Raglan Road (Dublin)

Raglan Road runs between Pembroke Road and Clyde Road in exclusive Ballsbridge, Dublin. It came into existence in 1857, on the conclusion of peace after the Crimean War, and was named after one-armed (he had lost his right arm at Waterloo) Field Marshal FitzRoy James Henry Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, the first Chief Commander in that war. Lord Raglan and his staff were at the time blamed by press and government for the sufferings of the British soldiers in the terrible Crimean winter before the Siege of Sevastopol, owing to shortages of food and clothing. Historians have since suggested that the chief neglect rested with the home authorities, and the appalling logistical support from England. The severe situation at the front line sent Florence Nightingale into action.

On 3 October 1946 a poem appeared in The Irish Times under the title ‘Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away’. The author was Patrick Kavanagh. The poet whilst walking on a ‘quiet street’ recalls a doomed love affair with a younger woman:

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

The poem became famous under its later title ‘On Raglan Road’. The young lady involved was Hilda Moriarty who later married Donogh O’Malley, the Irish Minister for Health. In a 1987 interview she explained that the main reason for the failure of their relationship was the wide age gap between them. The poet was forty, she eighteen years younger. The poem itself had been set as a challenge to him. Kavanagh had described himself to Hilda as a ‘peasant poet’. She did not consider vegetables fit for poetry and asked him to write something more fundamental. He left and created ‘On Ragland Road’.

The Bailey, Duke Street, is a famous Victorian pub which has a special place in the history of Dublin life – literary, social, and political. It was there that Kavanagh met Luke Kelly of The Dubliners. As a result of that meeting, Kelly set ‘On Grafton Street’ to the music of a Gaelic song ‘Fáinne Geal an Lae’. The song had been published by Edward Walsh in 1847 in his collection of Irish Popular Songs. In 1873, it was translated into English as ‘The Dawning of the Day’ by native Irish-speaker Patrick Weston Joyce, the outstanding historian, author, and music collector, whose most enduring work is The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (first edition published in 1869). Luke Kelly however denied that chain of events. In Luke Kelly: A Memoir his biographer Des Geraghy describes a gathering of poets and singers in The Bailey. Kavanagh asked Kelly on that occasion to sing ‘Ragland Road’ for him. This would suggest that the former had already set his poem to music. In an interview for Irish television, author Benedict Kiely described how Kavanagh had asked him previously if his poem ‘Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away’ could be set to the tune of ‘Dawning of the Day’. Whatever the genesis of the song may be, ever since The Dubliners put it on their repertoire, ‘Ragland Road’ has become a Dublin anthem, performed and recorded by a string of artists. Van Morrison’s rendering of the song is undoubtedly the most brilliant one.

Baggot Street (Dublin)

Irish writers are wedded to place. Their imaginations seem spurred by the lure of specific territories. James Joyce had set a precedent by – even in literary exile – describing Dublin’s localities and places with an almost obsessive precision.

Baggot Street is named after Baggotrath, the manor granted to Sir Robert Bagod, the first Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, in the thirteenth century. It runs from Merrion Row to the northwestern end of Pembroke Road. The street is divided into two sections, Lower and Upper Baggot Street and crosses the Grand Canal. Baggot Street is famous for its many pubs and home to the ‘Baggot Street Mile’, otherwise known as the ‘Twelve Pubs of Xmas Crawl’. From an artistic point of view, the street is of double interest. In 1909, painter Francis Bacon was born at no. 63 Lower Baggot Street.

Thomas Kinsella, a prolific Irish (Dublin) poet, translator, and editor, has put the street on the literary map. Much of Kinsella’s poetry has the urban inspiration of the district where he grew up between Bow Lane and Basin Lane, an area both of personal and historical associations such as Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, the last person to be hanged, drawn and quartered in the aftermath of the 1803 uprising, or Jonathan Swift whose St Patrick’s Hospital is nearby. Many members of young Thomas’s family were employed at the Guinness brewery. Kinsella’s Dublin is depicted in Thomas Kinsella: A Dublin Documentary, published by the O’Brien Press in 2006, which presents twenty poems alongside comments, family photographs, prints and other material. The book places the poet solidly in his Dublin context. At the same time, however, and at its best, Kinsella’s poetry transcends place and locality. His famous poem ‘Baggot Street Deserta’ (1956) suggests little involvement with the city, there is no direct reference to specific locality, no topographical identification. Its strength lies in the poet’s complex and multi-faceted relationship with different and contrasting impacts of experience in the city where he grew up as a child. The splendid closing lines give the only reference to the reality of place:

My quarter-inch of cigarette
Goes flaring down to Baggot Street.

Place, in much of Kinsella’s poetry, is mindscape rather than landscape.

Basin Street (New Orleans)

Basin Street (Rue Bassin) is a street in New Orleans, Louisiana, close to the French Quarter. The name comes from the turning basin of the Carondelet Canal (also known as the Old Basin Canal) which was constructed in 1794 on the order of Governor Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet and which remained in use until 1938. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century railroad tracks ran parallel to the Canal and then turned on to Basin Street to one of the city’s main railroad depots on Canal Street. The massive turning basin at the head of the Canal was the inspiration for the naming of Basin Street. The industrialization of the area in the late nineteenth century turned what had been a fine residential street into a red light district. From 1897 through World War I, the back side of Basin Street was the front of the Storyville red light district.

The name of the area was coined in reference to city alderman Sidney Story, who wrote the legislation creating the district. The ambition was to limit prostitution to one part of town where authorities could monitor and regulate the practice. In the late 1890s, the New Orleans city government studied the legalized red light districts in German and Dutch ports and set up Storyville based on such models. Between 1895 and 1915, so-called ‘blue books’ were published which were guides to prostitution for visitors to the district’s services including house descriptions, prices, particular services and the ‘stock’ each house had to offer. The blue-books were inscribed with the motto: Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense. Establishments in Storyville ranged from cheap ‘cribs’ to a row of elegant mansions along Basin Street for well-heeled customers. Black and white brothels coexisted, but black men were barred from legally purchasing services rendered in either black or white brothels. Nonetheless, brothels with black prostitutes serving blacks openly flourished with the full knowledge of the police and other local authorities a short distance uptown from Storyville proper. With a main railway station nearby, business boomed in the district. And so did music. It was tradition in the better establishments to hire a piano player and sometimes small bands.

Jazz did not originate in Storyville, but it flourished there as it did in the rest of the city. Many out-of-town visitors first heard this style of music there before the music spread north. Some people from elsewhere continue to associate Storyville with the origins of jazz. One of the finest pianists in the district was Ferdinand Joseph La Mothe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton. At the age of fourteen, he began working as a piano player in a brothel (or as it was referred to then, a sporting house). He was a pivotal figure in the development of early jazz. His composition ‘Jelly Roll Blues’ was the first published jazz composition, appearing in 1915.

