It's Always More Complicated

Dept of, inventing the city: Fake History: Some notes on London's bogus past. (NB - isn't Nancy murdered on the steps of a bridge in the 1948 movie of Oliver Twist? or do I misremember.) (And as for the Charing Cross thing, that is the ongoing 'London remaking itself and having layers', surely?)

***

Dept of, smutty puns, classical division: Yet More on Ancient Greek Dildos:

Nelson, in my opinion, has made a solid argument for his conclusions that, while “olisbos” was one of many ancient Greek euphemisms for a dildo, this was not its primary meaning, nor was it the primary term for the sex toy. Rather, this impression has been given by an accident of historiography.

Dept of, not silently suffering for centuries: The 17th-century woman who wrote about surviving domestic abuse.

***

Dept of, another story involving literacy (and ill-health): Child hospital care dates from 18th Century - study:

"Almost certainly she was taught to read and write while she was an inpatient."
He suspects just as part of the infirmary's remit was to get its adult patients back to work, by teaching children to read and write it would increase their employment opportunities.

Dept of, I approve the intention but cringe at certain of the suggestions: How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction:

Active engagement is crucial. This doesn’t mean turning every book into an interactive multimedia experience. Rather, it means ensuring that children are mentally participating in the reading process rather than passively consuming. With toddlers, this might mean encouraging them to point to pictures, make sound effects, or predict what comes next. With older children, it involves asking questions that go beyond basic comprehension: “What do you think motivates this character?” “How would the story change if it were set in our neighborhood?”

***

Dept of, not enough ugh: Sephora workers on the rise of chaotic child shoppers: ‘She looked 10 years old and her skin was burning’

The phenomenon of “Sephora kids” – a catch-all phrase for the intense attachment between preteen children, high-end beauty stores and the expensive, sometimes harsh, products that are sold within them – is now well established.... The trend is driven by skincare content produced by beauty influencers – many of whom are tweens and teens themselves.... skincare routines posted by teens and tweens on TikTok contained an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients per routine, which risked causing acute reactions and triggering lifelong allergies.

At least, I think that's sort of an unifying theme for these....

***

This actually goes back to Women's History Month 2020 but I don't recollect seeing it then: Sikandar Begum, Nawab of Bhopal. Not only a fascinating and perhaps counter-intuitive story of female power in C19th India

Nawab Sikandar Begum wielded power in the doubly challenging context of a patriarchal system confronted to the British colonial rule. This woman of diminutive stature but with the most imperious gaze was the second of four female rulers to reign for more than a century over the princely State of Bhopal.
....
Sikandar Begum, like the other Begums of Bhopal, was proud of her Afghan ethnicity. She refused to go into Purdah and be confined to women’s quarters and traditional activities. Her education was on par with what would have been expected from any other male ruler, both academically and physically, preparing her to rule in a male dominated field. Throughout her reign she powerfully asserted her presence in public life: she was a practiced horsewoman and participated in polo games and hunting parties. She was also trained in martial arts and could equally wield a bow, a lance or a sword. She commanded the army and inspected district offices, the courts and the treasury herself, making sure that her administration run smoothly. She would personally visit villages to ensure herself of the welfare of her people and assess the progress of the various reforms she implemented. In terms of progressive reform and advancement, Sikandar’s 21-year reign qualifies as a golden age of Bhopal’s history. Bhopal emerged from it as one of the best governed, enlightened and stable princely states. She was an effective, reform-oriented administrator, who strongly supported girls’ education (she founded the Victoria School in the centre of Bhopal to provide poor Hindu and Muslim girls basic academic skills and technical training in various trades).

***

Transfeminine community building in 1980s Manchester:

In 1987 Manchester, self-identified transvestite (or ‘tranny’ as she prefers) Bev helped to establish Northern Concord, a social group run by and for transfeminine people. The name Northern Concord was chosen because ‘it was bland’ and it meant that the group would not be immediately associated with gender nonconformity. It was hoped by its organisers that this nominative ambiguity would protect members of the group from some of the threats faced by trans people in society at the time. Bev felt that there was nowhere in the city where she and her friends could comfortably go out for ‘a meal in a frock’ and her memories examined here (taken from an oral history interview I recorded with her) highlight the role of nightlife in trans community building.
....
Bev’s initial dissatisfaction with the nightlife available to her in 1980s Manchester was echoed by other gender nonconforming people at the time. Across the UK, a network of transfeminine social spaces, catering in the main for transvestite and transsexual identified women, was beginning to emerge. This included the TV/TS [Transvestite/Transsexual] centre in Hoxton, London (known colloquially as French Place) and the Friendships group in Birmingham, which ran club nights at Grosvenor House, a venue that marketed itself as ‘Britain’s foremost residential club for TV/TS’s’. Like Northern Concord, these groups began offering an alternative to what Bev viewed as the ‘boring as hell’ tea and small talk that typically defined the church hall style meetings run by regional branches of other transfeminine support groups.
....
Northern Concord aimed to provide an alternative to what was perceived as the unsavoury atmosphere associated with the night club Dickens, the only other place where gender nonconforming people were welcome in the city at night.
....
In response to the absence of suitable social spaces, Northern Concord began to meet every Wednesday in the Rembrandt Hotel on Canal Street, in the heart of what later became the Gay Village.... Despite its ‘seedy’ location, the Rembrandt had recently been renovated by its landlord Peter Bessick, who offered Bev and her friends use of the new bistro above the pub. The group would also hire one of the hotel’s bedrooms to provide guests who were nervous about being seen in public with a safe place to change into their femme wear at the start of the night.

