The umbrella

In a downpour such as yesterday afternoon’s one reaches for one’s umbrella. This was not always the case. As with so many other branches of social history and what is often these days called “material culture,” I am heartened to know that others have not merely shared my curiosity about the history of that most civilized accessory, but have trodden the stony path of research (much of it before the advent of the Internet) and produced fascinating histories of it. These include but are hardly limited to Ombrelle—le gant—le manchon, by Louis-Octave Uzanne (Paris: A. Quantin, 1883); the relevant portion of Die Mode: Menschen und Moden im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, by Max von Boehn (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1923); Der Schirm: Kulturhistorische Studie, by Elisabeth Moses (Cologne, 1924); The Umbrella, by A. Varron (Basle: Society of Chemical Industry, 1942); Der Schirm und die Maler, by Otto Brues (Cologne: [Jagra-Haus] Dr. Schmidt & Co. GmbH, 1952); A History of the Umbrella, by T. S. Crawford (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1970); Umbrellas and Parasols, by Jeremy Farrell (London: B. T. Batsford, 1985), and a collection of essays entitled Schirme: der Himmel auf Erden, edited by Claudia Bölling and Rolf Horst (Berlin: Transit, 1995). I am proud to have made my own very slight contribution, and would have been glad to go much further had such fertile ground not already been tilled so thoroughly. Alas, I daresay the need is simply no longer there. Most of the elements have been covered: the parasol from Goya to Seurat, Monet, and Renoir, and from Gignese and Mottarone to Copenhagen and St. Petersburg via Leghorn (Livorno) and Genoa; the liturgical umbrella from the Lateran mosaics to the Second Vatican Council, and from India to China and Japan; the royal umbrella from ancient Assyria through Byzantium to Burma; the umbrella in ancient Greece and Rome; the umbrella from Hokusai to Mary Poppins. The umbrella and effeminacy. The late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English gentleman’s correctly rolled umbrella as an emblem, as indeed the model of correctness itself. The hazards associated with raising umbrellas and parasols in a motor car, as distinct from a statelier open landau. The question as to whether frills or fringes with toggles are vulgar, and, if not, what is? The evolution of double-, triple-, even quadruple-decker ceremonial cloth-of-gold models in Thailand, in other words piling protection upon virtual protection in direct proportion to the stature of the royal person underneath. The umbrella merely as a useful method of representing in oil paintings the action of the wind, or the fall of light. The historical panorama is wide and magnificent. Parasols are especially interesting to me, for never has the need for them been greater than in the hottest climates today, and in the ones that are steadily getting hotter, yet they have more or less vanished. Together with folding screens, much of the land fill of western cities must consist of the defunct parasol, its brittle skeleton awaiting retrieval by future archaeologists. Occasionally you see people strolling with one on Fifth Avenue. But on the whole dark glasses and peaked caps would seem to have supplanted it, though of course Regency ladies doubled up with wide bonnets and parasols, finding ample opportunities to deploy both. In fact the history of the umbrella and other forms of canopy has far more to do with the provision of shade than protection from rain or drizzle. Perhaps the umbrella has so often flown under the radar of scholars of the decorative arts precisely because it was so ubiquitous, but nevertheless its long history embraces at different times carved handles or handles adorned with precious stones or enameled ornamentation, embroidery, painting, lace, paper, and intricate construction—for which nature provided numerous sources of inspiration: the bat’s wing, and certain leaves and feathers, to name but three.

A Room in Rome

There are some books that you know are awful the moment you begin reading, but others whose awfulness creeps up on you, opening gradually in other words like some vaguely threatening tropical orchid. Many years ago I bought A Room in Rome, by the late Vera Cacciatore, sometime curator of the Keats–Shelley Memorial House in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. This slim volume was evidently translated from the original Italian, C’era una stanza a Roma (1970), very probably by the author herself. It was not until I reached about page 9, on the train to Naples, that I realized I had chanced upon something special. The book begins innocuously enough:

The room in Rome is the room of John Keats. Though he lived in it for only three and a half months, from November 1820 to February 1821—it is still his room, the room of John Keats.

