The posh mess of eighteenth-century London

I took the day off today and spent much of it engrossed in Jerry White's giant London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (2012). If his London in the Twentieth Century and London in the Nineteenth Century are as good--as full of detail, anecdote, and apposite quotation--then I'll gladly follow him all the way back to the (necessarily slimmer) Londinium in the First Century, should he decide the journey's worth it.

The opening section traces London's physical growth, and the buildings thereof, through the careers of two Scottish architects, James Gibbs and Robert Adam. As the eighteenth century opened, the London we know was still nearly all open land and fields, but by the time Gibbs died at midcentury, the open spaces around Hyde Park were starting to fill in with handsome terraced houses, and the city's inexorable march was truly underway.

White's description of the creation of Grosvener Square--now one of the poshest (and stateliest) locales in London--highlights the differences between building schemes then and now. This "grandest planned development of London's eighteenth century," which would convert the Grosvenor estate, was planned not as a set of buildings, or even a neighborhood, but as a whole town.

It is worth stressing just how socially mixed this most aristocratic of London estates was at its beginning. It was built not as a suburb but as a self-contained new town, complete with markets, churches or chapels, and even quartering and stabling for the 2nd Troop of the Life Guards, helpful in keeping the peace. Grosvenor Square, built from 1728, would immediately become home to the richest men and women in England, with a distinctively aristocratic tone, and so would Upper Grosvenor Street, Upper Brook Street, and, for a time, North and South Audley Streets. The first tenants of Grosvenor Square included the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Coventry, the Bishop of Durham, Viscount Weymouth, the Earl of Albermarle and numerous titled widows. Other smart developments in Mount Street became the homes of fashionable tradesmen, "upholders" or interior designers and the like, all living and working conveniently close to their clients. But behind these frontages, Palladian and palatial, let mews and blind-end courts for ostlers and coachmen and laundresses. Dung heaps peppered the stable yards in sniffing distance of drawing-room windows. And to the north of Grosvenor Square was a much more plebeian district, at George Street, Hart Street, Chandlers Street and so on, built at the same time as the square but home to building tradesmen, blacksmiths, butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers with businesses in St George's and Grosvenor Markets in the north-east corner of the estate.

Today's wealthy are much, much better at separating themselves from the other classes whose labor they require.

Even the squares themselves, intended as beautiful open spaces, could be quite noisome. White uses St James Square, "still easily London's smartest in 1726," as an example:

The Square's great open space was like "a common Dunghill." It contained many "loads of Soil and Rubbish" on which "the Inhabitants have, for many Years past, thrown their Dirt and Ashes, and . . . Cats and Dogs have likewise been cast, on the same." There were also encroachments, "particularly by a Coachmaker, who has erected a Shed, about Thirty Feet in the Square, in which he puts Heaps of Wood, and other Things."

That description calls to mind two great books by Emily Cockayne: Hubbub, about filth and mess in early modern England, and Cheek by Jowl, which traces the history of neighbors--the people who are most often responsible for dumping the horrible rubbish in the first place. Here she is, from Cheek by Jowl, on dunghills:

Dunghills were heaped up wherever they could be contained, sometimes against the neighbour's house. Rain saturated these stinking piles, encouraging damp to penetrate indoors and creating the potential for flooding. A London inkeeper heaped dung against his neighbour's wall in 1677 and the moisture from it soaked through the wall "to the great damage and the Annoyance of her house."

But those were times when both the law and moral suasion had less force, where the boundaries between public and private, both in terms of behavior and space, were less clear and less rigorously enforced. It was, quite simply, less clear what one could and couldn't do in a public square, or who had the authority to check your behavior if it crossed that ill-defined line.

Which is just one of many reasons why I'm glad to be able to enjoy this summer night reading in my library with the windows open, while suffering neither noxious odors nor any more street noise than that provided by the cicadas and the occasional hum of a passing bicycle. Some days, in some it's easier to spot--and remember to be thankful for--progress.

