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.

It's a goner!

{Manny-kin by rocketlass.}

October, that is. All Hallow's Eve is here, and the haunting of this blog is coming to an end. I hope you've enjoyed it.

But there's still time to sneak in one of my favorite unexplained scary stories, that of Spring Heeled Jack, "the terror of London" in the 1830s. Though there have been whole books written about Jack--from penny dreadfuls to relatively serious scholarship--Peter Ackroyd's brief account in London: The Biography (2000) is a good place to start. He draws primarily on the testimony of a young woman who was assaulted by Spring Heeled Jack in 1837, the year he was first spotted:

One statement, given by Jane Alsop at Lambeth Street Police Office, describes how the unfortunate girl encountered him on her doorstep. "She returned into the house and brought a candle and handed it to the person, who appeared enveloped in a large cloak, and whom she at first believed to be a policeman. The instant she had done so, however, he threw off his outer garment, and, applying the lighted candle to his breast, presented a most hideous and frightful appearance, and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flame form his mouth and his eyes resembled red balls of fire." . . . Jane Alsop's testimony had other, equally disturbing elements. From "the hasty glance which her fright enabled her to get at the person, she observed that he wore a large helmet; and his dress, which appeared to fit him very tight, seemed to her to resemble white oilskin. Without uttering a sentence he darted at her, and catching her part by the dress and the back part of her neck, placed her head under one of his arms and commenced tearing her gown with his claws, which she was certain were of some metallic substance."

Fortunately, two of Jane's sisters, hearing her cries, were able to drag her away and slam the door, locking her assailant outside. But even then, as she explained in her testimony,

Notwithstanding the outrage he had committed, he knocked loudly two or three times at the door.

Ackroyd rightly points out just how creepy the knocking is:

This knocking at the door, so strange that it could scarcely have been invented, is perhaps the most alarming moment in an entire alarming episode. It is as if to say--Let me in, I have not finished with you yet.

Others who spotted Spring Heeled Jack over the course of the next few years emphasized other attributes: several noted that he could leap remarkably high; others heard him cackling like an insane man; many emphasized his devilish appearance. Though the public furor over Spring Heeled Jack died down later that decade, sightings continued to be reported sporadically for the rest of the century. The Wikipedia, in fact, in a very good entry for those interested in learning more about Jack, catalogs sightings as recent as the late 1980s; it also runs through a variety of explanations, of varying degrees of likelihood, that have been offered over the years.

And now, because you can never be too careful when dealing with malign spirits, I'll close October with a brief parable by Robert Louis Stevenson that I found in The Suicide Club and Other Dark Adventures. It will surely keep the demons away for a while.


{Satan, by Gustave Dore, illustration for Paradise Lost}

The Devil and the Innkeeper

Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him, for they were people whose education had been neglected. He was bent on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears. But at last the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in the fact.

The innkeeper got a rope's end.

"Now I am going to thrash you," said the innkeeper.

"You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil. "I am only the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong."

"Is that so?" asked the innkeeper.

"Fact, I assure you," said the devil.

"You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper.

"Not in the smallest," said the devil; "it would be useless cruelty to thrash a thing like me."

"It would indeed," said the innkeeper.

And he made a noose and hanged the devil.

"There!" said the innkeeper.

Peter Ackroyd on London

Continuing my light blogging week focused on London, we now get to what is doubtless the most ambitious book on London in recent years, Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography (2000), an 800-page stew, in typical Ackroyd magpie style, of seemingly every anecdote, legend, and fascinating fact about the history and life of the city. He's plumbed the histories, novels, diaries, letters, and newspapers of centuries and collected them all in a breathless, headlong history that you can't help but read aloud to friends. Here he is on silence--a quality not usually associated with London, but one that is familiar to anyone who has wandered its streets early on a Sunday morning, when one's only company is church bells, or through the glass towers of the City on a winter weekend:

Yet, on Sundays and public holidays, Lombard Street falls quiet. Throughout the old City, silence returns.

The history of silence is one of London's secrets. It has been said of the city that its most glorious aspects are concealed, and that observation is wonderfully well fitted to account for the nature of silence in London. It comes upon the pedestrian, or traveller, suddenly and unexpectedly it momentarily bathes the senses, as if going from bright light into a darkened room. Yet if London sound is that of energy and animation, silence must therefore be an ambiguous presence within city life. It may offer peace and tranquility, but it may also suggest absence of being. It may be a negative force. The city's history is striated with moments of silence: the silence of the surrounding country when the anonymous poet of London Lickpenny leaves Cheapside in 1390, the silence of the civic assembly when Richard III was first proposed as king in 1483, the silence of desolation after the fire of 1666.

There was the silence of sixteenth-century London, after the day's last cry at the stroke of midnight:

Looke well to your lock,
Your fier and your light,
And so good-night.

Of course the London night was not wholly quiet. What London night is, or ever will be? It is the contrast that is significant, in an almost theatrical sense, because it marks an interdiction upon the natural ardour of the citizens. In that sense the silence of London is indeed unnatural. There is a mid-seventeenth-century poem by Abraham Cowley which intimates that, on the departure of all the wicked and the foolish, the city would become "a solitude almost," the implied silence suggesting her that noise and bustle are indistinguishable from sinfulness or folly. In that sense London could never be a silent city.