One can forgive, even celebrate, an opening flourish of this kind, involving a novel fusion of anaphora, epistrophe, and anadiplosis, even when it is immediately followed by:

This continuity evinces the magic and strength of Poetry, a proof that the past is always present and ready for a future and that the peculiarity of poetry is to transmute suffering into rest, fear into charm, the vagueness and shapelessness of desire into the ripeness of fulfillment.

However, when eventually I reached page 32, I had to conclude that Signora Cacciatore was laboring under the influence of mind-altering drugs—either in the composition phase, or whilst producing the translation, perhaps both. There is simply no other explanation:

He could not hear Fanny’s name uttered; he could not see Fanny Brawne’s name written. For a poet, the name is a spell. The name frees. The name is a handle to grasp. It is an object without weight; it is a form without an object. To see her name written would be more than I can bear. For a poet, the name is a noose too, the name ensnares, the name imprisons.

Likewise:

Shelley was very fond of Allegra, and, a fortnight after her death, as he was walking with his friend Edward Williams on the terrace of Casa Magni, he saw a naked child, a child very like Allegra, rise up from the sea, clapping her hands at him as if in joy. He often saw Allegra rising out of the sea in the moonlight and: “There it is again, there…” he would cry. Not only that: once he met the figure of himself walking on the terrace and the phantasm asked: “How long do you mean to be content?” Mary, his wife, thought them dreams, but Shelley would have none of it; he could not be persuaded that they were not walking visions. As a child, he was called mad Shelley…

The second half of the book is a selection of little snippets from the letters of Keats, entitled “When I am in a Room,” but here one misses Signora Cacciatore’s critical commentary, her gift for phrases that roll off the tongue like a brick, and a knack for conjuring images that linger in the mind long afterwards like marsh gas. That said, I have over the years become rather fond of Signora Cacciatore, and wish I could have had the opportunity to meet her in person. It was never to be. To me she will have to remain a name, a spell, a noose, a handle to grasp, or a form without an object.

No Turn Unstoned

This afternoon I have been nibbling at the delicate buds that seem forever to sprout afresh from the pages of one of my favorite books, a compilation of really terrible theatrical reviews entitled No Turn Unstoned. This was the patient editorial accomplishment of Dame Diana Rigg, and we are forever in her debt. Appearing as Ariel in The Tempest at the Old Vic in April 1954, for example, Robert Hardy, according to one reviewer, “postured throughout like a stone hat-stand in a Second Empire Turkish bath.” In All’s Well That Ends Well at Stratford-on-Avon in 1959, Dame Edith Evans played the Countess “in her characteristic later manner—tranquillized benevolence cascading from a great height, like royalty opening a bazaar.” In a 1977 production of The Apple Cart Penelope Keith played Orinthia “as though she has lost the last race at Goodwood.” In Ghosts, Dame Flora Robson “accepts the news of her son’s syphilis with the air of a district nurse facing an epidemic of sniffles.” “As swashbuckling Cyrano, Mr. [Edward] Woodward’s performance buckles more often than it swashes.” “Heralded by a sprinkling of glitter-dust and much laying on of microphones, Godspell is back in London at the Young Vic. For those who missed it the first time, this is your golden opportunity: you can miss it again.” America seems to have lost the will to create and distribute acid drops of this quality, at least since the death of Dorothy Parker. One reason why the review pages today read so noncommitally may be the unwelcome but inevitable prospect of costly litigation, but I think it much more likely that most critics just cannot now come up with remarks such as this, by Clive Barnes, in a review of Rose Marie by Harbach and Hammerstein (1960): “Only one joke was applauded: ‘We are all going into the fitting room to have a fit.’ This kind of brilliance was not sustained.” Or this by Milton Shulman on Glenda Jackson’s portrayal of Cleopatra in 1978: “Except for her final death scene with Antony, she gave me the impression that he didn’t really appeal to her.” Or the remark that I cannot now put my finger on, according to which a certain actor attacked his role gamely, “but what is gameness in a man who is suffering from delusions of adequacy?” I daresay American audiences, too, are rather less critical than they used to be. Not long ago I witnessed a performance of (inter alia) Chopin’s Waltz Brilliante for piano, opus 34, No. 1, in A flat major, by Lang Lang, and the wildness of the ovation with which that bouncy young man was greeted at the end made it seem as if the quality of his playing was at the very least a foregone conclusion. In fact, it was hard to imagine how any performance could be made to accommodate more freestanding gestures of unabashed vulgarity, or notes on the printed page stretched into such a sustained fit of cloying mannerism—as if Warner Brothers had entrusted Childe Harold to the care of Mel Blanc for Looney Tunes. However, I was obviously in a minority of one, so my mind turned immediately to W. A. Darlington’s memorable remark: “Richard Briers last night played Hamlet like a demented typewriter.”