"One can claim protection from the street-grinder, but who's going to interfere with the man next door suffering from jim-jams?", or, More on neighbors

Emily Cockayne's first task in Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours is to decide just what a neighbor is: "Medieval villagers farmed strips of common land," she writes, "and the word 'nigh-bour' originally meant "the man who tills the next piece of ground to mine." That's not a particularly helpful definition for today, where, in urban spaces at least, the person who tills the next piece of ground to you is likely a friendly hippie from 'round the hill rather someone you would think of as a neighbor. But even recent usage can be frustratingly vague:

Early-modern neighbours could be anybody in the parish, albeit they might live a mile from each other. The looseness and geographical vagueness in the terminology makes it difficult to uncover much about what it meant to live very near to somebody. . . . Even in more recent times some biographers have been cavalier with the term "neighbour." Some have used it to mean "from the same town," or even "the neighbouring shire." These writers sent me on wild goose chases, tracking down "neighbours" who actually lived miles apart.

Then there's the problem of who counts as neighbor, exemplified by this passage from Elizabeth Taylor's biting, strangely affecting novel Angel (1955):

Lady Baines was Angel's nearest neighbour, she had declared on her first visit, ignoring the dozens of cottages, the doctor's house, the Vicarage, which lay between Paradise House and her own home. "No one between us and Lady Baines at Bottrell Saunter," Angel told people, doing the same.

Cockayne settles on a definition that seems utterly reasonable for both past and present:

One of my own neighbours told me that "a real neighbour is someone you can visit in your slippers" (he was wearing his at the time).

From there, Cockayne is off to the races, telling story after story of neighborly disagreement and disaster (and, occasionally, camaraderie or even romance). She acknowledges that the balance between bad and good neighbor stories may be skewed to the bad by the available sources, as no one goes to court to sing his neighbor's praises, but that's almost beside the point. Certainly Cockayne is mounting an argument--more deliberately than in her previous book, Hubbub--this time about how changes in living conditions have always been intertwined in complicated ways with changing notions of privacy, personal space, wealth, and social duty. But the nasty stories are what give the book life, and while perhaps the occasional account of neighbors helping with childbirth or sharing food may be necessary to the survival of our faith in human nature, what we really want is to read more disputes over dunghills and such.

And, oh, do we get those!

Dunghills were heaped up wherever they could be contained, sometimes against the neighbour's house. Rain saturated these stinking piles, encouraging damp to penetrate indoors and creating the potential for flooding. A London inkeeper heaped dung against his neighbour's wall in 1677 and the moisture from it soaked through the wall "to the great damage and the Annoyance of her house."

In this case, I might have listed "annoyance" first. Then there's the general nuisance of shared toilets--especially when combined with bored children:

Walter Greenwood and his chums interrupted their neighbours' motions by waiting until the shared toilet was occupied and then, "armed with a slat from an orange box at whose end stood a candle stump fixed in its own grease," they would slide it through the emptying flap and toast the occupant's bottom. Becoming a victim of "arseon" was only one of the many risks faced by neighbours sharing a toilet.

Then there's the more general nuisance of the loony neighbor:

In May 1883 [Henry] Kirkham "made divers loud offensive and alarming noises . . . beating and hammering with pokers hammers and other Instruments . . . and screaming, groaning and making other noises and also heating melting and dissolving divers large quantities of brass." His neighbours also complained of the smells and effluvia from his house.

It gets worse:

Ten neighbours were listed, who were also disturbed by his habit of "deliberately exposing himself naked in a most indecent posture situation and practice to divers liege subjects both male and female."

And that's well before the invention of the trench coat, the flasher's friend!

Familiar names turn up as well. George Gissing's diary provides some wonderfully grumpy, even catty moments, enough to make me wonder whether I should read the whole thing. "Fine days," he writes in August 1891,

but rendered utterly miserable by vile squabbles here in the house. The Rockett people behaving with every kind of vulgar malice. It makes me ill; I pass the time in sick, trembling rage unable either to read or think -- Yet i do think in a way; there has come across me, out of these miseries an idea for a volume of short stories, to illustrate the wretchedness of life in lodgings, to be called "At a Week's Notice."

Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, is positively charming in his neighbor-baiting:

In Oxford, Samuel Johnson was reported to have reprimanded Sir Robert Chambers for gathering snails and throwing them over onto his neighbour's garden, rebuking his "unmannerly and unneighborly" behaviour. Chambers argued that his neighbour was a dissenter, so Johnson changed his tune--"if so, Chambers, toss away, toss away, as hard as you can."

