William Paterson and the Battered Wife

It’s disconcerting to come across someone you know in an unfamiliar context.  You discover that your colleague in the bank is a part-time football hooligan (it happened to my sister’s friend), or the nice tenants in your rental property turn out to be members of Ananda Marga (it happened to me, at a time when the sect was allegedly responsible for various acts of political terrorism).

This happens with historical figures too.  One of the endless fascinations of biography is the way that people keep breaking out of the boxes we put them in.

Cover via Amazon

I’ve just been reading Wendy Moore’s biography of the Countess of Strathmore.  In the way of many books today, the long title – Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met his Match (2007) – gives you most of the plot.  Mary Eleanor Bowes (1749-1800) was an heiress.  At 11 she inherited a fortune in coalmines from her father, which made her one of the catches of Georgian England.  From her various suitors, she chose John Lyon, the 9^th Earl of Strathmore, a near neighbour from Co. Durham, and the hereditary owner of a decayed estate at Glamis in Scotland.  They married 2 days before her 18^th birthday.  Under her father’s will, her husband(s) had to change their name to Bowes to ensure the family name would survive.

Although Mary and her husband had little in common, they produced 5 children within 7 years.  John spent some £170,000 of her fortune on building projects and gambling, before dying of tuberculosis in March 1776, leaving behind a very merry 27-year-old widow.

During the rest of 1776, Mary Eleanor had an affair, several abortions, and generally slipped the traces of 18^th century polite society.  All this she wrote up in her Confessions (1793).  (These are digitised in Eighteenth Century Collections Online, available through subscribing libraries).

Then, in January 1777, she was tricked into marriage with an Irish fortune hunter, Andrew Robinson Stoney, who did indeed turn out to be ‘Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband’.  Wendy Moore highlights the problems faced by married women trapped in unhappy marriages.  Stoney (now Bowes) treated Mary Eleanor brutally, beating her, separating her from family and friends, bringing his mistresses and bastards into her home, and raping the servants.  He took control of her fortune, and when she finally ran away, he had her kidnapped and imprisoned.  It’s a riveting story – and I recommend it as a good read, ‘as gripping as any novel’ as the Daily Telegraph says on the cover.

Yet I came across Mary Eleanor Bowes quite by accident, while looking for something else entirely.  I came to the story through Australian history, and botany.

Wendy Moore doesn’t dwell much on this angle – and why should she, when wife beating in aristocratic circles will sell many more books? – but Mary Eleanor was particularly interested in botany.  During her year of liberty between husbands, Mary Eleanor hosted salons for some of the heavyweights of the scientific community, including the surgeon John Hunter, and the naturalists Daniel Solander and Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society.  She paid for a botanical expedition to South Africa, and employed as her collector William Paterson, the 20-year-old son of a gardener from near Glamis Castle.

William Paterson spent several years in South Africa, collecting plants and arranging for their transhipment back to England.  He published an account of his expeditions in Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffraria (1789), available in Google books here.

Paterson dedicated his book to Banks, not to his patron, the Countess of Strathmore, because by the time he arrived back in England in 1780, Mary Eleanor had lost control of her fortune.  Her new husband had sold off her greenhouses and her ‘damned weeds’, and he refused to pay the debts that Paterson had run up on her behalf in South Africa.

Paterson was left embarrassed, impoverished and bitter.  Instead of using the Cape expedition as a launching pad for a future career in botany, as he had hoped, he went into the army as an ensign – the lowest rank of commissioned officer.  He served in India, then in 1789 he was gazetted Captain in the New South Wales Corps, probably through the patronage of Sir Joseph Banks – which is where he first comes on to the radar for Australian historians.  He eventually became Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales, but his first interest was always botany.

Silky Patersonia, an Australian plant named after William Paterson, in The Botanical Magazine, 1807

There are other Australian links in the story of the Countess of Strathmore.  Amongst her no-good husband’s cronies were Captain Perkins Magra and his brother James Matra (or Magra).  James Matra sailed with Cook on the Endeavour, and Australian historians know him best for being the first to suggest to the British government that Botany Bay would make an ideal convict settlement, as well as a refuge for American loyalists.  It is startling to encounter him in Wedlock, helping to fake a duel to trick an heiress into marriage.

Another tenuous connection with Australia is Mary Isabella Bowes-Lyon, Mary Eleanor’s granddaughter, who married John Walpole Willis, the resident judge of Port Phillip in the 1840s – though, taking after her grandmother, she eloped with an army officer long before Willis reached Australia.

