-------- Original Message --------
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 4 Feb 2004 to 5 Feb 2004 (#2004-37)
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, February 6, 2004 5:00 am
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
There are 17 messages totalling 570 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Ruskin and the Queen of Sheba
2. Galignani's (2)
3. =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_'The_Bront=EB_Myth'?=
4. Opium in the 19th century (7)
5. Civil Service in India
6. Secret Marriages (2)
7. littering in Victorian novels
8. Reading albums (2)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 23:02:38 -0600
From: Sharon A Weltman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Ruskin and the Queen of Sheba
The painting "Solomon and the Queen of Sheba" by Veronese is I believe
still in the Sabauda Gallery in Turin, Italy, where Ruskin saw it (not
in the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice).
I'm sure you've already looked at Hilton's first volume of his biography
of Ruskin. You can also find Ruskin's descriptions not only of the
experience of viewing the painting but also of his own efforts copying
(watercolor and drawing) in _Letters from the Continent 1858_ edited by
John Hayman (U Toronto P, 1982).
Cheers,
Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
Associate Professor of English
Louisiana State University
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 07:09:34 +0800
From: Angela Richardson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Galignani's
I'm looking for information on a shop which Victorian travel journals
describe as simply "Galignani's". The one in Paris is most often
referred to (said to be near Rue Vivienne) but there was also one in
Rome and, I think, Naples.
I'd be grateful for any leads.
many thanks
Angela Richardson
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 07:08:04 -0500
From: Nancy Weyant <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_'The_Bront=EB_Myth'?=
A bibliographer's gaze: When the flood of animated discussion of
Lucasta Miller's book first began I was knee-deep in other
responsibilities so set them aside to read later. Two days ago, I
started reading them and was surprised to see the work being treated as
a new publication because I read selectively from almost two years ago
for my soon-to-be-released
bibliography of secondary sources on Gaskell.
The Bronte Myth was first published in 2001 in London by Jonathan Cape
(and reviewed in the 2002 issue of the Gaskell Society Journal by Robert
Barnard). At the time I read it I thought it would generate a lot of
discussion and was somewhat purplexed to read nothing about it on this
list. Interesting that it took its republishing by a "major" publisher
to attract attention and a review in the New York Times to generate this
dialogue!
Nancy S. Weyant
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 20:08:08 -0700
From: Goldie Morgentaler <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Opium in the 19th century
Dear Victorians,
A student has asked me a question that I cannot answer and I hope
that someone on the list can help. It has been my understanding that all
sorts of drugs, opium included, were readily available in
19th-century England and that they could be legally bought. Matthew
Sweet's chapter on the drug trade in Inventing the Victorians seems to
confirm this. But one of my students has pointed to a letter
written to Queen Victoria by the Chinese official Lin Tse-hui in 1839 at
the start of the Opium War in which Lin makes the argument that since
opium trade and consumption were illegal in England, the
British should not be exporting this harmful drug to other countries.
Was Lin Tse-hui mistaken about the illegality of opium in England in the
1830s or was he correct? If he was correct, then where did
Dickens and others get their portraits of opium dens later in the
century? Can anyone can shed light on this apparent contradiction?
--
Goldie Morgentaler
Dept. of English
University of Lethbridge
4401 University Drive
Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada T1K 3M4
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 08:20:53 +0000
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Civil Service in India
Here´s some proposals;
Arnold P. Kaminsky; The India Office, 1880-1910 (1986)
G.K Fry; Statesmen in Disguise (1965) includes materials relating to the
history of the Civil Service.
Mersey, Viscount; The Viceroys and Governors-General of India, 1757-1947
(1949)
Misra B.B.; The Bureaucracy in India up to 1947 (1977)
Best Wishes,
Ilona Salomaa
University of Helsinki
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 11:27:40 -0000
From: Patricia de Montfort <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Galignani's
Dear Angela
Galignani's claimed to be the first seller of English language books in
continental Europe although they also sold French language
books. There is still a shop of that name in Paris at 224 rue de
Rivoli although I cannot say how closely they are connected.