Storyville was closed down in 1917 after campaigns by moral crusaders and an intolerant attitude by the army. Soldiers were forbidden to enter the area and similar places. Soon after 1917 separate black and white underground dens of prostitution emerged around the city. The district continued in a more subdued state as an entertainment centre through the 1920s, with various dance halls, gambling dens, cabarets and restaurants. Brothels were also regularly found in the area despite repeated police raids. Almost all the buildings in the former district were demolished in the 1930s. While much of the area contained tired and decayed buildings, the old mansions along Basin Street, some of the finest structures in the city, were also leveled. The city government wished to blot the notorious district from memory. The history of Storyville has been recorded in the haunting photographs of John Ernest Joseph Bellocq. Born in a wealthy white Creole family in the French Quarter of New Orleans, he made a living by taking photographic records for local companies. More interestingly, he took personal photographs of the hidden side of local life, of the opium dens in Chinatown, and of the whores of Storyville. Some of the women are nude, some dressed, and others posed as if acting some exotic narrative. Many of the negatives that have survived were damaged, in part deliberately. Whether this was done by Bellocq himself, or by his Jesuit priest brother who – ironically – inherited the photographs, or by someone else, has never been established. The mystique about the photographer inspired Louis Malle’s controversial 1978 film Pretty Baby. Bellocq’s images have inspired stories and poems about the women in them, including Brooke Bergan’s Storyville: A Hidden Mirror.

‘Basin Street Blues’ is a song written by Spencer Williams, a jazz musician and singer from New Orleans. The song, published in 1926, was performed by many Dixieland jazz bands. Hundreds of recordings have been made since its creation, including a version by Miles Davis in 1963. The following famous lines were later added by Glenn Miller and Jack Teagarden:

Won’tcha come along with me,
To the Mississippi?
We’ll take a boat to the lan’ of dreams,
Steam down the river down to New Orleans:
The band’s there to meet us,
Old friends to greet us.
Where all the people like to meet,
This is Basin Street.

Chorus:
Basin Street, is the street,
Where the Elite, always meet,
In New Orleans. Lan’ of dreams,
You’ll never know how nice it seems
Or just how much it really means,
Glad to be; yes, siree,
Where welcome’s free, dear to me,
Where I can lose, my Basin Street blues.

Old Parr and the Poetry of Pub Signs

There are a number of London pubs that carry the sign of Parr’s Head and deservedly so, because Old Parr was a remarkable character. Thomas Parr came to public notice in 1635, when John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet’, published a lively account of his life in a pamphlet entitled The Old, Old, Very Old Man. As the story goes, Parr was born in 1483 at Alberbury near Shrewsbury. He remained a bachelor until he was eighty, when he married Jane Taylor. They had a son and a daughter both of whom died in infancy. At the age of 105 Parr did penance for committing adultery with Katherine Milton. His wife died after they had been married for thirty-two years. Parr remained a widower for a decade and before, at the age of 122, marrying Jane, widow of Anthony Adda, of Guilsfield, Montgomeryshire.

By 1635 Parr was blind and had one tooth, his beard was neat, his hearing and digestion were good and he slept well. In that year the great collector Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, visiting his estates in Shropshire, learned of this ‘remarkable piece of antiquity’ and decided to ‘add him to his collection’. He paid for the old man to be brought to London where he was put on show. He had his portrait etched by Dutch artist Cornelius van Dalen and was presented to Charles I. The Van Dalen image was copied for the pub signs using Parr’s name. Unfortunately, he was unable to relate many events of his long lifetime, being more interested in the price of corn, hay, cattle, and sheep. Six weeks after his arrival in London he died suddenly, on 14/5 November 1635. The Royal physician William Harvey, famous for his research in the circulation of blood, conducted an autopsy. Uncritically accepting that Parr had been 152 years of age, Harvey noted that his organs of generation were in a healthy state, this being consistent with the story of his adultery and with his second wife’s report that he had had regular sexual intercourse with her until about twelve years previously. Harvey attributed Parr’s death in part to his sudden exposure to rich food and strong drink after a lifetime’s diet of cheese, buttermilk, and coarse bread. The main cause of death in his opinion was the effect of London’s atmosphere, polluted by people, animals, and the smoke of coal fires, upon someone accustomed to the healthy air of Shropshire. Parr was an early victim of polution.

Parr was buried in Westminster Abbey, where an inscription declared that he had lived through the reigns of ten monarchs. Taylor’s tract went into several editions and a Dutch version was published in 1636. Portraits of Parr were widely reproduced and the story of his longevity entered popular folklore. John Taylor gave Parr’s supposed longevity a moralistic slant: Parr was an emblem of old England, subsisting on a simple diet and hard physical labour, and uncorrupted by metropolitan luxury. Old Parr’s own extremely sound advice for living a long life had been: ‘Keep your head cool by temperance and your feet warm by exercise. Rise early, go soon to bed, and if you want to grow fat keep your eyes open and your mouth shut’. It was almost inevitable that London pubs would adopt Parr’s head as a sign. A record is mentioned of a house in Aldersgate Street that once had the venerable old man as its sign accompanied by these lines which were freely interpreted from the old man’s ‘philosophy’ of life:

Your head cool,
Your feet warm:
But a glass of gin
Would do you no harm.

Parr reflects the poetry of pub signs. The history of such trade signs goes back a long way and constitutes a minor part of English art history. During the reign of Edward III a group of artists formed themselves into a fraternity, but were not incorporated. The work they carried out consisted of the painting or staining of glass, illuminating missals, painting altars and portraits. In the year 1575, they were regularly attacked in their occupations by plasterers and unskilful persons attempting to bring their art into disrepute. Determined to preserve their craft from the intrusion of pretenders, the painters applied to Queen Elizabeth for protection. Elizabeth incorporated them in the year 1582 by the name of The Master, Wardens and Commonalty of the Freemen of the Art and Mystery of Painting, called Painter Stainers within the City of London.

There were four sorts of painting which were properly acknowledged as trades, namely house, ship, sign and coach painting. For many years sign painting remained the roughest of work, but the skills involved became gradually more refined. Harp Alley, running from Shoe Lane to Farringdon Street, was for many years the centre for the production of signs and sign-irons (the carved grapes or gilded sugar-loaves that served as pendants). In a time when every shop in the streets of London had its sign, a Dutchman named Van der Trout opened a manufactory of these pictorial advertisements in Harp Alley. He had left Holland with William the Third, and was the first artist who settled in the area from where the majority of the Fleet Street signs were executed. It used to be one of the principal amusements of William Hogarth to visit the sign-painters shops in Harp Alley for the purpose of introducing some of those original subjects into his pictures. It was widely believed that sign and coach painting offered aspiring artists an effective training in their craft as well as an education in their art. In contrast to this sort of empirical training, academies of art focused on drawing and on questions of aesthetics.

The importance of training in the vernacular language of art is exemplified in the careers of a number of academic artists. Royal academician Charles Carton was in early life a coach and sign painter as was Robert Smirke who served his time under a herald painter of the name of Bromley. Peter Monamy was apprenticed to a house painter on London Bridge and John Baker, another Royal academician, was known for decorating coach panels with borders and wreaths of flowers. Richard Wilson is said to have painted the Three Loggerheads for an inn in North Wales, and from this sign the village of Loggerhead nearby would take its name. Samuel Wale painted a Falstaff and a full length Shakespeare. Sporting painter of Dutch descent John Frederick Herring had started his career as a sign painter. Amongst the signs he produced was that of the Flying Dutchman tavern at Cottage Green, Camberwell, and the Stag, Coach and Horses and the White Lion in Doncaster (where he created his notable series of St Leger winners, the famous classic horse race at Doncaster). George Morland painted several signs. He is credited with the Goat in Boots sign, an alehouse that once was located on the Fulham Road and for that of the White Lion at Paddington. For Morland painting signs was a way of settling bills. In one instance he charged a fee of ‘unlimited gin’. Thanks to these and other artists we have become familiar with the poetry of pub signs. They deserve are gratitude.

