orlando, FL 32816-1346
> 407-823-3406
>
> ----------
>
> "To a man not accustomed to thinking there is nothing in the world so
> difficult as to think. After some loose fashion we turn things in our
> mind and ultimately reach some decision, guided probably by our
> feelings at the last moment rather than any process of
> ratiocination;--and then we think that we have thought." --Anthony
> Trollope
>
> >
>
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 22:46:09 -0000
From: lee field <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Rural/Pastoral
Whilst there are obvious ways in which we cannot 'know' the past, we
have ready access to a range of information about it to which an
individual writing at or soon after the time would have been unlikely to
have had access. I don't think we can assume that when a writer peddles
a myth she/he does so knowingly. Writers from the generation that was
mostly born in the country but died in the city will have understood
urbanization in a special way. What do most of us remember about our
childhoods? I don't remember it raining very often. A great many people
during the second half of the nineteenth century probably knew one
village intimately (though from a child's eye view) and compared a rosy
retrospect with a much clearer image of the city they lived in now. We
can only guess how they experienced the contrast.
Simon Poë
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 18:00:39 -0500
From: David Latane <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: female sea captains
Some exceptional cases have been presented, but I think the editor was
wrong--especially if by "ships" one looks at ocean-going merchantmen, as
opposed to fishing boats, coastal ferries, etc. The editor's "he or she"
would encourage the unwary reader to believe a thing that was not: that
"Ship Captain" was a career open to women in the 18th-19th-centuries.
D. Latane
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 20:10:07 -0500
From: Lee O'Brien <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Holmes and the Pastoral
I couldn't resist joining two recent strands. Sherlock Holmes has his
own views of rural life not unconnected to the fruits of
industrialisation. In The Copper Beeches he says: "'Do you know, Watson
that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must
look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at
these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at
them and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their
isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.'
'Good heavens!' I cried. Who would associate crime with these dear old
homesteads?'
'They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson,
founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London
do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and
beautiful countryside.'
'You horrify me!'"
Holmes goes on to observe that the law is always close in the city but
"Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may
go on, year in, year out [in the countryside] and none the wiser." Such
passages make me think that Michael Faber may not be right when he sees
Holmes as "essentially amoral". He often expresses a real horror and
loathing of crime - particularly violent crime - that suggests a deep
moral engagement. And who could forget his wonderful turn as Altamont
the "bitter Irish-American" leaving his bees and risking the permanent
defilement of his well of English in the service, deep undercover, of
King and country?
I have an old copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles in which John Fowles
is scathing about the errors in the stories - which makes me wonder
about the status of Watson's narration. Fowles records that when taxed
about getting the training and racing world of Silver Blaze "very wrong
indeed", Doyle replied "one must be masterful sometimes". Grimpen Mire,
according to Fowles, "is Romantic-Urban" nonsense". If we ascribe the
errors to narrator rather than author the intriguing prospect of the
unreliable narrator opens up. So many of the stories address the actual
processes of Watson's story-telling - in one story, I forget which,
Holmes avers that Watson gets his methods wrong in the interests of
meretricious effects. The oppositions the stories play with -
particularly clever Holmes/dull Watson - become more unstable and
interesting I think if we allow Watson a possibly duplicitous narrative
power.
Lee O'Brien
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 10:11:50 +0900
From: Mitsuharu Matsuoka <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Female sea captains
I'm afraid this may have little to do with the subject, but I came
across the expression, "robing himself like Granuaile in one of my
blankets," while reading Le Fanu's ghost story "An Account of Some
Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street. No reference books included the
"Granuaile" entry, but I tried Google.
http://www.obrien.ie/Book112.cfm
Seeing is believing. Google is sometimes of use like _I See All_.
According to the concise DNB, which has no entry of Granuaile, Grace
O'Malley (1530?-1600?) is "Irish chieftainess (Graine Ui Maille in
Irish); in local traditions Graine Mhaol; married, first, the chieftain
of Ballinahinch, secondly, the chief of the Burkes of Mayo; famous as
leader of expeditions by sea; . . . died in great poverty." Granuaile is
perhaps so familiar to Irish people, like Le Fanu.
Mitsu Matsuoka, Nagoya University, Japan
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 10:15:45 +0800
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Tamara=20Wagner?=
<[log in to unmask]> Subject: the suburban at the
pastoral/urban intersection?
I've been following the pastoral/urban strand with
great interest, not least because of my growing
interest in fiction(s) of Victorian suburbia (now that
the "nostalgia-book" has been officially accepted and
I'm free to soar into new projects). In my course on
"domesticity in the novel", one of my students was
supposed to present on the representations of suburbs
in Wilkie Collins's _Basil_. Yet, instead of outlining
the descriptions of industrialisation, class-issues,
snobbery, reverse snobbery &c that are so prevalent in
the novel, she talked about the indeterminacies of the
categories of the pastoral and the urban. Very
interesting, but somehow beside the point. Still,
there was something to glean from her discourse on the
discursiveness of pastoral categories (as one of her
fellow students avidly endeavoured to do in order to
"rescue" the presentation, I presume) in that the
conceptualisation of suburbia in the nineteenth
century was perhaps (and that's the question here)
built precisely on the intersections of the rural and
the urban: hence garden-cities, for example. Does
suburbia play a role in any of the many fictional and
non-fictional discussions of the pastoral/urban divide
that have been mentioned over the last few days?
=====
Tamara S. Wagner
http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/staff/home/ELLTSW/
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Faster. Easier. Search Contest.
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 20:30:54 -0800
From: Peter O'Neill <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Rousseau, Deronda, and the pastoral
A passage from the opening chapter of Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ blends
two recent threads on the pastoral and the influence of Rousseau.
Observing the ostentatious and corrupting atmosphere of the opulent
casino where Gwendolen plays, Deronda alludes to the contrasting
pastoral pleasures of gambling suggested by Rousseau naturalistic views
in a work such as _Emile_ (1762):
"Deronda's first thought when his eyes fell on this scene of dull,
gas-poisoned absorption, was that the gambling of Spanish shepherd-boys
had seemed to him more enviable:--so far Rousseau might be justified in
maintaining that art and science had done a poor service to mankind. But
suddenly he felt the moment become dramatic. His attention was arrested
by a young lady who, standing at an angle not far from him, was the last
to whom his eyes traveled. She was bending and speaking English to a
middle-aged lady seated at play beside her: but the next instant she
returned to her play, and showed the full height of a graceful figure,
with a face which might possibly be looked at without admiration, but
could hardly be passed with indifference."
Peter O'Neill
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End of VICTORIA Digest - 2 Dec 2003 to 3 Dec 2003 (#2003-127)
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