A different kind of unexpected: Glimpses of a Transnational Life: Frank Mathew and Imports of Everyday Goods in Fifteenth Century London, through entries in customs records:

Particularly interesting are the devotional goods such as crucifixes, paxboards (including expensive examples made of ivory) and stone and box-wood Jesus. It is difficult to know for certain what the latter objects were, but they may be examples of the small pipeclay figurines of the Infant Christ that have been discussed recently by Lieke Smits as devotional toys. Fritz Scholten has also written about small, intricately made box-wood carvings as examples of a type of ‘playful devotion’. These connections between England and the Low Countries are particularly prominent in Mathew’s stock in trade. Combining devotion and play fits well with Mathew’s other regular imports of rattles, whistles and “japes” or toys. There is something quite light-hearted about many of Frank Mathew’s imports. Rattles have been found in substantial numbers in London and are usually associated with the material culture of pilgrimage.

I'm not sure this is entirely unexpected; this almost certain chimerical crocodile keeps recurring, among other specimens of West Country cryptozoology: New crocodile warning sign appears at Bristol Harbour: A decade after the first sighting of the infamous Bristol Crocodile, a new sign has been erected warning swimmers of the potential danger.

Interview with Kit Heyam, author of Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender:

a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to be comprehensive or definitive, but – by blending culture, feminism and politics – to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.... the stories this book tells leave questions and resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western terminology and categories.

Telling Scotland about AIDS:

From the first reports of AIDS in Scotland, individual activists and organisations have sought to educate and protect their local communities. Historian Colin Moore shows how their campaigns evolved from simple pamphlets to fun and innovative messages incorporating sex, comics, football, and even a bright pink bus.

This book looks fascinating: Bo Ruberg: Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies:

Ruberg examines the generally accepted story that the first sex dolls were dames de voyage, rudimentary figures made of cloth and leather scraps by European sailors on long, lonely ocean voyages in centuries past. In search of supporting evidence for the lonesome sailor sex doll theory, Ruberg uncovers the real history of the sex doll.

A rather different slant on love over distance and separation: Aimee Fox, '“I Have Never Felt More Utterly Yours”: Presence, Intimacy, and Long-Distance Marriages in the First World War':

Wartime separation gave couples space to develop new forms of intimacy and affection. Through creative, often abstract, alternatives developed to affect a sense of presence, spouses were able to know, embody, and imagine one another. While separated couples frequently desired and imagined physical reunion, its fleeting nature was emotionally wearing and often undermined intimacy and togetherness in immediate and long-lasting ways.

Pioneering the sexy horror of the vampire before the Transylvanian Count: Meet 'Varney,' The Vampire Who Popped Up 50 Years Before 'Dracula':

Varney is about the (very) long quest of Sir Francis Varney to acquire blood to live on, in the form of a beautiful young virgin who he can marry and then suck dry. Lacking this wife due to Plot Reasons, he resorts to the women near him to feed on. He wants to “obtain the voluntary consent of one that is young, beautiful, and a virgin” .... Varney is emo, haunted by guilt, full of self-criticism, and a drifter in a world that hates and fears vampires. Who better, then, to become the icon of the undead? Varney’s tall, gaunt, so pale as to have pure white skin, with “eyes like polished tin” and a head full of long black hair.

Anyone up for a jaunt to that dolls' house exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood next week? (any day except Wed) as I realise that the following week is already looking difficult; and then it ends.

***

The ghastly news that Jonathan Franzen's next novel includes 'a fanatical feminist' and that some woman writer whose name is unfamiliar to me has tweeted '“After all these years we finally get to read a man’s take on feminism.... Bless you and the hard work you do, Mr Franzen.” (No, can that be wrote satirikle? PLZ?) I mean, basically men haven't shut up at least since Horace Walpole referred to Mary Wollstonecraft as a 'hyena in petticoats', have they? Also there have always been women prepared to do the 'loony caricature feminist' figure in their books to prove that oh no, they're not like that.