The opal

The opal exerted considerable fascination over consumers in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, yet it was also encumbered by a superstition as stupid as it was evidently recent. Perhaps this dual preoccupation was no accident. The idea of cursed gemstones pried from the forehead or eye socket of potent heathen idols and temple deities of the mysterious East was powerfully reinforced by the publication of Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel The Moonstone, and curses in general were rich fodder for the press. Certainly a sinister evil was presumed to hover over the Orloff diamond, which belonged to Catherine the Great, and also Queen Victoria’s Koh-i-noor, though conveniently the curse of that diamond was said to apply only to male wearers. There is also the strange case of the Hope diamond, whose putatively malevolent power was exploited without shame by late-Victorian and Edwardian jewelers actually to hook successive owners, culminating with the limping Ohio mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean. Such superstitions were plainly bogus, and dealers, con-men, and journalists, at least the brighter ones, certainly knew it. Revolting statements about gemstones in general such as the following passage from The Great Diamonds of the World (1882), by the London jeweler Edwin W. Streeter, were nakedly self-serving in the sense that they aroused a measure of excitement—causing the general public to recoil, the better to make space for the hard-nosed but strangely pliable rich, as yet unencumbered by income or inheritance tax: “A symbol of power, the diamond has been a talisman of not less influence in the East than the very gods whose temples it has adorned. It has been the factor in tragedies innumerable, supplying the motives of war and rapine, setting father against son, blurring the fair image of virtue, making life a curse where it had been a blessing, and adding new terrors to death...” But what about the opal? As H. Kershaw Walker put it in 1904, “Whence has originated the superstition, now so widely spread, that the opal is unlucky and the cause of misfortune to the wearer?”

By the ancients it was held to exercise the combined virtues of the amethyst, ruby, and emerald, becoming moreover the type of Hope, Innocence, and Purity. Certainly its impaired reputation is not of long standing. [John] Brand, in his [Observations on the popular] Antiquities [of Great Britain, 1777], having collected together a large number of popular superstitions and beliefs, makes no reference to the opal. Even the gems alluded to are credited with good and benevolent characters. Of the turquoise an early English compiler says, “The Turkeys doth move when there is any peril prepared to him that weareth it” [Edward Fenton, Secrete Wonders of Nature, 1569, p. 51]. And again, “Corall bound to the neck takes off turbulent dreams and allays the nightly fears of children” [Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature, 1658, p. 391]. Apparently the only reason for the disparagement which the beautiful opal has suffered in modern times is found in chapter xi. of Anne of Geierstein [or, The Maiden of the Mist (1829) by Sir Walter Scott], and it must be said that it is wholly insufficient and quite ridiculous. (“A Chapter on Opals,” The Nineteenth Century, 56:311, September 1904, pp. 497–8.)

The author of an unsigned article in Chambers’s Journal (7:346, August 16, 1890, p. 524)  already pointed to Anne of Geierstein as the fons et origo of the opal superstition:

Sir Walter Scott must to a certain extent be made responsible for the bad odour in which the opal has found itself of late years. In Anne of Geierstein he alludes to the belief that the Mexican opal loses its beauty when exposed to the action of water, and puts this down to supernatural agency. Hence arose the idea that to wear an opal is the royal road to all manner of ill-luck, and that as a love-token the stone shows the continuance or decline of the giver’s affections in proportion as its colours are bright or clouded. Whenever its hues suddenly changed, misfortune of some kind or another was believed to be close at hand.

According to The London Journal (“A Foolish Superstition,” 22:560, September 8, 1894, p. 189):

The superstition about opals—that they bring ill-luck—dies hard. In fact, although Queen Victoria has taken a firm stand against it, and proves her position by making presents of opal jewelry to her friends and relatives, there are many who think that it is increasing.