Cockayne's book loses a bit of steam as it approaches the present. That's less a fault of her writing or her material--a brief discussion of Silver Jubilee parties amusingly calls to mind the block party for Charles and Diana that Adrian Mole relates in his first diary--than a result of the fact that our own era's stories are always going to be less interesting, and more inflected by the familiarity of the actual frustrations they relate, than the past. A tale of an armorer who "built a forge made of earth and timber next to a neighbour's house" and "sledghammered armour plating and shook the neighbour's walls, ruined beer and wine in their cellar and filled their home with smoke" is, at four centuries' remove, as amusing as it is shocking; a £5,000 fine for noise pollution issued in 1993 over a crying baby simply elicits wincing sympathy for everyone involved.

But then, even though--or perhaps because?--I grew up in a small town, I've never really been the neighborly sort myself. I like having a neighborhoodl=. I like going into shops and knowing the people there and being known in return, and I like recognizing the dogs and stray cats of our streets. But I'm not one to look for communion or friendship from my neighbors. I understand the utopian impulse that would have us all sharing lawnmowers and trading services, but I want to choose the people in that circle myself, not have geography and real estate patterns do it for me. I think of a man quoted in David Kynaston's marvelous Family Britain: 1951–1957 after a tour and a sales pitch for the just-being-built New Towns:

The sort of thing the planning boys dream up, but which doesn't work out. . . . Then, there's no privacy--think of it, front gardens in common. And the back gardens divided only by wire, so your neighbour knows all about you. And to think of it on washing-day. And there's going to be a community centre. Yes, it's not a joke, there really is. A community centre! Planners are nuts on palliness.

I've turned to Kynaston before when I've been on the theme of neighbors, and I'll close with a line I quoted then, from a set of sociological interviews conducted in 1950s Britain. An interview subject says of a neighbor:

I never thought I'd come to hate anybody like I do her.

To avoid that risk, I'm inclined to stay at the level described by a 47-year-old housewife from Sunbury-on-Thames when asked if she knew her neighbors:

Lots I suppose but only to say "Good morning etc" or to have "the daily grumble" with either on the road or perhaps on the bus, wherever we happen to meet.

We may be dung-heap free, the smithys and slaughterhouses are far away, and my neighbors, I'm confident, are perfectly nice and good people . . .but I hope you'll forgive me if, Cheek by Jowl in hand, I continue to be a tad circumspect despite.

Nuisances, neighborly

A couple of months ago the publishers of Emily Cockayne's new book, Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours, sent me a galley. Having greatly enjoyed her first book, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1600–1770, I was excited about this one, and I've been pleased with what I've found as I've dipped into the galleys here and there over the past couple of months while the publication date neared. Cockayne in both books reveals herself to be a delightful archive mouse with a taste for anecdote, joyfully mining memoirs and histories and court records for minor moments that are usually passed over but which, carefully selected and assembled, can reveal wonderful new facets of life in the past.

And that all got so much better today with the arrival of the finished book--for, unlike the advance galley, it includes an index! My current obsession with the piano and my fears that my only barely competent playing might be annoying the neighbors more than they let on, I turned first to that entry. It could be worse, it turns out: while pianos are healthily represented in the annals of neighborly complaint, with nine entries (five of them under the subcategory of "noisy pianos"), that's not nearly so bad as some other sources of irritation. Children, for example, merit thirty-one entries--and that's before taking into account the separate entry for "Noises, children," with its seven. Or take the entry for pets:

Pets, 132, 149; see also birds; cats; dogs; monkey in the garden next door

No normally curious human could fail to follow up on "Monkey in the garden next door":

One couple were forced to endure a rather peculiar nuisance. The person who lived in the adjoining house owned "a large-sized, old and artful monkey," which had been won as a prize. Although kept on a chain, the monkey could escape and on occasiona had pursued the man's wife, who had to jump over a fence to avoid it." The couple requested that the Greenwich Police Court ensure that the monkey be secured. They were informed that they would need to make a civil case because the law covered dogs, not monkeys.

It's not a fair cop.

From there, the index led me, understandably, to "Murder," which is subdivided neatly:

Murder 7, 186; committed by a neighour, 83–84, 110, 195; overheard by neighbours, 17, 34–36, 102–3

Elegant as that is, it can't compare to the perfection of the entry for Sex, in which the order of the alphabet happens to set up the punchline:

Sex: hearing a neighbour having, 3, 197–8, 223; seeing a neighbour having, 14–16, 197; with a neighbour, 48, 72, 210–2

Sadly, it doesn't look like Cheek by Jowl has a Stateside publication date lined up yet, but it will be available any day now from the UK. I'll definitely have more to share from it in the coming weeks, but for the moment you'll have to excuse me: I haven't annoyed my neighbors with a runthrough of "Lush Life" for more than a day!