And talking of dolls' house and exiting therefrom, was Ibsen NOT A MAN????

Okay, I am pretty much I don't even about these churches that build life size replicas of Noah's Ark (thanks, or do I really mean thanks? to sara for this link), with animatronic animals, yet.

Because building a replica with the resources of modern tech (and no problems with fewmets, not to mention the feeding issues) so proves that Noah, the Ark and the Flood rly, trooly happened.

I feel that the proof of this would only come if there were a flood of similar nature, and even then, I think model animals, even life-size, would be cheating, no? (See above, food resources, waste disposal, etc)

What this did make me think, however, was that I seem to recollect reading somewhere that Noah's Ark toys were so popular in the Victorian/Edwardian era because they were a biblical toy that did not fall under the 'no toys on Sunday' strictures, because, hello, scripture lesson with added wooden animals!

Possibly the pastors of the churches that are doing this were toy-deprived themselves on Sundays and are now, perhaps just a leetle over-compensating?

Not perhaps quite such a name to conjure with as Soho, Chelsea, or Bloomsbury, nonetheless Fitzrovia has significant claims to be one of London's Boho Centrals.

Even before these epics of pub-crawling -

By the time Julian Maclaren-Ross met Tambimuttu and Dylan Thomas in the early 1940s this literary group had moved away from the Fitzroy Tavern, which had become a victim of its own success, and were hanging out in the lesser-known Wheatsheaf and others in Rathbone Place and Gresse Street. Maclaren-Ross recalls Tambimuttu saying: "Now we go to the Black Horse, the Burglar's Rest, the Marquess of Granby, The Wheatsheaf... in Fitzrovia." Maclaren-Ross replied: "I know the Fitzroy" to which Tambimuttu said: "Ah, that was in the Thirties, now they go to other places. Wait and see." Tambimuttu then took him on a pub crawl.

While information seems a bit vague, it appears to have been one of the locations of Elsa Lanchester's theatre-cum-nightclub, the Cave of Harmony, during the 1920s.

Cleveland Street was, of course, the locale of the Cleveland Street Scandal.

Marie Stopes moved her birth control clinic to Whitfield Street in 1925, and the building is now the HQ of the sexual health charity Marie Stopes International.

However, most of the other medical establishments in the area are now closed: the Middlesex Hospital, the London Foot Hospital, the Hospital for the Clergy (for people suffering with a bad case of the dreaded clergy...)

There is also Pollocks Toy Museum

A statue of the South American revolutionary General Francisco de Miranda can be found in Fitzroy Square.

Among the manifold delights of the area la patronne racommande aussi Navarros Tapas,

The House At Pooh Corner Goes Up For Sale.

Cotchford Farm, the story book setting for the adventures of Winnie the Pooh, has just been put on the market. Author A.A. Milne lived in the real life Pooh corner home for three decades until 1959*. The English estate is where Milne dreamed up several of the stories and poems about the lovable bear. It is also where he raised his son, Christopher Robin.

But Cotchford Farm isn’t all about cuddly bears, honey, and bouncing Tiggers. The home is also the setting of a darker piece of pop culture. Forbes notes that in the late 1960′s, Brian Jones, one of the founding members of the Rolling Stones, purchased the house. Jones was kicked out of the band in 1969 and less than a month later he was found floating dead in his pool at Cotchford Farm.

*And since AAM actually died in 1956 if he was living there until 1959, woooooh, spooky.

But even apart from all that, one gathers that Christopher Robin Milne had possibly less than sanguine memories, or at least felt scarred by his identification with his literary avatar, so perhaps not terribly hummy vibes.

What's the betting that it gets bought up to turn into a theme-park of the Disney version?

Cannot resist linking to this earlier Pooh-related post.

For some, a doll's house is no mere plaything but a way to create their fantasy home. Even if that means building a tiny bondage room. And to take the thing entirely into the Couldn't Make It Up realm, 'she found a woman selling 1:12-scale condoms at a craft centre in Braintree'..

The gallery of tiny interiors. And what do we not spot in the life minimised, my dearios? Books!

***

Other people whose commemorative anniversaries fall this year and are not Dickens:

Peter Bradshaw, who is Known to the Ponceyness Police, does quite an interesting and fairly non-poncey piece on Marilyn Monroe, with a welcome acknowledgement of her professional abilities. But does he really mean to imply, that all About Eve, in which he has already mentioned she makes but a fleeting appearance as Addison de Witt's arm-candy, was one of her greatest films, and that she was 'the beguiling newcomer... poised to steal the older star's crown'. Huh?

Another bicentenary, Robert Browning. Though does Carol Ann Duffy's 2006 collection Rapture really owe its title to Browning, rather than, e.g., Blondie, or just, you know, the word is out there and available for use. Letters of further yay Browning comment.

***

Leo Benedictus suggests a code of conduct for audiences (over a range of cultural phenomena).