I am not quite sure that by making gifts of opals to other people, and not necessarily wearing them so much herself, the Queen’s stand was necessarily proven—but let us assume that in this respect Her Majesty acted with the usual mixture of common sense and determination. Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary certainly also managed to suppress any such misgivings about wearing large, often huge diamonds. In any event, Chambers’s point about the discernible change in hue is interesting because we have long known that opals do indeed respond to extreme and sometimes relatively slight fluctuations in temperature, but more recently they have also been found to be sensitive to light in much the same way that watercolors fade as a consequence of over-exposure. This was proven lately when an opal was removed from its setting, and the edge of the stone, long covered up by the silver setting, was found to be markedly more vivid in hue than the rest of the stone. Museums therefore now display opals as if they were works on paper. So if you wear one, be sure to stay out of the sun.

The Gum-tree leaf

This brief note was addressed from Government House in Sydney to my great-grandmother Sophie Pearson by Lady Mary Lygon (1869–1927), who was a lady of the bedchamber to H.R.H. The Duchess of Cornwall and York. In May 1901, the Duke and Duchess (the future King George V and Queen Mary, the present Queen’s grandparents) visited Australia to represent King Edward at the inauguration of the new federal Parliament in Melbourne, and soon afterwards the Duke visited Kilmany Park for some shooting. The royal excursion was dreamed up by my great-grandfather’s friend Chief Justice Sir John Madden, who was at that time acting governor of Victoria, and responsible therefore for all the local arrangements. Lady Mary’s note still lives in a little bundle that consists of Sir John’s increasingly restive letters from Melbourne to my great-grandfather in advance of the visit, seeking (inter alia) firm assurances that there would be enough game birds to keep the Duke fully occupied on his day at Kilmany, and that there would be sufficient traps and buggies to convey the royal party safely to and from the special train at Sale, etc. In the end everything went swimmingly, and the Duke spent the whole day slaughtering anything with a pulse that was not human, even during afternoon tea. Afterwards my great-grandmother must have written to thank the duchess for the signed photographs that the duke presented to her at the end of the day—I still have those—presumably enclosing the “painted Gum-tree leaf” to which Lady Mary refers. Some years ago I wondered if by any chance that whimsical gift, a thoughtful souvenir of East Gippsland, might still be preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor, and made a discreet inquiry to the excellent Pam Clark. Mindful of Queen Mary’s enthusiasm as a collector of objets d’art, I thought this distinctly possible although it is true that an East Gippsland gum-tree leaf might not have enjoyed the same prominence as, for example, a carefully selected miniature hardstone animal with ruby eyes from the House of Fabergé. Still, perhaps it could have been tucked away in a little cabinet containing various other intercolonial bits and bobs at White Lodge or Frogmore? Alas, there was at that time no discernible trace of it. However, I have an inkling that some day, perhaps decades or even centuries from now, some unsuspecting reader will open an exquisite volume bound in morocco leather, perhaps stamped with the Princess’s monogram, and out will fall that painted gum leaf, perfectly preserved—the ideal page marker. If that should happen, I fervently hope that Google will by then be so powerful, even omniscient, that the responsible librarian will without a moment’s delay find her way to this page and simply join the dots. The notepaper is edged in black, of course, because the Court and therefore all vice-regal households throughout the empire were still in deep mourning for Queen Victoria.

Quid tum?

The Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press in Britain surely challenges any reasonable listener not to fall into a pit of despair. The worst excesses of the tabloid press, many of them criminal in character, prompt the question: Is this the point to which public discourse in the United Kingdom has sunk? Is this what we have become—since you could argue that the press merely holds up a mirror in which we see our corporate self? Is this in fact an eerie rehearsal of The Picture of Dorian Gray? How did this happen? Quid tum?

Historical perspective will help us here. 100 years ago, the tabloids served a particular function, of which current titles retain a sort of perverted remnant, that is, charging to the defense of the defenseless, often bravely. Today this would appear to provide the tabloids with some twisted justification for running various hypocritical shock-horror exposés of marital infidelity, et cetera, but, of course, 100 years ago British working people were far more defenseless than they are now, and handicapped by corresponding measures of incarceration by virtue of class, implicit trust in authority, and a degree of whole-of-population gullibility that created a pressing need for documents such as the “Truth” Cautionary List for 1910. This useful publication was designed above all to arm servant girls and young widows against the predatory activities of “thieves, blackmailers, swindlers, rogues, imposters, and other dishonest persons.”