There are an endless number of ‘jolly’ characters among the names of taverns and pubs. The sign indicates laughter, joviality, happiness and intoxication. Formerly the word also implied the meaning of healthy and well-developed. Something could be described as good, but more forcefully as jolly good. A wide range of public houses therefore contain this element. It is most frequently linked to a profession or trade, The Jolly Blacksmith, The Jolly Brewer, The Jolly Butcher, The Jolly Farmer, Fisherman, Potter, Shepherd, Tanner, Weaver, Woodman, etc. A jolly was also a sailor’s nickname for a marine (a militia man was known as a ‘tame jolly’). One expects to encounter a public house with the name of the Jolly Sailor exclusively in the harbour and sea side towns of the country. That is not the case. Even suburbia welcomes its sailors. During a 1906 auction in Norwich an interesting signboard was sold for the price of twelve guineas. It was the sign of the Jolly Sailor which formerly hung outside a Yarmouth public house known by that name. This sign depicts a jovial mariner wearing a red cap and a short blue jacket, standing on the shore and pointing seaward to his beloved ship close at land. Its creator was ‘Old Crome’.

John Crome was one of the principal artists of the Norwich School. Founded in 1803 in Norwich, this was the first provincial art movement in Britain. Artists were inspired by the natural beauty of the local landscape and the work of seventeenth century Dutch masters. Also known as ‘Old Cromer’ (his son John Berney Crome also became a well-known landscape painter), he had been apprenticed to Francis Whisler, who was a house, coach and sign painter. There is an interesting alcoholic parallel here with Dutch landscape painter Meindert Hobbema. In 1668, the year of his marriage, the latter took on the position of wine gauger (a measurer of the amount of wine in the vats of vintners on which they were taxed) with the Amsterdam customs and excise, producing very few pictures thereafter. He spent most of his life in a poor district of the city and was never able to make a living out of his art. Yet, he would become one of the most sought-after Dutch artists in England, both among collectors and landscapists such as Gainsborough. Today, his work is outstandingly well represented in English collections. John Crome was known as the ‘English Hobbema’ just as Edinburgh-born Patrick Nasmyth enjoyed the reputation of a ‘Scottish Hobbema’. On his deathbed, Crome’s last recorded words were:

O, Hobbema, my dear Hobbema, how I have loved you!

The Pillars of Hercules

The Pillars of Hercules is the ancient name given to the mountains that flank the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar (Gibraltar in Europe and Monte Hacho in Africa). It has its origin in Greek mythology. To accomplish his tenth labour, Hercules had to journey to the end of the world. Eurystheus ordered the hero to bring him the Cattle of Geryon. On his way to the island of Erytheia, Hercules had to cross the massive mountain that was once Atlas. Instead of climbing the obstacle, he decided to use his strength to smash it. Hercules split it in half using his indestructible mace or club. By doing so, he connected the Atlantic with the Mediterranean and formed the Strait of Gibraltar.

The Pillars of Hercules is an appropriate name for a public house located in Greek Street. Soho has at various times attracted waves of immigrants. Many of the former grand buildings were split up in multiple dwellings in order to give room to those who could only afford cheap residences. Greek Street is just one reminder of the many people who were forced to make London their new home. The public house was built around 1910, but the original tavern dates back to 1733. The establishment is mentioned in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and the road at the side of the pub through the arch is named Manette Street, after Dr Mannette, one of the characters from the story. From the eighteenth century onwards artists and writers, attracted by the cosmopolitan flavour of the area, flocked into Soho.

One of them was Giacomo Casanova. He stayed in Greek Street during a period in his life that he was beset by money troubles. He had arrived in London on the afternoon of 13 June 1763. It was his first visit to the city, and his first port of call there was Soho. Carlisle House in Soho Square was the home of Teresa Imer, Casanova’s childhood friend and the mother of his ten-year-old daughter, Sophia. The last time Casanova had seen Teresa had been in Holland in the winter of 1758/9 when she had been a penniless singer. In the intervening four years she had turned her life around. Using the pseudonym of Mrs Cornelys she had become London’s leading music impresario. She received him in a cool and distant manner. He would never forgive Teresa afterwards for the off-hand way she treated him.

Whilst in Soho, Casanova became besotted by a young courtesan. French-born Marianne de Charpillon lived in Denmark Street with her Swiss mother and other women who specialized in robbing men of their money. From the moment she met Casanova, she tormented him. No matter what gifts he lavished on her, she refused to have sex with him. Deeply frustrated Casanova resorted to violence, for which Marianne had him arrested. He took his revenge by teaching a parrot to say, ‘Miss Charpillon is more of a whore than her mother’ and putting it on sale at the Royal Exchange in the City. Casanova had never been rejected by any woman in that manner, and the experience damaged his self-confidence as a lover. In Marianne de Charpillon, the seducer had met his nemesis.

Casanova’s presence in London would have an interesting follow-on in the history of publishing in the capital. Modernist poet John Rodker, son of a Jewish immigrant corset-maker from Poland, was one of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, a group of artists who met together in the pre-war period in the area around Whitechapel Art Gallery. A conscientious objector during the war, he had been on the run before being arrested in April 1917, imprisoned, and then transferred to the Home Office Work Centre at Dartmoor. In 1919 he started the Ovid Press, a private press which lasted about a year. It published T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (the first edition of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) and portfolios of drawings by Wyndham Lewis and others. That same year Rodker took over from Pound as foreign editor of the New York magazine The Little Review. While working in Paris in 1922 on the second printing of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Rodker met his future mother-in-law, the literary translator Ludmila Savitzky. Together, Rodker and Pound persuaded Savitzky to translate Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into French where it appeared under the title Dedalus in 1924. Back in London, he established the Casanova Society. Beginning in 1923 the Society issued expensive limited editions of classical literature in newly commissioned translations by Arthur Machen, E. Powys Mathers, and others, including Casanova’s steamy erotic memoirs.

Poet and opium addict Francis Thompson was for many years a London vagrant. There is a story relating the fact that one night in 1888 Thompson, destitute and drunk, had collapsed in the doorway of the Pillars of Hercules where he was rescued by Wilfred Meynell, the man who later would take care of the publication of the poet’s work. The story is likely to be inaccurate, but it typifies Thompson’s life style. From a devout (convert) Catholic background, Francis Thompson was trained as a doctor but never practiced and moved to London instead. He arrived with literary ambitions. In the capital he was reduced to selling matches and newspapers for a living. By this stage, Francis was already a drug addict. His interest in opium seems to have been the result of reading Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater given to him by his mother for his eighteenth birthday. Opium, particularly in the form of laudanum, would have been easily available to Thompson, both in his father’s clinic and in college. It was also legally obtainable from pharmacists. In London he attempted suicide, slept rough under the arches at Charing Cross, lived for a while with a prostitute who gave him lodgings and shared her income with him. Though he never revealed her name, Thompson was later to describe her in his poetry as his saviour. But she disappeared one day and never returned.

In February 1887, Wilfred Meynell, editor of Merry England, a Catholic literary monthly magazine, received some untidy manuscripts, accompanied by the following covering letter:

Dear Sir,

In enclosing the accompanying article for your inspection, I must ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is due, not to slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which it has been written … I enclose a stamped envelope for a reply … regarding your judgement of its worthlessness as quite final … Apologizing very sincerely for my intrusion on your valuable time, I remain, Yours with little hope,

Francis Thompson
Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office.