There was also an English language newspaper (often mentioned
in the Whistler correspondence) called Galignani's Messenger.The
1911 Encylopedia Britannica mentions that Giovanni Antonio
Galignani (1752-1821) started a library in Paris in 1800 followed by a
newspaper, Galignani's Messenger in 1814. The newspaper ran
from 1814 to 1895 when it became the Daily Messenger although
the 1911 encylopedia entry disputes this. There are copies of
Galignani's Messenger in the British Newspaper Library.
I hope this is of some help
Patricia de Montfort
----------------------------------------------------------
Dr Patricia de Montfort,
Centre for Whistler Studies,
University of Glasgow,
Glasgow G12 8QQ,
Scotland
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
tel: 0141 330 3268
fax: 0141 330 8602
website: www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 08:10:50 -0600
From: Ellen Moody <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Secret Marriages
If the original poster is willing to move outside novels
and a bit earlier than the 19th century, the later 18th
century play, _The Clandestine Marriage_ by Colman
and Garrick is a mine of acute observations. The
triggering problem of the plot is that a rich suitor who
is an aging male relative wants to marry the already
married and pregnant heroine.
Looking into the effect of the 1753 law which attempted
to regularize marriage would also be germane.
There is no marriage, secret or otherwise, in Trollope's
_An Eye for an Eye_. The heroine gets pregnant
outside marriage and the hero refuses to marry her.
He is willing to co-habit, be her (as would once have
been said) common-law husband, but not marry her.
For the Victorian reader the frankness with which
Trollope treats the sex in this life, the pregnancy
and the motives of the young man and his
family (who are aghast at the idea of this upper
class Englishman marrying a lower class Irish
girl) was shocking. It's not the events in the novel,
but the frankness with which they and the motives
for the non-marriage afterwards are treated.
Ellen Moody
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 08:20:26 -0500
From: "Dara R. Regaignon" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Opium in the 19th century
My understanding (based on Berridge and Edwards _The Opium and the
People_) is that opium was legal in England until 1868. It was
certainly widely sold -- grocers, chemists, etc. -- and apparently
unregulated.
Best,
Dara
--
Dara Rossman Regaignon
Princeton Writing Program
207 Notestein Hall
21 Prospect Avenue
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
609/258.7347
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 09:26:56 -0400
From: Rohan Maitzen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Secret Marriages
I don't think I've seen this one mentioned yet (apologies if it has
been): in Gaskell's _Wives and Daughters_, Osborne Hamley is secretly
married (to a young French "bonne," Aimee).
Rohan Maitzen
Dalhousie University
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 09:07:51 -0500
From: Michael Wolff <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Opium in the 19th century
Another useful book would be Terry Parsinnen's _Secret Passions, Secret
Remedies_ (I'm not sure I have the exact wording of the title, but it's
early 1980s).
Michael Wolff
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 15:41:02 -0000
From: Michel Faber <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Opium in the 19th century
Goldie Morgentaler wrote:
> It has been my understanding that
> all sorts of drugs, opium included, were readily available in
> 19th-century England and that they could be legally bought. Matthew
> Sweet's chapter on the drug trade in Inventing the Victorians seems to
> confirm this. But one of my students has pointed to a letter written
> to Queen Victoria by the Chinese official Lin Tse-hui in 1839 at the
> start of the Opium War in which Lin makes the argument that since
> opium trade and consumption were illegal in England, the British
> should not be exporting this harmful drug to other countries. Was Lin
> Tse-hui mistaken about the illegality of opium in England in the 1830s
> or was he correct? If he was correct, then where did Dickens and
> others get their portraits of opium dens later in the century? Can
> anyone can shed light on this apparent contradiction?
To deal with simplest question first -- the opium dens. The relevant
chapter in Matthew Sweet's 'Inventing The Victorians' is perhaps the
strongest and least objectionable in the book, in that he uses his
skills as an investigative reporter to track down the opium dens, and
argues persuasively that the popular conception of a teeming network of
such places can be traced to the same few establishments.
