The Victorians, A. N. Wilson, c. 2003

My "consequential" book for the next week: The Victorians, A. N. Wilson, c. 2003. The heft and feel of the book is awesome. I love the feel of the paper, and love the pitch and font. This should be a fun book; it is a continuation of my "China phase."

Time period:

• parliament burned down in 1934
• Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle, nearing Tierra del Fuego, 1934
• Charles Dicken: Pickwick mania
• Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution; Carlyle -- perhaps the best-loved author of the day
• Princess Victoria becomes queen: 1837
• 1837 - 1844: the worst economic depression that had ever afflicted the British people; and,
• the question: why no revolution in Great Britain; 1848 is known as the Year of Revolutions on the European continent
• and, so I begin.

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As noted earlier, my "consequential" book for this week: The Victorians, A. N. Wilson, c. 2003. The heft and feel of the book is awesome. I love the feel of the paper, and love the pitch and font. This should be a fun book; it is a continuation of my "China phase."

I've now read the first three chapters, and have skimmed through most of the rest of the book. It is not an easy read for me. It probably is not an easy read for the average American. It is extremely heavy on politics everywhere, and statistics in places. I don't care for politics in general, and I definitely don't care for British politics. But in defense, the author has it exactly correct -- one cannot discuss/analyze/report any "modern" human "activity" without understanding the politics. But the book is quite unreadable for the most part -- unless one is really, really concentrating.

But, wow, where it is readable, it is incredible. This is the kind of book I would like on my book shelf if I had book shelf room for any more books. This is an incredibly good reference book.

I am quite perplexed why the author completely avoided any mention of the opium wars. Hong Kong is mentioned once, p. 124, in passing.

An extraordinary expansion of British imperialism had marked the first decade of Victoria's reign. Hong Kong in the Far East -- 1843, Labuan in Indonesia -- 1846, Natal -- 1843, Orange River in South Africa -- 1848, Gambia on the West Coast of Africa -- 1843. In 1842 the British fought the first of their disastrous Afghan wars, temporarily annexing that unconquerable country. Even the Russians in the twentieth century, or the Americans in the twenty-first, did not experience quite so cruelly the brutal indomitability of the Afghan guerrilla. 

Then this, page 197: two things to emerge from the Crimean War, completely unpredictable -- the importance of photography, and a change in the Western world's smoking habits.

Data points from the Crimean War and smoking as told by A. N. Wilson:

• Robert Peacock Gloag, a Scotsman, was in the Crimean during this period; Wilson does not know why
• while he was there, Gloag saw Turks and Russians smoking cigarettes; "in them he found an idea and an ideal. From the war a purposeful man emerged." -- 
• the first Gloag cigarettes on sale in London were cylinders of straw-coloured paper into which a cane tip was inserted and the tobacco filled in through a funnel
• the Russians called these little scorchers, papirosi (reminds me of paparazzi, also little scorchers)  
• then a list of early cigarette-makers that followed
• "Moscows" -- had a piece of wool in the end to act as a filter
• "Tom Thumbs" -- penny lines to be smoked to the bitter end
• "Don Alfonso" -- bundles of 25 for 1 shilling
• "the Whiff" -- introduced in 1871; the profits paid for the church of St Stephen, Peckham
• Gloag had introduced a narcotic that was so addictive that social attitudes were forced to change in order to accommodate the cigarette compulsion
• previously, smoking was considered a "low" activity; greatly restricted where folks could smoke
• by 1860, smoking was allowed in railway carriages
• the real smoking revolution happened in the generation after Gloag's when the Bristol tobacco firm of W.D. and H.O. Wills pioneered the first Bonsack cigarette-making machine
• the Bonsack cigarette-making machine was bought from America in 1883, the invention of James A. Bonsack of Salem, VA
• the Bonsack: could manufacture 200 cigarettes per minute
• between 1860 and 1900, consumption of cigarettes grew about 5% per annum
• the firms that followed Willis:
• Lambert and Butler (London)
• John Player and Sons (Nottingham)
• Hignett Bros and Cope Bros (those are two firms, Liverpool)
• the Liverpool firms competed for the franchise to display and sell cheap cigarettes in the Railway Refreshment Rooms
• 1880s: a price war let to the "penny cigarettes
• Wild Woodbine, 1888, founded: became the most famous cheap smoke in the Western world, forever associated with the men fighting in the trenches 25 years later
• smoking soared
• the working classed were hooked; the true opium of the people
• Gloag's legacy of the cigarette habit could be said to be the most lasting and notable consequence of the Crimean War
• and then this, a typical A. N. Wilson observation:
• When the Turkish, Russian and British empires are now as obsolete as the Bonapartist dynasty, the British working class, 146 years after the treaty of Paris, are still addicts of what Gloag brought home -- though in other classes the custom, like its adherents, is dying.

Maybe later, time to talk about photography and the Crimean War.

 

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The Victorians

A.N. Wilson

c. 2003

pp. 230 - 231

From the chapter, "Clinging to Life":

If one had to isolate a single all-consuming idea which has taken hold of the human race in the post-politial era in which we now live, it is the interrelatedness of natural forms -- the fact that we are all on this planet together -- human beings, mammals, fish, insects, trees -- all dependent upon one another, all very unlikely to have a second chance of life either beyond the grave or through reincarnation, and therefore aware of the responsibilities incumbent upon custodians fo the Earth.