The parcel included the moving poem ‘The Passion of Mary’. All attempts to trace the author failed, until Thompson noticed that one of his poems had been published in Merry England. Meynell’s hope that the author after publication would reveal himself, proved correct. One day in the spring of 1888, a man in ragged clothes, looking aged and ill, presented himself at his office. It was Francis Thompson. The meeting with husband and wife Meynell marked the beginning of a creative period in Thompson’s life. The Meynells watched over their prodigy. On more than one occasion they arranged for him to time in a monastery as a means to overcome his opium addiction. The first of these extended retreats was at the Norbertine monastery of Storrington in 1889, during which period, Thompson composed his most enduring poem, the autobiographical ‘Hound of Heaven’ that tells of God, who does not abandon, but pursues the most wayward soul. During the last period of his life, he was to produce three volumes of poetry.

More recently, the Pillars of Hercules was favoured by a number of notable figures from the London literary scene, including Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. Poet and critic Ian Hamilton lived a bohemian life in Soho, his office was an anteroom to the Pillars, his ‘Mermaid’s Tavern’. During the 1970s the Pillars became the ‘outer office and club room’ of the literary magazine The New Review (based next door at no.11) which was edited by Hamilton. The title of a testimonial collection of work Another Round at the Pillars pays tribute to the house where Hamilton was known as the ‘Gaffer’. Until the closure of the magazine, he introduced many young writers and for a while, the New Review group dominated London literature which drew occasional accusations of a ‘literary mafia’. The second collection of literary essays by Clive James, entitled At the Pillars of Hercules, was first published by Faber and Faber in 1979. The title indicates that most of the pieces within it were delivered or written at the tavern. James was most likely not aware of the fact that the title of his collection was not an original one. In fact, the same title had been used over a century previously.

David Urquhart was a Scottish-born diplomat and author who had been educated in France, Switzerland and Spain. In 1827 he joined the Greeks in their War of Independence. He spent many years as a diplomat in Constantinople. In England, he was an outspoken opponent of Lord Palmerston’s foreign policy. The action of England in the Crimean War provoked his indignant protest. To expose the government, he founded the Free Press in 1855 (in 1866 renamed the Diplomatic Review), which numbered Karl Marx among its contributors. However, he is remembered for quite a different achievement: Urquhart introduced the idea of hot-air Turkish baths into Great Britain. Previously, Turkish baths had been associated with prostitution. By the middle of the eighteenth century Soho and Covent Garden were full of seedy lodging houses and an astonishing number of Turkish baths, most of which were brothels. John Fielding, the magistrate, called Covent Garden ‘the great square of Venus’. Urquhart however advocated their medical use in the Pillars of Hercules (1850). Irish physician Richard Barter had started experimenting with water and hot air therapy during the cholera epidemic of 1832. Unlike many early hydropaths (hydrotherapy was once called hydropathy), Barter continually experimented with hot waters, finally opening a luxurious Turkish bath in 1856, modelled on those that had been described by David Urquhart.

A tradition of renewal: on innovation in the 15th and the 21th century

To know the future we have to understand the past. And of course there is also history repeating itself.

Gustave Flaubert would have loved these two sayings and he would certainly have used them for his dictionary of received ideas. Flaubert himself noted down a cliche that has some relevance for this lecture. It goes

photography: will make painting obsolete.

Karl Marx used the one about history for one of his funnier quips: history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a comedy.

Still, there is truth in both sayings. History – or humanity – certainly has a tendency to repeat itself and we can only recognize these repetitions and learn something if we have some knowledge of the past.

At the moment we are in the middle of one of the greatest sea-changes the world of information has gone through. Therefore I want to take a look at what happened during an earlier era and share some ideas with you about the lessons of history.

What can we learn from the 15th century change from manuscript to printed book? Does it tell us something about the fate of the printed book itself? What lessons might the early heroes of printing have for the internet publishers of our days – and of course for us bookhistorians who are going through such interesting times. I will say something about design but more about the financial circumstances that influence design. During my research for this paper I came to the conclusion that these circumstances are perhaps more important than changes in design we see on the page – and may expect to see on the screen of our digital books.

Let me first say that I consider the codex a far more important, interesting and influential invention than the computer or the internet. The codex has now reached a venerable age of more than 17 centuries. About a hundred generations have used it’s unique features.

There is a difference between a codex and a pile of papers held together by a pin or glue. The uniformity of the size of the pages defines the accessibility of a book. Quick and random acces to information, that is what the codex is about.

Creating such a book in the middle ages was everything but easy.

For a medieval codex you would have to slaughter ten or twelve pigs or sheep and have vellum made of their skins. After that you had to find that rarest of species: a man or woman who could write down a text for you. Early medieval society was hardly organized and places where you could have a book made or actually see a book where few. Monasteries were scarce and wide apart.

Secular reading – for instruction or pleasure – belonged to the city. To be able to live in a city and do something else than menial work, you would have to be able to read. Once you could read you probably wanted to read more than bookkeepers records. You wanted to read books. Religious books, scholarly books, adventures and poetry.

And soon an industry came into existence that catered for this new market of readers. Scriptoria in great cities like Florence where well organized companies that produced high-quality manuscripts for a decent price.

Then, halfway the 15th century came the printing press – invented by the Man of the Millennium, Gutenberg. More than 29.000 titles were printed up to 1500. If we put the number of copies of an edition on the arbitrary number of 300 this would mean that about 9.000.000 books were made and sold during the first 40 years after Gutenberg. How many scribes would be needed to create such a mountain of books?

It is clear that here we have a genuine information revolution. At the same time it is a rather curious revolution! What everybody knows, but hardly anybody seems to realize, is that printers played a relative small part in the making of a book. In the days of Gutenberg the typesetters and printers realized far less than half of the value of a copy.

The materials of which books were made, claimed the major part, even when paper was about ten times less expensive that vellum. So the actual printing of a book may have been 50 times less costly than writing it down by hand, but the printers could only claim about 20% of all work done on a single copy. The rest was done – or supposed to be done – by rubricators, illuminators and bookbinders.

In the 15th century a paper copy of a printed book would be half as expensive as a handwritten one. It will be clear that the prime importance of Gutenbergs printing press lies in being a catalyst. Printers printed editions and editions had to be sold.

Gutenbergs artificial writing machine was certainly not meant to be a prime mover that made knowledge available to the masses and revolutionized the world. That kind of book emerged almost half a century later and was created by a totally different kind of man. The 40 years between Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius brought us the modern book.

The birth of the book as we know it is the result of typical capitalist development with its system of trial and error, fuelled by greed. It is important to remember that, while the price of a single copy of a book might be halved, the total investment needed to produce that copy as part of an edition would rise more than twohundredfold. The return of investment would be slow as it might take years to sell an edition. And before work on that edition could start, there would be an initial investment in the equipment of a printing house and the hiring of an expensive specialist workforce.

It was only in the 16th that being a publisher or even a printer became a sure way to riches. In the early days the infrastructure to sell 500 copies of a book was non-existent. Early printers seem to have thought and act like the makers of manuscripts. The first printing press in Italy was up in the mountains and days away from Rome. It was rather difficult to print in Subiaco and still expect to sell a lot of books in little time. So Sweynheim and Pannartz moved their bussiness to Rome. And even then life was difficult. To be able to sell books printers and publishers had to create a close knit community that was parochial and international at the same time.