Running to 715 carefully drafted entries spreading over 128 dense pages, the “Truth” Cautionary List for 1910 is a fascinating compendium of Edwardian crimes specifically and cruelly directed towards the poor, the ignorant, and the credulous. These include but are by no means limited to fake religious subscription-hunters and charity-mongers; fraudulent begging-letter writers; medical, dental, and ophthalmological quacks; betting agents, touting tipsters and peddlers of secret gambling “systems” or non-existent continental lotteries; bucket-shop and wild-cat company schemers and “sixpence-a-share” fraudsters; home-employment tricksters; sinister emigration agents, “white slavers,” or “foreign relative” swindlers; vicious money-lenders who often used strong-arm tactics, or worse; bogus biographical dictionary compilers; tallymen, or purveyors of worthless jewels; trick advertisers of every conceivable description; “gold-brick” schemers generally targeting inexperienced executrixes; “luggage-in-advance” and “railway-lost-property” con-men; fee-snatchers; fake premium bond peddlers; fake insurers; fake mediums; fake cancer-curers; fake debt-collectors, and offerers of fake legal aid—fake, fake, fake: fake everything.

This appalling vision of deceit and depredation was merely a colossal development of the criminal underworld of Dickens into the era of new technologies that above all transformed effective communication. While it would be naive to ignore the fact that the proprietors of Truth profited handsomely from the price of 1s. 1½d. per copy, and from the revenue from the sale of many advertisements scattered through its pages, still the Cautionary List for 1910 obviously filled a social need, for the scale of fraud and exploitation appears to have been far beyond the capacity of Scotland Yard or the Crown Prosecution Service to crush it on their own. Indeed many of the schemes Truth identified are depressingly familiar to us in the current form of disembodied spam—“Dearest one in Christ”—but unlike those, which lurk behind an impregnable façade of anonymity, Truth named names, disentangled aliases, furnished addresses, described in plain language the exact nature of the imposture, and the tactics directed toward the victims, and in several cases successfully defended their detailed allegations in courts of law.

If this were still the ideal, or even just the basic purpose, to which the tabloid press aspired today one would be a little more sympathetic with what they generally describe as their “campaigns” on particular issues, but unfortunately by their nakedly illegal conduct (while cowardly sheltering behind the idea of the freedom of the press) they have forfeited any claim to act in the public interest, so the unenviable task of Lord Justice Leveson is to go back to the question quid tum?—so what? or what next?—and figure out how on earth to clean up the mess. If anything at all has come out of all this, other than filth and the revelation of widespread criminality, it is the fact that self-regulation by the media is a terribly bad joke.

Recreations in Who's Who

These days most people either do not have enough imagination or spare time or superabundant creativity to list recreations in their entries for Who’s Who that stray far beyond walking, reading, tennis, or golf—if they bother to list them at all. Others indulge that irritating habit of using their entries as an opportunity to insert a tedious little joke. Naturally in both respects, as in all others, the Edwardians tease and delight us by going much further in the same directions. In his “The Recreations of Distinguished people” (Temple Bar, 127:507, February 1903, pp. 208–16), Charles I. Graham selected from the 1902 edition what he then regarded as some of “the most interesting pieces of information afforded by this most interesting book”:

Dr. T. L. Cuyler, for instance, states that “fifty-two years of active life in such perfect health have been his as to need no recreations”; yet, he adds, “except walking, and entertainment-reading, and talk”—a liberal exception after all. Mr. Nicholas D. Davis, auditor-general of British Guiana, tells us that “he knocks off work to carry bricks”…and that his peculiar form of recreation also consists in “historical researches relating to English colonization in America.” This is something like the answer given by William Montgomery Crook, editor of the Echo, who looks on “politics” as part of his recreation. It is indeed difficult to conceive how men’s recreations can, in any true sense, lie so close to their daily work. Of course, if a man has changed his calling as life goes on we can understand how his recreation may consist in resuming somewhat of his earlier tasks, as when Dr. J. B. Crozier, now philosopher and historian, tells us that his recreations are “skating, boxing, dog-fancying, swimming, walking, and attending the practice of the special hospitals.”…