The question of the illegality of opium use is more complicated given
the comparatively unregulated nature of high-Victorian England
(particularly London), a society which vastly outmatched official
capacities to police it. However, Mike Jay, in 'Emperors of Dreams:
Drugs in the Nineteenth Century' (Dedalus, 2000) has this to say:
"Until the 1860s, there was not and never had been such a thing as a
'controlled substance'. Broadly speaking, anyone could sell anything to
anyone else..." (p.73)
The phrase "broadly speaking" may, of course, be an evasion of awkward
legislative anomalies that other members of VICTORIA may be aware of.
However, it is incontestible that opium was freely sold & advertised.
Jay says that
"In its everyday use it should perhaps be viewed more prosaically as the
aspirin of the nineteenth century: aspirin itself only made its debut in
1899, courtesy of Bayer Pharmaceuticals who were looking for a
follow-up to their big-selling brand medicine of the previous year --
heroin." (p.52)
The large-scale demonisation of opium did not begin until long after the
the Opium Wars, and was not universal until the 20th century. Before
then, a useful analogy may be made with alcohol, in that alcoholics
were (and still are) seen as fatally flawed unfortunates who become
enslaved to a substance that most 'normal' people are able to 'handle'.
The accounts of opium dens by Dickens and others can be seen as being
laced with racism -- the sense that Chinese were creatures who by
nature were morbidly susceptible to opium. (A similar argument is often
advanced in discussions of why Australian aborigines and native
Americans were ravaged by alcoholism.)
As far as legislation goes, the 1868 Pharmacy Act is identified as the
first step towards controlling the supply of opium. Jay again: "It
[the 1868 Act] stipulated that anyone buying any of a list of poisons
such as arsenic, cyanide or prussic acid -- a list to which opium was
promptly appended -- was obliged to do so from a registered chemist,
who in turn was obliged to record their name, the date and the quantity
purchased." (p.73)
It goes without saying that the aim of this Act, apart from benefiting
the pharmaceuticals companies, was to reduce the number of deaths by
poisoning in England, not any concern for the effect that opium may have
been having on the citizens of foreign countries.
It therefore remains a mystery to me why Lin Tse-Hui should apparently
have been convinced that opium was illegal in England in 1839,
twenty-nine years before the Pharmacy Act. Perhaps other members of
VICTORIA can set us all straight.
Best wishes,
Michel Faber
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 08:48:04 -0800
From: michael helfand <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Opium in the 19th century
Regarding Lin's letter to Victoria and the illegality
of opium in England, in CHINA'S RESPONSE TO THE WEST:
A DOCUMENTARY SURVEY 1839-1923, editors Ssu-yu Teng
and John K. Fairbank write that the Chinese had no
tradition of interest in the outside world. After
their defeat by the British in 1840, "it took the
rules of China two decades . . .to acknowledge the
necessity of studying the West." Beyond that Chinese
who were "supremely ignorant" of the West, tended to
assume that other people and nations were like China.
Since opium was illegal according to Chinese
administrative law and it was the rulers obligation to
look after the welfare of the people, Lin probably
assumed it was also illegal in England. Incidentally,
Chinese ignorance about England was so great that they
did not even address the letter to Victoria, but
simply to "the ruler of England ("Ying-kuo wang, i.e.,
without distinction of sex").
Michael Helfand
University of Pittsburgh
[log in to unmask]
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 14:13:49 -0000
From: Lee Field <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: littering in Victorian novels
It's not in a novel, but it's the best bit of writing about Victorian
litter that I know. In the preface to The Crown of Wild Olive, John
Ruskin writes:
... I walked up slowly through the back streets of Croydon, from the old
church to the hospital; and, just on the left, before coming up to the
crossing of the High Street, there was a new public-house built. And the
front of it was built in so wise manner, that a recess of two feet was
left below its front windows, between them and the street-pavement - a
recess too narrow for any possible use (for even if it had been occupied
by a seat, as in old time it might have been, everybody walking along
the street would have fallen over the legs of the reposing wayfarers).