The advent of the printed book made rubricating and illuminating a booming business and that is perhaps the reason why the quality of manuscripts detoriated so much in the last decennia of the fiftheenth century. It was only in the fiftheen-seventies that printers started to experiment with printed initials and woodcuts, thus streamlining the production and reducing the costs of a single copy with at least another 20%.

Aldus Manutius established his firm in the great merchant city of Venice, had sound financial backers and reduced the size and thus the price of books. But he hardly used the woodcut initials that would have reduced the price of his books even more, although he did so in his most famous publication: the Hypnerotomachia.

It seems clear that most 15th century printers did not realize the real potency of the printing press and indeed saw it as a form of artificial writing. There was no break with the past. They saw their activities in no different light than the makers of manuscripts.

Even today paid writers exist who ply their trade on the streetcorners in Mexico or India. They write letters but also newspapers. The investment for such a trade is small. You have to know how to write, which may take some years to learn and that is it. I will come back to these writers later on when I will discuss the impact of the internet on the publishing industry.

Many books have been written about how the layout of the page had to be reconstructed to conquer the oceans of information that suddenly became available. Pages had to be numbered. The paragraph had to be invented, just as notes and bibliographical references. Running titles. And most important of all: the title-page.

Most of these innovations come together in the work of Erhard Ratdolt, the Augsburg and Venetian printer already mentioned. He was an early adapter: he used a title-page, printed in color and so on. I especially mention the way he placed woodcut illustrations in the margins in one of the most beautiful and well-structured books ever published: his first edition of Euclid that dates from 1482.

Why did changes that were clearly great innovations not find their way immediately and sometime took ages to get accepted. Why did not all printers started to use woodcut initials right after they were invented – why did it take almost a century for such a simple but effective innovation to be generally accepted?

I have a few assertions that will play a role in the second – smaller – part of this lecture when I will discuss the digital age.

The first one goes like this: what we see as typographical innovation is often a ressurection of something older. Most typographical inventions of the 15th century are in fact reinventions.

My second obervation is that almost all real innovations come from outsiders. The power of tradition is very strong, especially in the field of printing and publishing were innovation is stultyfied by the conservatism of the trade and the consumers.

What does this mean for the future of publishing and more specifically for the future of design? I love the term Information Architecture as it covers perfectly what modern design is really about.

It will be clear that the internet and searchmachines have changed the way we look at information and how we use it. Will we need footnotes when all books have been digitized? I can imagine a searchmachine that analyzes texts in depth: a researchmachine. Now information is anchored to a page but digitized it can have any form – especially as we do not need to refer to a given page any more.

On the other hand the way we organize and read texts will not change. Writing and reading is about rhetorics and expectations and these are deep undercurrents that were probably hotwired into the human brain long before we were able to notice them. We will always need art and need to create art, or science and scholarship.

Digital information will always be expressed in books and these books will be more beautiful and better made. More people than ever before are active as designers, of typefaces and of books. They are counted in tens of thousands where there used to be hundreds. Of course beauty and taste have nothing to do with numbers. But more practitioners create more choices for a public that has become more critical in its appraisal.

And perhaps more important the costs are low. In fact everybody with a computer can create a book and have it printed. We have – again – arrived in an age where the costs are counted per single copy in stead of editions. The modern bookdesigner is in fact a publisher and can be compared to those writers in India I mentioned earlier who still write newspapers in longhand – and even more with the scribes of the early 15th century. And so it seems that we are in fact swinging back to an earlier age, on a different, higher level.

How does this work out in the real world? A few months ago I had the great honor to participate in the creation of a new and beautiful magazine on typedesign, called Codex. The publisher, John Boardley is well known for his blog ilovetypography.com. He lives in Japan, the editor somewhere in Canada, some of the authors are in fact here in this room, but they can also be found in California and Brazil. It was printed and shipped by a German firm. All 5000 copies were sold, most of them directly to readers of blogs on typography, a few by specialist bookstores, none by the great chains like the Dutch Selexyz.

I think that a few years from now there will be less books than there are now, but they will be better edited, better designed and better printed. Part, perhaps even the greater part, of the mass market will go digital. This will make books less interesting to the kind of publisher or bookseller that now fill the great chains of bookstores with endless and depressing repetitions of soulless and bad designed books. The independent bookseller will rise again and so will the independent publisher. I think that this is the future, an interesting and humane future and certainly our future as book historians.
PD

Sackville Street (Dublin)

O’Connell Street is Dublin’s main thoroughfare. Up till 1924 it was known as Sackville Street, after which the street was renamed in honour of nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell whose statue stands at the lower end of the street, facing the river and O’Connell Bridge.

In 1935 Gogarty published his first prose work, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street  (subtitled ‘A Phantasy in Fact’), a semi-fictional memoir that tells, in reverse chronological order, the story of Gogarty’s Dublin through a series of interconnected anecdotes and characters sketches. Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty was an Irish poet, a nationalist politician (one of the founding members of Sinn Féin in 1905), and a surgeon who served as the inspiration for the character of Buck Mulligan in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Young Gogarty was a talented cyclist. In 1901, however, he was banned from the tracks for using bad language. Cycling used to be a sport for gentlemen. At Trinity, he developed his interested in literature and poetry, making the acquaintance of W.B. Yeats and George Moore, and forming a friendship with the up-and-coming James Joyce. In the summer of 1904, Gogarty made arrangements to rent the famous Martello Tower in Sandycove with the ambitious plan of housing ‘the Bard’ (i.e. the pennyless James Joyce).

Joyce stayed there briefly before leaving abruptly. Joyce was never convinced about the sincerity of Gogarty’s motives. Gogarty made use of the Martello Tower during the following year as a writing retreat and party venue.  Between 1916 and 1918 Gogarty published three small volumes of poetry and an equal number of plays all performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Most of his output dates from the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924 he published An Offering of Swans followed in1929 by another book of verse, Wild Apples. This was followed in 1933 by Selected Poems.

Gogarty’s name appeared in print as the renegade priest Fr. Oliver Gogarty in George Moore’s 1905 novel The Lake. Dublin remembers this son of the city in another (typical) manner. Designed in late nineteenth century style the Oliver St John Gogarty Bar is located in the heart of Temple Bar.

Grub Street (London)

New Grub Street is a novel by George Gissing published in 1891, which is set in the London literary and journalistic circles of the 1880s.

Until the early nineteenth century, Grub Street was a street close to Moorfields, one of the last pieces of open land in the City of London. After the 1666 Fire of London, refugees from the calamity evacuated to Moorfields and set up temporary camps there. In the early eighteenth century, Moorfields was the site of open-air markets, shows, and auctions. Homes nearby Moorfields were places of the poor, and the area had a reputation for harbouring highwaymen in hiding from the law. The area was notorious for soliciting prostitutes and cruising gay men. Much of Moorfields was built over in 1777, when Finsbury Square was developed; the remainder followed soon after.