The hazards of milk and the glories of puddingtime

"My illness is due to my doctor's insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies"--W. C. Fields

Perhaps Fields's doctor had been reading Lord Chesterfield? Chesterfield wrote to his son on March 12, 1768:

In my opinion, you have no gout, but a very scorbutic and rheumatic habit of body, which should be treated in a very different matter from the gout; and, as I pretend to be a very good quack, at least, I would prescribe to you a strict milk diet, with the seeds, such as rice, sago, barley, millet, etc., for the three summer months at least, and without ever tasting wine.

Fields would not have been surprised to learn that Chesterfield's son died soon after.

Though Chesterfield's son may not have suffered from gout, one who did was Tobias Smollett's cranky country gent (and alter ego) Matt Bramble in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), whose lively rant about the horrors of London milk Emily Cockayne draws on in Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007):

[T]he produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered within hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke's-sake, the spewings of infants . . . and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.

Cockayne goes on to explain that London milk was thought to be particularly bad not just because of the contaminants that fire Smollett's powers of invective, but also because of the horrid conditions in which London cows were forced to live:

With a small and diminishing number of grazing opportunities and little space to store fodder, beasts were left to wallow in their own excrement, tied in dark hovels, where they fed on brewers' waste and rank hay. Their milk was known as "blue milk," and was only good for cooking.

The conditions described sound frighteningly similar to those found on contemporary factory farms; though I suppose pasteurization has cut down on the potential for contamination, the lives of the cows themselves don't seem to have improved much. And I'm sure I'll never be able to look at the blue tinge of a bowl of skim without thinking of horrid London blue milk.

In the right locations, however, Londoners could get the freshest of fresh milk:

[F]resh drinking milk was available in small quantities from cows that were walked along the streets, as mobile bovine vending machines. The Lactarian in London's St James's Park provided some fashionable milk, drunk warm, fresh from the udders of cows able to exercise.

{"The merry Milk Maid," from Marcellus Laroon's The Cryes of the City of London, Drawne after the Life (1688)}

Ah, but who would want milk, however fresh, from a cow rather than from a lovely milk maid--or, as Matt Bramble deems her, a "nasty drab"? In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the maids walked the streets of London, carrying pails and announcing their presence with, as Peter Ackroyd explains in London: The Biography (2000), a familiar--if incomprehensible--call:

It was certainly true that, as Addison wrote in 1711, "People know the Wares [tradesmen] deal in rather by their Tunes than by their Words." The words were often indistinct or indistinguishable: the mender of old chairs was recognised by his low and melancholy note, while the retailer of broken glass specialised in a sort of plaintive shriek quite appropriate to his goods. . . . There was also in the passage of years, or centuries, the steady clipping or abbreviation of jargon. "Will you buy any milk today, mistress" became "Milk maids below," then "Milk below," then "Milk-o" and, finally, "Mieu" or "Mee-o." . . . Pierce Egan, author of Life in London," recalled "one man from whom I could never make out more than happy happy happy now."

Before I milk this lazy little Saturday meander dry, I have to check in with Dr. Johnson. Though the definitions for milk in his Dictionary are relatively dull, he does define one of my favorite eighteenth-century terms, derived from a milk-based dish:

puddingtime
1. The time of dinner; the time at which pudding, anciently the first dish, is set upon the table.
2. Nick of time, critical minute.

Mars that still protects the stout,
In puddingtime came to his aid.
HUDIBRAS.

It clearly being puddingtime, I'll close.

"Methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies into the same water," or, Looking after the Codpiece Oeconomy

{Flea, by Robert Hooke, from Micrographia (1664)}

Is it a mark of shallowness that I never feel the difference between modern life and the past more clearly than when I am reminded that for most of human history people weren't able to take showers? Sure, baths have their virtues--though they, too, were so rare as to be almost nonexistent for most of history--but there are few things quite so satisfying as a hot shower. I think of my post-marathon showers, when I can feel the salt encrusted on my skin give way beneath the water; or the shower in high school that followed a day's work cutting horseweeds out of young beans, with not a hint of shade in sight; or the shower that cleansed the stench of cream cheese and cheap ham that lingered after a shift at Bruegger's Bagel Bakery during college. Oh, how lucky we are!