But, by way of making this two feet depth of freehold land more
expressive of the dignity of an establishment for the sale of spirituous
liquors, it was fenced from the pavement by an imposing iron railing,
having four or five spearheads to the yard of it, and six feet high;
containing as much iron and iron-work, indeed, as could well be put into
the space; and by this stately
arrangement, the little piece of dead ground within, between wall and
street, became a protective receptacle of refuse; cigar ends, and oyster
shells, and the like, such as an open-handed English street-populace
habitually scatters from its presence, and was thus left, unsweepable by
any ordinary methods.
There's no-one like him for eloquent moaning, is there?
Simon Poë
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 14:00:52 -0500
From: Herbert Tucker <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Opium in the 19th century
And there's a fairly recent book on the subject, *Pleasures and Pains*,
by Barry Milligan in our Victorian Literature and Culture series here at
Virginia.
At 08:48 AM 2/5/04 -0800, you wrote:
>Regarding Lin's letter to Victoria and the illegality
>of opium in England. . . .
Herbert F. Tucker
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English
219 Bryan Hall
University of Virginia 22904-4121
[log in to unmask]
434 / 924-6677
FAX: 434 / 924-1478
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 12:46:02 -0800
From: Kort Melissa <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Reading albums
Hello!
Can anyone suggest novels in which characters examine photograph albums?
Many thanks.
Melissa Kort
Santa Rosa Junior College
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 17:45:15 EST
From: Tamar Heller <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Reading albums
In The Moonstone, on the night of her birthday dinner, Rachel is looking
over photograph albums with the widowed Mrs. Threadgall while sneaking
peeks at Franklin Blake (see Gabriel Betteredge's narrative, chapter
10). It's true it's said she's showing Mrs. T "photographs"--not
explicitly a photograph album--but wouldn't the photographs have been in
an album? I hope this helps.
Tamar Heller
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004 09:02:48 +0800
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Tamara=20Wagner?=
<[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Opium in the 19th century
--- michael helfand <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > in
CHINA'S RESPONSE TO THE WEST: A DOCUMENTARY SURVEY
1839-1923, editors Ssu-yu Teng
A good account of the very different discourses on
colonial versus domestic uses of opium over the course
of the nineteenth century can also be found in Peter
Melville Logan’s _Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural
History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British
Prose_. The chapter on De Quincey emphasises the
"uniqueness" of those that condemn the use of opium,
which was moreover tied to a condemnation of the opium
trade and thus limited to the colonial context.
Raffles's _The History of Java_ (1817) - on which I'm
currently working and that's my connection to opium -
figures as a central document in this analysis. (note
the connection to the "British love affair with tea"
:-):
"In addition to serving as an example of this second
model of addiction, Raffles’s description is also
significant, paradoxically, because of its uniqueness.
Discussions of opium’s effects are rare within
governmental and mercantile discourse on the colonial
trade in opium. This silence is all the more
remarkable in light of the immense volume of the
India-China trade, its crucial importance to the
British economy, and the British public’s thorough
ignorance of it all. During the eighteenth century,
the British East India Company had a monopoly on the
sale and production of all opium grown in India.
Cultivation was centered in Bengal, where the company
compelled Indian ryots to plant poppies as their
primary, and often their only, crop. Its principal
market was China, although the company had to smuggle
it into Canton through private merchant ships because
the Chinese banned the importation of opium in 1723.
The British government renewed the company’s monopoly
in 1789 and again in 1814, despite the obnoxiousness
of monopolies to its own laissez-faire economic
policies, and this renewal emphasises the importance
to the British treasury of the revenue produced b the
opium trade. Indeed, until it began selling opium to
the Chinese, Britain had been suffering a severe
outflow of British bullion to China because of the
demand for Chinese tea. The British love affair with
tea grew enormously during the eighteenth century,
from 1 million pounds in 1730 to 20 million pounds by
1789. The Chinese, however, were uninterested in
British textiles or manufactured goods, and so the tea
trade was draining British reserves. The opium trade
gave the British a commodity to sell to China in
exchange for tea.” (Nerves and Narratives, 82)
=====
Tamara S. Wagner
http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/staff/home/ELLTSW/
__________________________________________________
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------------------------------
End of VICTORIA Digest - 4 Feb 2004 to 5 Feb 2004 (#2004-37)
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