Grub Street became famous for its concentration of poor hack writers, aspiring poets, and low-end publishers and booksellers. It was pierced along its length with narrow entrances to alleys and courts, many of which retained the names of early signboards. Its bohemian society was set amidst the neighbourhood’s low-rent apartments, brothels, and coffeehouses. According to Samuel Johnson (who had lived and worked himself on Grub Street early in his career) in his Dictionary the street was inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems – ‘whence any mean production is called grubstreet’. The street name no longer exists, but Grub Street is still used as a pejorative term writings of low literary value. In fact, the name had already disappeared when Gissing published his novel. However, hack-writing certainly persisted. In the novel, the author contrasts the careers of two central characters a pair of writers: Edwin Reardon, a shy but talented novelist with limited commercial prospects; and Jasper Milvain, an ambitious but unscrupulous young journalist with cynical views about the craft and value of writing.

 

Gamblers, Cheats and Fatalists

There’s no punishing or shaming
Certain people out of gaming;
’Tis among the plagues that ravage
Countries civilized and savage,
In its blind, impartial rage
Sparing neither sex nor age.
Henry Luttrell, 1827
Crockford House (Cantos II)

Gambling is the wagering of a stake on a competitive event with the intent of winning money. Typically, the outcome of a bet is known within a short period. Chinese culture has been the home of gambling, but games like craps, baccarat, roulette and black jack all originated in Europe. In addition to these games betting took place on a variety of spectator sports such as dog-fighting, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, boxing, and even cricket.

Speculation is often associated with gambling although there is a significant difference. Gambling is investing money in a short term game of chance with a high probability of losing the stake. Speculators take a longer term view based upon on an assessment of risk. However, there have been numerous occasions in economic history when speculative ventures turned out to be little more than mindless gambling. The story of the tulip has been told many times. Complementing the craze for curiosities, tulips were displayed in Wunderkammers. Each rare flower was exhibited like a work of art. The tulip became an object of wild speculation until the market crashed in late 1637. That collapse did not spell an end to the flower mania.

In the early eighteenth century another craze manifested itself, this time for hyacinths. They, too, reached astronomical prices on the open market. In 1720 Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid (The Great Scene of Folly) was published in Amsterdam. This folio volume is a collection of seventy-six engraved satirical prints and literary pieces which all concern the so-called South-Sea Bubble, the boom and subsequent crash of the stock market in that year, hitting France, England (Isaac Newton lost £20,000 in the crash), and the Netherlands. Each particular issue of Het groote tafereel is unique, cobbled together on demand by an unknown Amsterdam printer. It is astonishing that this publication was compiled and released in the few months following the financial collapse in September. Interestingly, the collection also includes a deck of playing cards. In England in particular there had been a tradition of publishing packs of specially illustrated cards to commemorate the reign of monarchs or specific events and sceneries.

In 1672, London mapmaker Robert Morden created a pack of playing cards with an image of the fifty-two counties (the exact number of cards in a pack) of England and Wales. The earliest politically motivated pack was produced in 1679 to commemorate the (fictitious) Popish Plot. In 1688, the Glorious Revolution was celebrated in a deck of cards containing reminders of James’s cruel reign, such as the murder of the Earl of Essex and the hanging of Protestant rebels. The tradition of issuing topical cards is maintained to this very day.

After being introduced into Europe by Arabs, playing cards have been around since the 1370s. The anonymous Master of the Playing Cards was active as an artist in the Rhineland from the 1430s to the 1450s. He is the first recognizable personality in the history of engraving. Over a hundred of his works have been recorded. They include a set of playing cards in five suits, copper-engraved and uncoloured, from which he takes his name. They were most likely intended as models for use in workshops. Playing cards such as these served as repositories for design motifs to be used by other artists. Craftsmen throughout the medieval period worked from sketch-book models which were copied time after time, so that images spread from master to pupil. The designs were inspired by written texts. Plants from the herbal, beasts from the bestiary, birds and insects from the Books of Hours, created a semiotic language based upon the everyday world of popular belief and proverbial wisdom. The same figures recur into the border decorations and miniature illustrations of manuscripts or printed books from the same period.

Spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds were taken from French decks of cards and did not emerge until later. They represented the four perceived classes in society, i.e. nobility, clergy, merchants, and peasants. Cards were used for games and gambling. They also provided a new way of telling fortunes. Prohibitions of card playing and denunciations by preachers demonstrate that the passion for the game was widespread. It was a pastime that attracted card sharps and gamblers. Cheating at cards has been delightfully depicted in paintings by Caravaccio, Gerard van Honthorst, Hendrick ter Brugghen, Georges de La Tour, and others. In our own time, several films have been inspired by the same subject.

The game of cards and its players has been a recurrent theme in the history of painting. From the works attributed (with reservations) to Lucas van Leyden in the sixteenth, to that of Rombouts, Teniers, Terborch or Jan Steen in the seventeenth, to Dumesnier and Chardin in the eighteenth, to Meissonier and Millais in the nineteenth, to Cézanne’s series of card playing Provence peasants of the early 1890s, to paintings by Theo van Doesburg and Ferdinand Léger in the twentieth century (to mention but a few masters of their art), they were all intrigued by the same topic. From the outset, artists have been fascinated by gaming, gambling and cheating.

In the course of the sixteenth century English inns had begun to serve one meal a day at a common table at a fixed time and price. The meal was called the ordinary and the eating places generally began to be named ordinaries. During the seventeenth century many of these ordinaries were turned into fashionable clubs and gambling resorts. Of Locket’s ordinary at Spring Gardens, Westminster, no representation has been preserved. Adam Locket, the founder of the house, lived until about 1688, and was succeeded by his son Edward who was at the head of affairs until 1702. During that period, Locket’s was the resort of the ‘smart set’.

One of the regulars in Locket’s was wealthy dramatist and diplomat George Etherege. In 1660, young George composed his comedy The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub. The success of this play was enormous. After a long silence, he wrote the 1676 play The Man of Mode or Sir Fopling Flutter, arguably the most sophisticated comedy of manners written in English. The play had the additional attraction of satirizing known London characters. Fopling Flutter was a portrait of Beau Hewit, in Dorimant the public recognized the Earl of Rochester, and in Medley the author drew an image of himself (or maybe fellow playwright Charles Sedley). Etherege remained a regular customer at Locket’s. His passion for gambling was well known. In his ‘Song on Basset’ he celebrated a card game that had been introduced to England in 1677. Apparently the game (bassetta) had been invented by a noble Venetian, who was punished with exile for the contrivance. In France, the game was prohibited by Louis XIV in 1691. It continued being played in England where in a relatively short period of time it impoverished many families. Having learned basset at the London house of Hortense Mancini, Duchesse Mazarin, French mistress of Charles II, Etherege became one of its victims. Gambling deprived him of his fortune. He stopped writing and went in search of a rich widow.

Various forms of gambling were a feature of eighteenth century London life. Gambling gained wider popularity during the last two decades of the century, especially with the arrival of French émigrés fleeing the Revolution. It was given additional impetus with the cessation of hostilities in Europe in 1815. The heart of London’s gambling was St James’s Street in the West End. By the late 1820s the street was the site of four leading gentlemen’s clubs, White’s, Brooks’s, Boodle’s and Crockford’s, where gambling was pursued in varying degrees. William Crockford was the son of an East End fishmonger. By the mid-1820s, he obtained the lease to a building on the west side of the street, where he set up a so-called gambling ‘hell’. After acquiring the leases to three adjacent buildings, he razed all four and set about building a palatial gentlemen’s club devoted to gambling. It was dubbed ‘Pandemonium’, the name invented by John Milton at the end of the first book of Paradise Lost (1667) for the capital of Hell that was built by the fallen angels at the suggestion of Mammon.