And then, of course, there’s the big one: Mary Eleanor’s great-great-great-granddaughter was Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, whose daughter is currently Queen of Australia.

For me though, the eye-opener was encountering Colonel William Paterson, ineffective and ageing administrator of New South Wales in 1809, as a humble gardener’s son, setting out to the Cape of Good Hope – and escaping from the box.

William Paterson’s letters to Joseph Banks from New South Wales have been digitised by the State Library of New South Wales, and are available here.

This time last year:
Corsets and Centrefolds: 150 Years of Women’s Magazines, 19 April 2011
The Chocolate Conscience, 23 April 2011
Bunyips, 25 April 2011

Teredo – worms shall devour them

Places matter to people.  In my suburb, one of our best-loved places is the Shorncliffe pier.  Throughout the day, it is a place for tai chi and joggers, crab pots and fishing.  In the early evening, it is full of friendly walkers, with or without dogs.  People sprinkle the ashes of those they love from its railings, or use it as a backdrop for wedding photos.  It was recently used in a UK television ad available on YouTube here.

They used to say that Sandgate is 12 miles from Brisbane – or 13 at low tide.  It is a long way out to deep water, so early settlers could not get their goods – or themselves – from ship to shore without wading.  As the community grew, in 1865 they made plans ‘for the construction of a PIER or LANDING STAGE at Sandgate’.  This pier opened to the public in 1872.  (It was originally called the Sandgate pier, but when Shorncliffe became a separate suburb, it became the Shorncliffe pier.)

From the start, the pier had a dual purpose, as a commercial landing stage, but also as a popular promenade.  Piers were a part of the tradition of beach ‘watering places’, growing popular amongst all classes by the mid-19^th century.  They were destinations for city day-trippers who came by railway to enjoy a day at the beach, perhaps swimming, but probably just strolling along the waterfront, and enjoying the concerts, food outlets, Punch and Judy shows and other commercial activities that took place on and around a pier.

Our pier followed the social model of British piers such as the West Pier at Brighton (1866) and the Cleveden Pier on the Severn (1869), both built at much the same time.  People came by coach, and then by rail (1882) to enjoy a day at the beach.  But while the British piers were mainly built of iron, wood was much cheaper in Brisbane, so our pier is wooden.

A few weeks ago, council inspectors found marine borers in its timber pilings and the pier has been closed until further notice.  Since then there have been petitions and a rally, a local newspaper campaign and a lot of promises.  A local election next Saturday has raised the temperature.

Generally though, we are all in furious agreement that we love our pier, and want it saved, even though it has no commercial purpose any more, and no one seems to know quite how it can be restored.

The usual culprit in this sort of damage is Teredo navalis, commonly called the shipworm, though it is not a worm, but a bivalve mollusk.  It lives very widely in salt-water environments, wherever there is wood to feed on.  Once it must have depended on the occasional log falling into the sea, but ever since people first went to sea, Teredo has been a problem.

In 1579, Sir Francis Drake spent 5 weeks on the Californian coast repairing the Golden Hind, which had been damaged by shipworms.  He thought they were native to the New World, but they are now so widely distributed that it is hard to tell.  They have certainly moved beyond their original tropical environment, and at present they are invading the Baltic Sea.

Shipworms caused enormous damage to wooden ships.  The best solution, which became standard during the 18^th century, was to clad them in copper sheeting.  It was an expensive solution used for naval vessels and merchantmen, but every ship still needed a skilled ship’s carpenter to deal with the leaks and creaks.  Iron replaced wood by the late 19^th century.

However while iron ships were safe from teredo, the underwater furnishings of a maritime economy – jetties,  wharves, piers, dry docks – continued to be built of wood, particularly in newly settled regions where wood was still plentiful.

A maritime economy based on wood used a lot of timber.  Venice, for instance, consumed all the forests in its hinterland constructing its maritime empire.  A few years ago, I travelled along the Brenta Canal which links Venice and Padua.  The first section of this canal dates back to the 16^th century, and along its edges, there are still sections lined with tree trunks.  Even if they were coppiced tree branches, these banks consumed a great deal of timber cladding.

The British Empire was also a maritime empire.  By the time James Cook first saw the Australian coastline in 1770, the British navy had consumed most of the forests of southern England, and relied on timber from the Baltic and North America.  He thought the tall trees of Australia, such as the pines of Norfolk Island (Araucaria heterophylla) that grow to a height of 65 metres, and other Araucarias, would make ideal masts – though as it turns out, they are rather too brittle.