'Let it be born in mind,' Darwin writes in The Origin, 'how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life.'

This surely explains why, in our generation, Darwin has grown in importance and stature, whereas almost all his contemporary thinkers and sages are half-forgotten.

Herbert Spencer is all but unread. With the demise of European communism, it seems to many -- especially to the majority who have not read Marx -- as if The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are dead.

Freud, in many schools of psychology, is discredited; Hegel is of more interest to historians of philosophy than as a living inspiration to many of our contemporary philosophers.

Carlyle and Ruskin are unknown to general readers; Mill is read selectively by students, but is no household name. But neo-Darwinians -- Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett and the ret -- can still write bestsellers.
From Chapter 13, "Marx - Ruskin - Pre-Raphaelites", The Victorians, A. N. Wilson, c. 2003:

The word "Pre-Raphaelite" in popular modern parlance does not refer to particular painting techniques or attitudes to the Middles Ages.

[Pre-Raphaelite] means young women with pale faces, pouting lips and abundant hair. The hair was important -- this was the 1850's in England; so important that hairdressing, for the first time in English history, came out of the private domain of the home.

Women who could afford to now went to hair-stylists -- the styles varying much from year to year. No respectable woman wore her hair loose -- which is what gives those loose-haired Pre-Raphaelite maidens so much of their erotic charm for the men who painted them and the men who bought the pictures.

And in an age where everything was up for sale, the exporters and importers did not stop at hair itself. Great quantities of hair were imported into Britain fro the European continent. The "hair harvest" in Italy was an annual feature in poorer villages and 200,000 lbs of hair were sold annually in the Paris markets, at a price of 10 shillings or 12 shillings per ounce -- 20 schillings for really long hair.

"We saw several girls," noted one observer at the Collenee market, "sheared, one after the other like sheep, and as many more standing ready for the shears, with their caps in their hands, and their long hair combed out, and hanging down to their waists."

So valuable a commodity had hair become that The Hairdressers Journal reflected on "one most unpleasant feature connected with the business" -- the prevalence of hair thieves who would set upon young women whose head showed a valuable crop, shear them, "and always kept on the safe side of the law, apart from the robbery of the hair."

One of the reasons I love the book was reading about all the kinds of horse carriages. So, this passage in The Victorians, A. N. Wilson, c. 2003, pp. 261 - 262:

Mrs Warren reckoned in A House and Its Furnishing (1860s, England) that a six-roomed house could be run if you had an income of £200 per annum.  A New System of Practical Domestic Economy estimated that you should set aside 10 percent of your income on horses or carriages, which would mean you needed £1,000 for a four-wheeler with horses. (The coachman would be paid for out of the 8 percent you would spend on the wages of male servants.) If you had £600 a year you could keep two horses if your groom doubled as a footman. A gig cost £700: that is, a one-horse carriage -- a tilbury or a chaise.

This was the great era of 'carriage folk.' At the beginning of the [19th] century, elliptic springs had made this soon-to-be-obsolete mode of transport enjoy a magnificent flowering. The berlin, barouche, calèche, coupé, clarence, daumont, landau and phaeton all crowded the streets of London in the supposedly prosaic railway age.

In 1814, there were 23,000 four-whelled vehicles in the capital; by 1834, 49,000; by 1864 [think, US Civil War], 102,000, with a further 170,000 two-wheelers.

This represents a huge social class, as well as huge congestion in the streets; and it is this class, this immensely privileged class, probably more comfortable than any human class who had ever existed on the planet, whose offspring were the first with the leisure and time to have a childhood.

 I've often wondered why the Brits (for the most part the English and the Scots) had such an incredible effect/impact on the world.

Something I've never seen discussed in this context is the English system of inheritance: primogeniture.

I'm currently reading A. N. Wilson's landmark opus The Victorians, c. 2003. I said the other day I have no more shelf space and won't be buying any more books. I have made my first exception. This is an incredibly good book, but wow, I have to read it slowly. After four days of reading it, I've finally gotten into the book's rhythm.

It was while reading this book -- and I've read a lot of books about Great Britain, England, and Scotland, and have spent many years in England and along the Scottish border -- that it finally dawned on me what is likely the main reason for England's impact on the world.

The unique Lamarckian trait among the Turks: traders and multilingualism. The English and Scots: explorers.

[Hungarians, by the way, are probably descendants of an extra-terrestrial alien society far more advanced than any on earth. But I digress.]

To me, it's simply incredible, the concept of primogeniture. For most of history, XY primogeniture -- women were not even "considered." With primogeniture, the title, the estate, the family name, everything goes to the first born (and even that isn't quite correct, but it will due for now).

Taken to its extreme, and apparently it was until recent times, the first born English male inherited everything. His brothers and sisters got nothing, or were at a minimum dependent on the largess of their oldest brother.

Essentially, under primogeniture, everyone is disinherited except for the first-born male. The females would survive only by marrying "well." The disinherited brothers had two options. The first option: marry "well" but since they had nothing with which to begin, they were not, as a rule, highly sought-after bachelors. The second option: leave home, and seek their own fortunes.

It's simply incredible to read the family histories in British history like that presented by A. N. Wilson where a multi-million-dollar estate and title (in many cases) was inherited by the oldest brother, and the rest of the siblings received nothing.

It certainly explains a lot.