Crockford’s opened in January 1828. Architect Benjamin Wyatt had modeled the club’s neoclassical design on the palace of Versailles. The cost of construction and furnishings was phenomenal. Membership to the club was limited. Among its members were the Duke of Wellington, the acknowledged leader of English society, as well as a host of other aristocrats such as Lord Alvanley, Bentinck, and Chesterfield. There were distinguished foreigners like the Count d’Orsay, Prince Paul Esterhazy, Prince Lieven, Louis Napoleon and Talleyrand; and fashionable authors such as Edward Bulwer, Benjamin Disraeli, and Theodore Hook. Vast sums of money followed the fall of the dice or the facing of a card. The house was in name operated by a management committee, but in reality the show was run by Crockford alone. With his Cockney accent and corpulent appearance, he presented himself as a humble servant to his privileged clientele. He retired in 1840, an extremely rich man.

During the Georgian, Regency and Victorian periods, gambling was endemic among the English upper classes. Beau Brummel and the Count d’Orsay had to flee to France when their gambling debts got too high. Young Charles James Fox, the future politician, would stay up for days gambling, drinking coffee to stay awake. At one point Fox’s father, Lord Holland, paid off almost £140,000 in gambling debts which freed Fox to go off and make new ones. Lord Byron’s daughter Ada, Countess of Lovelace, tried to use her mathematical talent to devise a system that would enable her to beat the odds at horseracing. She piled up large debts.

Members of the Royal family were also involved in gambling. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, got caught in a gambling brawl known as the Royal Baccarat Scandal. On 8 September 1890, the Prince spent the evening at Tranby Croft, the county estate of shipbuilder Sir Arthur Wilson. The guests played baccarat, an illegal gambling game which was a favourite of Edward. Present at the table was Scottish landowner and soldier Sir William Gordon-Cumming, who was accused of cheating. Attempts to keep the affair a secret failed. Sir William sued his accusers in civil court for defamation. The Prince of Wales was called as a witness and had to acknowledge his participation in an illegal game. William lost the case, was dismissed from the army, and withdrew from high society. Edward changed his behaviour, abandoned baccarat, and played whist instead.

In the early days, members of Venetian high society met to gamble in so-called ‘casini’ (small dwellings). These houses attracted other activities, from dodgy business dealings and political intrigue to prostitution. The word casino became synonymous with crime and vice. Forced to act, the authorities produced the shrewd idea that gambling could provide additional income to the state. The first known gambling house was the Ridotto, established in 1638 in order to allow controlled gambling during the carnival season in Venice.

Blaise Pascal created a perpetual motion machine in 1655. The spinning wheel entered European history. In its present form, the game of roulette (‘small wheel’) was played in Paris since 1796 in the Palais Royal. In his 1801 novel La Roulette, ou le Jour (1801) Jacques Lablée provided a description of the wheel. Napoleon legalized casinos in 1806 after which the game spread widely. Casinos were patronized by the European aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Traditionally, there has been a close connection between spa towns and gambling. In fact, the Spa casino in Belgium (La Redoute Spa) dates from as early as 1762. In England, spa cities such as Bath and Tunbridge Wells were places where the rich went for treatment, entertainment and gambling. In 1824, Friedrich Weinbrenner designed his neo-classical Kurhaus in Baden-Baden. By the mid-nineteenth century this city, situated on the foothills of the Black Forest, enjoyed the reputation of being Europe’s gambling capital. In 1837, public gambling was prohibited in France and casinos were declared illegal. Then a great idea was put forward in Monaco. The principality was in serious financial difficulty when François Blanc suggested the building of a casino. It proved a masterstroke. Monte Carlo became a Mecca for the Europe’s big spending elite.

Many authors were addicted to gambling. Writing was a means to settle debts and play again. Oliver Goldsmith was addicted to the game and perennially in debt. As a hack writer for London publishers he produced a massive output to keep himself afloat. William Makepeace Thackeray was educated at Trinity College. However, he became hooked on gambling and left Cambridge in 1830 without a degree and heavily in debt. Novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave ample space to the figure of the gambler, but there is a clear difference in approach. The romance of gambling, a celebration of the ‘lucky break’, is a central topic in the novels of Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, Edgeworth, or Austen. Nineteenth century European fiction, as illustrated by Marcel Emants’s novella Monaco (1878), emphasized the curse of Monte Carlo, and highlighted the ruinous effects of gambling. The novelist was interested in the psychology of addiction and the pathological behaviour of the gambler.

If an element of light-hearted romance remained, then it was associated with crime and fraud. The most notable example is that of Charles Deville Wells, son of the poet Charles Jeremiah Wells, a man to whom John Keats had addressed a sonnet in June 1816. Charles was a fraudster and gambler. In July 1891 he travelled to Monte Carlo with £4,000 that was stolen from investors in a bogus invention. In an eleven-hour session Wells ‘broke the bank’, winning a million francs. In April 1892, Fred Gilbert wrote the song ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’ which was made popular by music hall star Charles Coborn. This pleasant song was a favourite of James Joyce’s and is mentioned in Ulysses. Significantly, Edvard Munch created his first roulette painting in that same year 1892 (followed by another painting on the same theme in 1903).

George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894) was one of the more controversial novels of its day for its depiction of a single mother struggling to survive prejudice. Stylistically in the tradition of French Naturalism, the author supplies a vivid, at times polemical, image of Victorian sub-culture. The novel is set against a background of horse racing and the frenetic atmosphere of gambling and drinking that surrounds it. Moore exposes the hypocrisy of those who condemn the poor for their vices and profit from their addictions. Moore knew racing well. His father had a stable of race horses in Ireland and in his teenage years young George was a keen gambler who studied the racing-calendar, the stud-books, the latest betting, etc. In spite of Moore’s detailed knowledge of the game and its technically correct representation, his novel was received as a vitriolic attack on gambling. The Russian novel of the nineteenth century also portrays countless gamblers and losers. In his younger days, Leo Tolstoy was addicted to gambling. At sixteen he had entered Kazan University to study Oriental languages and later took up law. He dropped out before completing his courses and spent his time in Moscow and St Petersburg where he got caught up in high society, enjoying nights in ballrooms and at gambling tables. In 1851, after clocking up enormous gambling debts that would take him years to pay off, Tolstoy accompanied his elder brother to the Caucasus. He joined the army and spent almost three years in a Cossack village where he began writing in preparation of his first short novel Childhood. Fyodor Dostoevsky was another notorious player. His novella The Gambler is the most famous and influential gambling story in literary history. It reflects the author’s personal addiction to roulette. He completed the novella under a strict deadline to pay off gambling debts. In it, Dostoevsky analyzes the psychological make-up of the gambler and suggests that his countrymen have a particular affinity for gambling.