Other Australian timbers became popular for quite different reasons. Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) from Western Australia and satinay (Syncarpia hillii) from Fraser Island, off the Queensland coast, were both considered particularly resistant to attack by teredo, so were used in shipbuilding and for marine pilings.  When the Suez Canal was built in the 1860s, it was lined with satinay logs – some 50,000 of them, according to Fraser Island sources.

Teredo is rapacious, and it seems to strike suddenly.  It ate into the Dutch dyke system several times during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  In 1917 it appeared in San Francisco, where it caused $15m. worth of damage to the harbour fixings.  Although a salt-water animal, it can survive in brackish water, but the salinity level is important.  One theory is that it may attack after a drought, when salinity rises following a drop in fresh water flows.

Currently it is invading the Baltic Sea which until recently had low salinity levels, but is now becoming more salty.  Maritime archaeologists are worried that it is destroying wrecks on the sea floor.

The shipworm has attacked other piers too.  In an article entitled ‘Pier-eating Monsters’, the Hudson Reporter reported in 2009 that teredos had caused part of a walkway along the Hudson River to collapse.  Ironically, there were no shipworms there for many years because of the level of pollution in the Hudson River.  Now the river is being cleaned up – and teredo is back.

Teredo has no friends, but it does have one claim to fame.  The story goes that the engineer Marc Brunel was first inspired to develop the idea of ‘shield tunneling’ from watching the way the teredo bores into wood from within its enclosing shell.  He and his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, built the first tunnel under the Thames using this technique.  It opened in 1843.

Nowadays, according to Wikipedia, Teredo tunnelling refers to something quite different:

In computer networking, Teredo is a transition technology that gives full IPv6 connectivity for IPv6-capable hosts which are on the IPv4 Internet but which have no direct native connection to an IPv6 network.

I haven’t the faintest idea what this means.

Is Google a Monster?

Many years ago, I wrote a biography of a woman called Maria Rye who was involved in first-wave feminism during the 1850s and 1860s.  The details aren’t important now – because without asking my permission, Google digitized the whole thing.

Google did this a lot, a few years back.  Google, you see, is a monster.  Many authors protested at this abuse of their copyright, and eventually there was a settlement, but since they had sued in an American court, the settlement only really provided compensation for American authors.  Anyone else had to accept a derisory amount of money, or take up the case individually in an American court – which was, of course, impossible.  And since Google didn’t notify us of the deal and there was a cut-off date, most of us got nothing.  Which is fine, really, since the only royalties I ever got came in American dollars, in amounts smaller than the cost of banking the cheques and converting them to Australian dollars.

So I am wary of Google, which is, as I said, a monster.

Maria Rye was involved with a group of women known as the Langham Place group.  They published the English Woman’s Journal, which advocated for women’s causes: votes for women, better job openings and education, ways for single women to emigrate to the colonies in search of better opportunities.  Maria wrote for the Journal, and her activities are regularly reported there.

Maria Rye also wrote for several years for another women’s magazine, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.  The EWDM was published by Sam and Isabella Beeton.  It was much less feminist and more domestic, with recipes and dress patterns, but they published her articles on social issues, and history from a feminist perspective.

Together, these two journals made up a good portion of the research I did for several chapters of my book.  The English Woman’s Journal wasn’t available on microfilm, and neither was in many libraries, but I worked in London for many weeks, going through the copies in the Fawcett Library (now The Women’s Library, and in trouble according to the latest news).  I couldn’t afford to live in London, so I commuted from the Midlands by train every day, and occasionally stayed the night in my long-suffering cousins’ attic.

Why am I telling you this?  Because this morning, I downloaded the entire runs of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the English Woman’s Journal.  It took less than 10 minutes, and I now have them on my iPad in a new App called Google Play.  Both the App and the downloaded journals were free.  I can read them offline. Unlike the Fawcett copies, the illustrations in my version of the EWDM are in colour.   For many books, you can toggle between a scanned version and ‘flowing text’, which is searchable.

Google Play is not perfect by any means.  The system of going from Google Books (to find and order the books) and Google Play (to download them) is clunky.  Reviewers in the Apple Store are barely lukewarm towards the App because there are very few new books available to buy.  I still prefer to read my novels in paperback anyway.  But because Google has now digitized so much old material, for a historian working with printed materials, the system is brilliant.

So far I’ve downloaded these two journals, plus several books from the 1820s to the 1860s, which seem (from the stamps and catalogue numbers) to come from the British Library.