Those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries weren't nearly so fortunate, as Emily Cockayne reminds us in her spectacularly rich Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007)

Washing routines were so unexceptional that they are usually ignored in contemporary diaries, autobiographies, and letters. Consequently it is difficult to be sure how people washed in the period. . . . Samuel Pepys rarely mentions washing himself, and for him cleansing did not need to involve water--on 5 September 1662 he records "rubbed myself clean." It is unlikely that soap featured much in the cleansing routine. Made from rancid fats and alkaline matter such as ashes, most cakes of soap would have been quite greasy and would have irritated the skin. . . . Some authors did extol the virtues of a wet wash. . . . At the age of thirty-three John Evelyn began "a Course of yearly washing my head with Warme Water, mingl'd with a decoction of sweete herbs, & immediately with cold spring water." This "much refreshed" him.

In line with other physicians Joseph Browne thought that many conditions were improved with cold bathing, which could cure scrofula, rickets, venereal diseases and "weakness of Erection, and a general disorder of the whole Codpiece Oeconomy." . . . Chimney sweeps were besooted from head to toe and known as part of the 'black Fraternity." "I would not recommend my Friend to breed his son to this Trade," remarked Mr. Campbell in 1747, adding, "I think this Branch is chiefly occupied by unhappy Parish Children. Sweeps effectively acted as the chimney brush--their clothes were tattered on the way up the chimney and their skin endured grazes, burns, and scratches. Soot, a carcinogenic substance, would not have washed readily from skin. Millers were prone to lice, which fed off pockets of flour held in folds of skin. Grocer's itch was a condition caused by handling flour or sugar. . . . Jonas Hanaway reported that some sweep masters washed their apprentices annually.

Cockayne continues by citing Lord Chesterfield, which sent me back to his letters to his son for a more full statement of his position on cleanliness. As usual with Chesterfield, I wasn't disappointed:

In your person you must be accurately clean; and your teeth,hands, and nails, should be superlatively so; a dirty mouth has real ill consequences to the owner, for it infallibly causes the decay, as well as the intolerable pain of the teeth, and it is very offensive to his acquaintance, for it will most inevitably stink. I insist, therefore, that you wash your teeth the first thing you do every morning, with a soft sponge and swarm water, for four or five minutes; and then wash your mouth five or six times. Mouton, whom I desire you will send for upon your arrival at Paris, will give you an opiate, and a liquor to be used sometimes. Nothing looks more ordinary, vulgar, and illiberal, than dirty hands, and ugly, uneven, and ragged nails: I do not suspect you of that shocking, awkward trick, of biting yours; but that is not enough: you must keep the ends of them smooth and clean, not tipped with black, as the ordinary people's always are. The ends of your nails should be small segments of circles, which, by a very little care in the cutting, they are very easily brought to; every time that you wipe your hands, rub the skin round your nails backward, that it may not grow up, and shorten your nails too much. The cleanliness of the rest of your person, which, by the way, will conduce greatly to your health, I refer from time to time to the bagnio. My mentioning these particulars arises (I freely own) from some suspicion that the hints are not unnecessary; for, when you were a schoolboy, you were slovenly and dirty above your fellows. I must add another caution, which is that upon no account whatever, you put your fingers, as too many people are apt to do, in your nose or ears. It is the most shocking, nasty, vulgar rudeness, that can be offered to company; it disgusts one, it turns one's stomach; and, for my own part, I would much rather know that a man's fingers were actually in his breech, than see them in his nose.

Since she started me on this topic, it seems only fair to let Cockayne have the last word, which is not completely foreign to those of us who spend our summers swimming in Lake Michigan--though, again, our sufferings pale in comparison to those of the early moderns:

Despite the pollution Londoners used the Thames for bathing. John Evelyn noted that even when they bathed in water "some Miles distance from the City," they still became coated in a "thin Web, or pellicule of dust" gathered from the clouds of city smoke by falling rain.

It's so nice to go trav'ling . . . ?

[Photo by rocketlass]

Because it seems I've been doing more than my share of traveling lately, I offer up some notes on getting around.

From Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War for Independence (2007), by John Ferling:

Little time passed before it was evident that the leadership had grossly underestimated the difficulties that would be confronted in the wilds of Maine. Within the initial three days--over a fifty-mile stretch that drew the army well beyond Maine's last settlement--the soldiery came on a succession of churning rapids and disquieting falls, including some "very bad rips," as one soldier noted, which resulted in far more portaging than had been anticipated. . . . The men were wet constantly--"you would have taken" them for "amphibious Animals," [Benedict] Arnold wrote to Washington--and the night temperatures routinely plummeted below freezing. Each morning the men awakened, said one, to find their clothing "frozen a pane of glass thick." Before he had been in the interior of Maine a week, Arnold reported the "great Fatigue" of his men and quietly worried over whether he had brought along a sufficient supply of food and blankets. The men grew concerned as well, not only about the dwindling supplies. They "most dreaded" the cold, fearing not only disease, but anxious at their fate should they fall on ice and fracture a leg or hip while deep in the wilderness.

Well, maybe it's better if one keeps out of the wilderness (let alone the Continental army), sticking to cities instead?

From Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007), by Emily Cockayne:

In a few cases [of deadly road accident] the driver was found guilty of causing an accident by failing to pay due care and attention. The attitudes of the carters and coachmen were questioned. In particular, commentators complained about the lackadaisical way the drivers positioned themselves on their vehicles so that they could not easily see the road ahead. It was recorded in 1692 that "most of the carters, Carmen, and draymen that pass and repass with their several carts, carriages, and drays through the public streets, lanes and places [of London and Middlesex] . . . make it their common and usual practice to ride negligently on their several carts." Often nobody guided the horse, "so that oftentimes their horses, carts, carriages, and drays run over young children and other their Majesties' subjects, passing in the streets about their lawful occasions, whereby many lose their lives."

It seems that at least one recognizable type of driver-for-hire has persisted through the centuries; imagine how much more imperiled the lives of those seventeenth-century Londoners would have been had their draymen had cellphones on which to chatter away throughout their shifts.

Speaking of which, Stacey saw a cabbie yesterday who would, I think, have done well in the rough-and-tumble of seventeenth-century London: after his running of a red light led to his cab blocking an intersection, he was verbally assailed by a stuck motorist--which he took as an occasion to, after shouting to his far, "Hold on!", get out of his cab and go fight the other motorist. The last Stacey saw of the incident was some police cars heading that way, lights flashing.

So maybe a train would be a better idea?

From a letter from E. B. White to Henry Allen of 22 February, 1955 telling about White's attempt to catch a 6:30 train,collected in Letters of E. B. White (1977, 2006):

I looked at my watch again and it said 6:31. We screamed into the station yard, jumped out, and the engineer saw us coming and I guess he took pity on me. They had the train all locked up, ready to go, the bell was ringing for the start. The taxi driver grabbed my bags and whirled down the platform, and I trotted behind , carrying my fish pole and the Freethy lunch box. The trainman saw this strange apparition appearing, and he opened up the coach door. I plunged on board and the driver threw the bags on, and away we went. I had no ticket, no Pullman receipt for my room, just a fish pole. For the next hour or two, I was known all through the train as "that man." But the porter got interested in my case, the way porters do, and he stuck me in the only empty bedroom and told me to sit there till we got to Waterville. The conductor stopped by, every few minutes, to needle me, and between visits I would close the door and eat a sandwich and mix myself a whiskey-and-milk, in an attempt to recuperate from my ordeal. At Waterville, the conductor charged in and said: "Put on your hat and follow me!" Then he dashed away, with me after him. He jumped off the train and disappeared into the darkness. When I located him in the waiting room he looked sternly at me and said, "Are you the man?"

"I'm the man," I replied.

"Well," he said, "go back and sit in the room."

Then planes, and luxury travel--being met at the airport and whisked away to a spa and all that instead.

From a letter from Jessica Mitford to Robert Truehaft of November 15, 1965, collected in Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (2006):

I arrived more dead than alive, the plane being 2 hours late in the end. Shall draw a veil over that. Was met by a gliding lady (they all glide here, rather than walk) and driver. The latter drove me here, the glider having to leave and fetch another arriving flower. As you can imagine, I was pretty well sloshed by the time the plane finally downed.

Ultimately, perhaps the key is not to care about the mode, but just to set oneself into motion and hope for the best. I'll leave that for James Laughlin, who in the following note from his sort-of-autobiography, The Way It Wasn't (2006), seems not much to care about the details of his upcoming trip--and while I suppose such blithe unconcern is easier for a wealthy heir than for the rest of us, his approach does seem likely to be satisfying.