The association between Russia and gambling was reinforced by the emergence of Russian roulette. The earliest use of the term appears in ‘Russian Roulette’, a short story by Swiss author Georges Arthur Surdez that was published in the January 1937 issue of Collier’s Magazine. Was there a historical precedent for this story? Did soldiers play Russian roulette? Czarist officers were notorious for their dissolute behaviour. They drank heavily, fought duels, gambled, and shirked their duties. But there is no evidence that they engaged in this sinister game. The only reference to anything like Russian roulette can be found in the 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. After an evening of playing cards, officers debate whether fate is preordained. A gambling-addicted Serbian lieutenant challenges his companions to a bet. Pointing a pistol to his head he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He then points the weapon into the air and pulls the trigger again. It fires. He collects his winnings. Later that evening the same lieutenant is murdered by a drunken Cossack. Had it not been for its rolling alliteration, Russian roulette may well have gone into history as Lermontov’s roulette.

Goose Liver and Creativity

The dietetics of literature is an open field of research, but the link between writing and cooking has been made by various authors, past and present. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued more than once that mind and nutrition are inextricably connected. Creativity is a matter of stomach. In Ecce homo he relates the consumption of food directly to intellectual development, not just of the individual, but of a nation as a whole. He blames poor cookery for the mental sloppiness of his German countrymen. Soup before the meal (known as ‘alla tedesca’ in early Venetian cooking books); an addiction to meat; vegetables cooked with fat and flower; the degeneration of pastries into paperweights; the bestial drinking habits – all that, Nietzsche argues, reinforces the notion that the nation’s thinking took its origin in disordered intestines. The philosopher is just as critical about the English kitchen. A diet of beef and pasties constitute to him a ‘return to nature’, that is to say, to cannibalism. Intellectually, to Nietzsche, the most inspiring kitchen is that of Piedmont, an area famously known for its ‘risotto al tartufo’, fine cheeses, and excellent wines such as Barbera and Barolo.

 

To the booklover Holbrook Jackson’s Anatomy of Bibliomania remains indispensable reading. With great learning and wit, the author comments on why we read, where we take our books, and what happens to us when we get lost in literature. Part nine of the study is dedicated to ‘bibliophagi’ or book-eaters. The miracle of books is one of nourishment. Literature is a banquet. Books are food served out for distinguishing palates. Bibliophiles are gastronomes and epicures. They taste, chew, masticate, nibble, devour, gorge, and cram. They are subject to appetite and repletion. They may also be subject to over-eating. Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary and Croatia, built one of the largest libraries in Europe (second only to the Vatican Library). To some observers he was but a mere glutton of books with an indiscriminate appetite. Books are good wines. Readers relish their literary vintages. In his 1750 pamphlet ‘A New Project for the Destruction of Printing and Bookselling; for the Benefit of the Learned World’ (published anonymously), John Swift put forward the bold proposal for the liquefaction of literature. He advised to barrel and bottle books, thus making them more accessible and easier to consume. A cellar of books would be more invitingly absorbable than a library. Scottish poet Francis Bennoch summarized the experience of drinking books in the opening lines of his poem ‘My books’ which is included in his 1877 collection of Poems, Lyrics, Songs, and Sonnets: ‘I love my books as drinkers love their wine; / The more I drink, the more they seem divine’.

 

Book historians and bibliophiles have made ample use of gastronomic metaphors to indicate the delight of reading. One early example has survived in a rather spectacular form. Queen Elizabeth was particularly keen on her copy of Laurence Thomson’s 1582 version of the New Testament (printed by Christopher Barker: the book is held in the Bodleian, Oxford), which she bound in a covering of her own make with various motto’s. The words in her own handwriting are written on the fly-leaf of the volume: ‘I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holye Scriptures, where I plucke up in the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them up musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together; that so hauing tasted thy sweeteness I may the lesse perceave the bitterness of this miserable life’. The gastronomic metaphors collected and presented by Holbrook Jackson all refer to the consumption and digesting of foodstuff, not to the preparation of the dish. He is concerned with the reading and collecting of books, not with the process of creating them. The critic stays at the table without inspecting the kitchen. There is however a close affinity between cooking and creating.

Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister, was an odd character. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he became MP for Callington (Cornwall) in 1743, held the seat for thirteen years, but never set foot in the place. A confirmed bachelor, he drew about him a circle of cultured ‘dear friends’, a semi-erotic camaraderie of sensitive aesthetes. His biographers have described Walpole as an effeminate, asexual, or passively homosexual character. As an author, he is remembered for his Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto and for his extensive correspondence which is of significant political and social interest (a handbook of contemporary gossip). Literary critics such as Isaac D’Israeli and William Hazlitt rejected Walpole’s work as that of a frivolous dilettante, an image that survived well into the twentieth century. Historian and critic Thomas Babbington Macaulay was admired as a brilliant prose stylist in his day. He applied an intriguing gastronomic metaphor in reference to Walpole’s literary output.

Strasbourg pies or paté de foie gras are expensive pasties for which the city of that name was once famous. They are prepared from the livers of geese, which have been tied down for three or four weeks to prevent them from moving. During that period the animals are forced to eat fattening food. In an extraordinary review of Walpole’s two volumes of letters to Sir Horace Mann, British Envoy at the Court of Tuscany, published in the Edinburgh Review (October 1833), Macaulay compared the processing of the Strasbourg pie to the chemistry of the creative process. He describes Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, as the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, and the most capricious of men. His mind is a bundle of whims and affectations; his features are covered by mask within mask making the real man invisible. The overall critical evaluation of Walpole’s writing is expressed in the following manner: ‘His writings, it is true, rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual epicures as the Strasburg pies among the dishes described in the Almanach des Gourmands. But, as the pâté-de-foie-gras owes its excellence to the diseases of the wretched animal that furnishes it, and would be good for nothing if it were not made of livers preternaturally swollen; so, none but an unhealthy and disorganized mind could have produced such literary luxuries as the works of Walpole’.

Historically, food has been part of the never-ending exchange of insults between Britain and France. The surname of John Bull is reminiscent of the English fondness for beef. This is reflected in the French nickname for English people, ‘les rosbifs’. Jean Crapaud is an English jocose name given to a Frenchman. The word ‘crapaud’ is French for a toad (rather than frog). It is a reference to the ancient heraldic device of the kings of France, consisting of ‘three toads erect, saltant’. Yet, frogs, froggies, and frog-eaters have all become terms associated with the French. The Bull – Crapaud antagonism incorporates a variety of elements of patriotic hostility such as English robustness versus French refinement, ruddy health versus decadence, beef versus frog, beer versus wine and, after 1815, Wellington versus Napoleon. According to Macaulay, Walpole’s writings rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual epicures as Strasburg pies. Pâté-de-foie-gras owes its fine taste to the unnaturally swollen liver of the poor animal that furnishes it. Similarly, only an unhealthy and disorganized mind would be capable of producing such stylistic niceties as those of Walpole. It is impossible to guess which of the author’s ‘literary luxuries’ justifies such a comparison, but critical analysis allows for two different interpretations. The metaphor either supplies an illuminating insight into the chemistry of the creative process itself, or, alternatively, it is a playful ploy of restating what is an old stereotype. If the suggestion is correct that Walpole’s style of writing is the product of an unhealthy or unstable mind, then by implication every imaginative work of art may be judged similarly. In the interpretation of Macaulay the creative artist is an unhappy goose. A plateful of pre-Freud – but with a different flavouring. The alternative reading however is the more likely one. The luxurious refinement of the author’s writing is like that of a French gastronomic delicacy – tasty maybe, but unhealthy and decadent. In that sense, Macaulay has contributed an amusing metaphor to the good old tradition of Anglo-French gastronomic ding-dong.