So Google is still a monster, but this morning at least, I am grateful to the monster. I am also much more sincerely grateful to the librarian at the Fawcett Library, all those years ago, who told me to look at the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in the first place because he thought the articles signed ‘M.S.R.’ might be written by Maria Susan Rye.  You don’t get that sort of service from Google.

There’s a good review of Google Play here.

This time last year:
To Err is Human; to pick up errors is human too, 2 April 2011
Sandgate, in a good pair of boots, 6 April 2011
Communications in Revolution; Revolutions in Communication, 9 April 2011
Oh Shenandoah! Australians in the American Civil War, 14 April 2011

The British Library, and why I love librarians

We all know that Karl Marx wrote his revolutionary works sitting in the Reading Room of the British Library.  But did you know that the man who ran the British Library, and who came up with the original design for the reading room, was also a revolutionary, who helped to shape the 19^th century, just as Marx helped to shape the 20^th.

The British Library has moved now.  It occupies a modern building on Euston Rd, which is comfortable and efficient for staff and scholars alike.  It has free wifi, hundreds of lockers, and food outlets with decent coffee, and the computerized ordering system works fine.

But it will never give me the same buzz to enter the new building that I used to get when I walked into the central reading room of the old library, with its high domed ceiling, rows of desks radiating out from the centre, and leather upholstered chairs.  It was full of the ghosts of readers past.

The old British Library was an eccentric place.  The cataloguing system was – and remains – mysterious, and before computers, ordering a book involved consulting the printed catalogue and filling in a paper slip with various duplicates. Eventually the book appeared as if by magic at your numbered desk – or else the slip would reappear with an explanation as to why it couldn’t be found.  The lists of excuses included ‘Destroyed in Bombing’.  According to persistent rumour the non-appearance of books published as late as the 1960s was sometimes explained this way.

I’m sure when the whole show moved up the road, a lot of missing books were found – and perhaps a lot of others went missing.

Like every historian, I am so grateful to librarians.  They are the most important people in so much of what we do.  Bad librarians see it as their role to protect books from people, but good librarians – the vast majority – bring books and people together.  I have met many librarians who have helped me in my research, telling me about collections I might find useful, identifying mysterious initials or signatures, sharing their knowledge generously.

The conventional image of the librarian as a fuddy-duddy is also way off the mark.  Librarians have always been at the forefront of technological changes.  Today digitization and databases are making information more widely available; in the 19^th century, the British Library gave men and women free access to books at a time when most libraries were private, or accessible only by subscription.

Caricature of Anthony Panizzi (1797-1879). Caption read "Books". (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The British Library took shape under the supervision of a most unlikely guardian.  Antonio Genesio Maria Panizzi (1797-1879) was born in the duchy of Modena.  He studied law at the University of Parma and graduated in 1818.

This was a dramatic period in Italian history.  Napoleon’s invasion had shaken up the conservative 18^th century political world.  After his fall the old regimes came back, but new ideas of liberalism and nationalism had been unleashed.  Secret societies such as the Carbonari emerged.  In 1822, Modena’s chief of police was killed.  In the crackdown that followed, a number of his friends were arrested and put on trial.  Panizzi escaped to Geneva where he wrote a book about the trials.  This led to him being tried, condemned to death, and executed in effigy.

Like Marx several decades later, in May 1823 Panizzi arrived in England as a penniless political exile, teaching Italian to bankers and merchants in Liverpool, but within a few years he had carved out a reputation as a scholar.  In 1828 he became Professor of Italian in the newly founded University of London, and in 1831, he joined the staff of the British Museum as an assistant librarian.  He did both jobs simultaneously until 1837, when he was promoted to Keeper of Printed Books.  He became Principal Librarian in 1856.

Panizzi may have come to librarianship by a circuitous route, but he seems to have had all the standard characteristics of the profession.  Firstly, he was an empire builder, constantly asking for extra money from the British Government to fund a bigger collection.  Between 1837 and 1845 the average parliamentary grant was £3600 p.a., but Panizzi argued it up to £10,000 p.a.

In 1842, Parliament passed a Copyright Act that still requires British publishers to deposit a copy of every book in the British Library.  It was part of his job to enforce this rule.

As the number of books grew, Panizzi experienced the standard librarian’s headache – where to put all the books?  So he made plans to enclose the central courtyard of the British Museum.  The Round Reading Room was opened in 1857.