I am going to see Gertrude Stein for a few days on Friday and then I am going to Lausanne -- Basel -- Freiburg -- Strassbourg -- Stutgart (H. Baines) -- Wurzburg -- Erfurt -- Leipzig -- Dresden -- Prague -- Brunn -- Bratislava -- Budapest -- Vienna -- Linz -- Salzburg -- Ljubljana -- Zagreb -- Dubrovnik. What all this will add up to is not known, but if I write a poem in each place, I shall have had some practice in this matter.

Or I suppose you could travel by not traveling at all, as seems one explanation of an image featured in a show that Luc Sante's currently curating at apexart, The Museum of Crime and the Museum of God. It's an old black-and-white print that incorporates two photos, the larger one showing a black man in clerical robes waist-deep in a wide, muddy stream, an "x" scratched into the print near him.. The caption, apparently typed on it at the time the photo was printed, reads:

Reverend C. H. Parrish, D.O., standing in the River Jordan, April 13, '04, a short distance from the place where John the Baptist baptized the Saviour. See cross-mark.

The inset photo shows the same man in the same robes standing under a tall, thick, knobbly tree, and the caption reads:

Dr. Parrish standing under the Oldest Olive Tree (1800 years old) in the Garden of Gethsemane, April 16, '04.

Meanwhile, the print itself is captioned thus:

Photographed while attending the World's Fourth Sunday-School Convention, held at Jerusalem, April 18, '04.

All of which would be fine except that the two photos are obvious fakes: the man, who is exactly the same in both photos, has been cut from a different photo and pasted in place. In the river photo, he's been cut in half to show that he's partially submerged, while the olive tree photo presents him whole.

Now, perhaps there's a reason for this fakery. Perhaps the Reverend Parrish's photos from the Sunday-School conference simply didn't turn out, and he felt that a little cut-and-paste work would be more likely to draw his parishioners closer to holiness than seeing nothing at all from his trip. But what if that's not the case?

What if the Reverend Parrish didn't go to Jerusalem at all? Presuming that his parishioners paid for his trip, just what, this hundred years on, do we think he actually did with the money? Did it go to a lady friend in dire need of mink? Was it laid on a can't-miss horse? Or did it support a trip to some lesser locale than Jerusalem--someplace far less exotic, historical, and sacred, but for all that far more congenial, hospitable, and fun? Someplace like Atlantic City?

Oh, that's probably enough speculation for a lovely summer Saturday. I'll let Sammy Cahn close it out, with the end of his "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling":

It's very nice to be footloose
With just a toothbrush and comb
It's oh so nice to be footloose
But your heart starts singin' when you're homeward wingin' across the foam.

It's very nice to go trav'ling
But it's oh so nice to come home.

As Frank himself might say, ain't that the truth.

Indexes, lice, and the land of Cockaigne

I'm in New York for work this week, so there won't be much posting. But while flipping through the index of Emily Cockayne's Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 (2006), I found something I thought you might enjoy:

lice
on an apprentice 76
in beds 58
figs blamed for 94
head 60, 66, 67
houses infested with 155
millers prone to 61
spreading typhus 212

Doesn't an index entry like that more or less guarantee a good book?

Emily Cockayne would seem to have the right name for someone writing about filth; by some accounts, the mythical medieval utopia of Cockaigne was only reached by fording a river of dung--up to one's nose--that took seven years to cross (though some other versions of the legend opt for eating challenges instead, such as a ten-thousand-foot-high pudding or a mountain of cheese).

Oh, but it'll all be worth it once you get there, you poor, lice-ridden late-medieval apprentice! Cockaigne is an earthly paradise, its pleasures--unlike the vaguely boring perfection of Eden--earthy and explicit. Here is how Pieter Brueghel the Elder imagined it in his 1567 painting The Land of Cockaigne:



In various versions of the story, after crossing the river of shit, travelers are rewarded with rivers of oil, honey, milk, and wine. Pigs in Cockaigne have knives in their backs for easy cutting, the owls lay fur coats, and grilled geese fly into people's mouths. On top of that, everyone in Cockaigne is forbidden to work--presumably even the lice. If this whets your appetite, you can learn much more about Cockaigne in Herman Pleij's Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (2003).

A final, unrelated note for today: in my online searching for the definition of "cockaigne," I stumbled across a word I didn't know, but which I will certainly find occasion to employ in its first sense in the future:

cockalorum

1) a self-important little man
2) the game of leapfrog
3) boastful talk