I can't find any reference to mention I vaguely (Lecture on Modern European Drama at which I sat in the back row chatting with me mates?) recall about Brecht wanting the theatre to be less stuffy and more like a cabaret with smoking and drinking (if not actual chatter).

However, I do not think we want to return to the kind of theatre/opera-going experience delineated in this wonderful article Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 (though I'm now wondering about the bourdaloue in this context...)

***

Why has the UK got so few women scientists?. Yes, there's a problem, but I don't think saying Cambridge only started giving women degrees in 1948 has anything much to do with it, because women were getting degrees and working in science well before then. I am rather fond of Professor Yellowlees on the basis of this portrait, which seems to me to heark back to the decolletage in portraits of famed foremothers such as Emilie du Chatelet and Ada Lovelace, but I wonder if she is not entirely comparing like with like (some of the below the line comments on the Guardian article make useful points to that effect).

Well, this spam cheered up a gloomy post-Bank Holiday return-to-work morning.

( Not entirely worksafe even without the pretty picture )

And could I have some made up to my design to include a picture of Queen Victoria?

Seasonality:

An exhibition gathered from the long history of leftwing Christmas cards, though alas lacking the more copious illustrations in the print edition. Unfortunately I can't see anything about it on the actual museum website, chiz, but you could note the Cholera Walk in 2 weeks time down in your diaries ...

Has pinkification finally passed its peak? Christmas toys: a rethink on pink? - though I think Groskop is taking a rather sanguine view of Disney 'pulling the plug on princesses' - the last thing I read on that suggested that they were all about a major reorientation in order to appeal to TEH BOYZ (sigh).

***

Anne Billson on the remarkably durable filmic career of Erzsébet Bathory, and finds the recent revisionist versions not entirely satisfactory:

[F]udge the issue by failing to fix on any one genre and instead attempting to wrangle a coherent narrative out of incompatible chunks of historical epic, romance, politics, horror and half-baked feminist revisionism.

Both films try to take Báthory's corner, but at the same time are loath to do away entirely with the story's sensational selling points: the slaughter of innocents, the nude bathing and sanguinary facials.

There is probably a discussion to be had about the way in which in order to render her a sympathetic character, Bathory is positioned as victim rather than villain. Problematic much? (see yesterday's post, perhaps, on this creepy dynamic about female power = evil.)

***

Was he really that terrible in the sack? Mick Hucknall apologies to thousands of women he slept with.

And further in the realm of urgent phallicism, larf - I fair lay on the ground when coming across this Tiger Beatdown post apropos that recurrent fictional genre by aged male writers of litfic, Fond Memories of Vagina. I rather particularly loved this comment:

The sad thing about the Fond Memories of a Vagina genre is that not only is it soul-crushingly self-centered and misogynistic, but you can’t help but feeling that the Vagina Does Not Have Fond Memories of Them. If the Vagina were to write its memoirs, it might read more like: The Time I Let This Old Douche Bone Me Just To Shut Him Up Already My Goodness What A Tiresome Bore Was I Ever Glad To Get That Over With, I Will Now Join A Nunnery And Spend Quality Time With Kittens, Or Puppies Too, Of Course, No Offense To Hektor.

***

The horror! The horror! Inventors unveil smart beermats that send out automatic chat-up lines. Plz do b telling hao worn-out old chat-up lines with whiskers on are somehow ever so much better than online interaction -

Bartindale said the mats were also a counterbalance to the way the internet and modern communication tended to isolate people at their computers, however much they tweeted or updated their Facebook pages.

He said: "In general, technology tends to kill conversation and trigger quite antisocial behaviour – we bury ourselves in our text messaging, iPods or computer screens and never even look up to see who's standing next to us.

***

State school pupils 'do better at university': Research finds students from comprehensive schools get better degrees than privately educated peers with the same grades.

Lee Elliot Major, research director at the Sutton Trust, said: "Independent and grammar school pupils are getting lots of support – they're being pushed to their limits, whereas with comprehensive pupils they aren't fulfilling their full potential, and this shows up at degree, where they fly.

***

I thought this could have been a nifty idea (if not quite on the level of Chaucer Hath Blog), but it seems to have fallen into desuetude quite some while ago: Ask the Brontë Sisters. There are some nifty moments:

Anne explains: We were careful to give ourselves names that did not actually indicate that we were of the stronger sex. 'Currer', 'Ellis' and 'Acton' are not gender-specific names; we were merely counting on people opting for maleness as the default position. If people were silly enough to fall for it then that was hardly our fault. We did not mind hoisting people with their own sexist petard, but we did not wish to lie.

Emily adds: Not like that coward soul George Eliot or that pathetic cheat Mrs Henry Wood or that complete sooky la la Henry Handel Richardson.... Pffft.