UK - London - Bloomsbury: British Museum - Reading Room (Photo credit: wallyg)

Finally, like a lot of librarians I have known, Panizzi was a networker.  He was close to various figures within the Liberal establishment – Henry Brougham in the early days, later William Gladstone.  He used his political contacts to promote the Library – and to promote the cause of revolution in Italy.  He didn’t think much of Mazzini – another Italian in exile in England – but corresponded with Cavour, and when Garibaldi visited England in 1864, Panizzi played an important role, introducing him to the political establishment.

Panizzi was knighted in 1869, and died in 1879.  By all accounts he could be cantankerous.  He had long quarrel with Thomas Carlyle who objected to the fact that he couldn’t roam the shelves of the British Library, but had to order his books through the librarians.  Carlyle and his supporters founded the London Library on an alternative model: a high subscription, and free access to the shelves.  I believe the London Library is wonderful – but I’ve never been inside.  I can’t afford the subscription for the sake of a few weeks of access, every few years, and I prefer the free model Panizzi espoused when he said:

I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.

Antonio Panizzi, Evidence before Select Committee on British Museum, 7 June 1836, quoted in Edward Edwards, Lives of the Founders of the British Museum (1870) and requoted in Wikipedia

P.R.Harris, Sir Anthony Panizzi, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (available through subscribing libraries only – oh, the irony, the irony!)

The Titanic’s Menus and what they can tell us

A menu from the first class service on the last luncheon of the Titanic’s maiden voyage has just been sold at auction for £76,000 [$A117,000].  This menu’s high value lies in its link to the Titanic, of course, especially in this centenary year.  But menus in any case make great collectors’ items.  They have an intrinsic fascination – I challenge anyone to read one without choosing which dishes they would order! – and they can tell us a lot about the time and place they come from.

The story of the Titanic is closely associated with issues of class, so it’s interesting to compare what the other passengers were eating, in Second Class:

and in Third Class:

In both cases the food is plain, and the choices are fewer, but the food was still cooked and served to the passengers, and came with a printed menu.  It’s a far cry from the 19^th century immigrant ships when steerage passengers were responsible for their own cooking.  Even the Third Class menu seems adequate (though we can’t know how generous the serves were), providing a hot midday meal called Dinner followed by Tea of soup, cold cuts and bread and butter.  Class determined not just what you ate – but when you ate it, and what you called it.

Ever since I went out to a posh French restaurant with a new boyfriend and ordered brains (cervelles) when I thought I was ordering prawns (crevettes), I’ve been deeply wary of menus, which often seem full of traps for the unwary.

Menus are notoriously hard to read, their descriptions hedged about by conventions as rigid, and as silly, as a Masonic handshake.  A l’Argenteuil means ‘with asparagus’, because this area on the Seine, downstream from Paris, supplied asparagus to the capital.  Anything Parmentier means ‘with potato’, because Antoine-Augustin Parmentier promoted potatoes as a food for the poor in 18^th century France.  And so on.

But even now that I know the difference between a salad Lyonnaise (bacon, croutons and egg) and Niçoise (tuna and green beans), the ambiguities remain.  The Titanic’s menu is fairly straightforward, but what is Chicken à la Maryland?

My first experience of Chicken Maryland goes back nearly 50 years, when my mother took us out to celebrate my exam results.  That dish consisted of a chicken leg and thigh, served with a banana and tinned pineapple rings, all of them deep-fried in a crisp orange batter.  I thought it the height of sophistication – but I suspect it was a million miles from the Titanic’s dish – or from Baltimore, for that matter.

Menus are a valuable source of information, but they need careful interpretation.  The Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, 1851-1930 is currently being digitized by the New York Public Library.  But digitizing isn’t enough.  Partly because menus are so decorative, partly because the names of dishes are so tricky, the library has recruited an army of volunteers to transcribe the menus and classify them, dish by dish.

Menus can tell us a lot about class and society, but they can also be used as a tool to understand environmental change. The History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) is a collaborative project using historical data to look at changes in fish stocks.

Both menus and recipe books are important sources of information – but menus have the advantage that they include prices.  In the US, for instance, lobsters used to be eaten by servants, but as supply fell during the 20^th century, their price rose and they became a luxury item.  This is currently being traced through menus.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this project.  As readers of my blog already know, I’m very interested in seeing the ways that historical data can be used to help us understand our changing environment.  Reading and interpreting menus offer another way to look at the past.  Let’s hope the scientists can use the information on declining fish stocks well – or we may all be heading for another iceberg as we dance the night away.

What’s on the Menu? News, histories and culinary findings from NYPL’s collaborative menu transcription project

This time last year:
To Err is Human; to pick up errors is human too, 2 April 2011
Sandgate, in a good pair of boots, 6 April 2011