            It is not always the really greatest who indulge in peculiar forms of recreation. Neither [Field Marshal] Lord Roberts [of Kandahar] nor [Lieutenant-General] Lord Kitchener [of Khartoum] is eccentric when at play. Lord Roberts simply states that he hunts and bicycles; Lord Kitchener apparently ignores the question. It does not need a reference to Who’s Who to inform us that the present prime minister’s recreation is golf [the Right Hon. Arthur Balfour, M.P.], nor that of the late prime minister (Lord Salisbury) natural science…

            But to come to some of the more extraordinary answers given to this question, What is your recreation? Surely a man must have no recreation proper who tells us, as Lieutenant-General J. W. Laurie, D.C.L. and M.P., does, that he finds it thus: “Member of Governing Body of City and Guilds Institutes; agriculture, breeder of thorough-bred stock, and personal supervision of an experimental farm; also of children settled in Canada from Mrs. Birt’s Home at Liverpool.” Side by side with which we may place, “maker and patentee of the Sleepy Hollow chair,” which the Dean of Ely (Dr. Stubbs) mentions as his form of recreation.

Graham continues at length in this vein, but I must say that my favorites are the following, quoted in no particular order:

Mr. G. R. Sims: “Battledore and shuttlecock,” pointedly not Badminton.

The Reverend E. J. Hardy, chaplain to H.M. Forces, “Riding his horse ‘Baby,’ or her assistant, Curate, as he calls his bicycle; talking to soldiers; taking a sunbath; thinking of the queer things of life; swimming, golf.”

H.S.H. The Duke of Teck, brother of the Princess of Wales, the future Queen Mary: “A little of all.”

Mr. Charles Williams, senior military correspondent of the Daily Chronicle: “Ritual.”

Mrs. Crawford, Paris correspondent of the Daily News: “Moon- and star-gazing when resting on oars in the country; was in youth devoted to reading, chess-playing, and pictorial art; likes now a quiet rubber of whist; hardly ever knows what tedium is; is a constantly interested observer of animated nature; has found real life so interesting that novels and plays seem flat; roughed it in the [Franco-Prussian] war of 1870, and during the Commune, and feels thankful for the education thus acquired.”

William Hall, V.C., R.N., farmer of Nova Scotia: “Shooting crows.”

Sir Henry Irving, actor: “Acting.”

Lord Baden-Powell: “Pig-sticking (winner of Kadir Cup), polo, big game shooting, hunting, yachting, stage-managing, acting, and singing, painting, etching.”

The Countess of Galloway: “The musical drama of Bayreuth at Bayreuth.”

The Most Reverend Richard Whately, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin: “The boomerang.”

Madame Janotha, court pianiste to H.I.M. the German Emperor: “Visiting the chapel of our Blessed Lady at Czestochowa [her place of birth in Poland]. Playing the organ, reading great works, mountaineering, taking care care of White Heather (the black cat).”

George Chetwynd Griffith: “Loafing and traveling; has been five times and a half round the world; once across the Rockies, thrice over the Andes (treasures a pipe smoked at 19,300 feet above sea-level), three times round the Horn, once in the Antarctic ice; has also flown in a balloon from London to the field of Agincourt; at present wandering through Australasia and Oceania to see how they look twenty years after.”

 

Emily Soldene, singer, actress, director, theater manager, novelist, and journalist: “An ocean voyage, plain sewing, and building castles in Spain.”

Dame Clara Butt, contralto: “Signing autographs and photographs.”

The Reverend Canon William Benham: “Riding on the knife-boards of omnibuses.”

Dr. Paul Mantegazza: “Je me suis marié à 25 ans à Salta dans la République Argentine avec une jeune demoiselle de haute famille et j’en ai eu cinq enfants, et une seconde fois à 60 ans avec une jeune comtesse de Florence et j’en ai une petite fille qui a maintenant sept ans.”

Colonel William Carey, C.B.: “Reconnoitering country with a view to military maneuvers in peace and war; study of scripture as literally carried out in the present day in its political aspects; deep sea diving.”

Badminton

According to last week’s Spectator, the game of Badminton is “the pâté de foie gras of Olympic sports.” That was before the game-throwing scandal was exposed in London, and those Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian players disqualified. If the delicate, cork-and-goose-feather shuttlecock once floated back and forth over nets suspended in arbors, conservatories or on wide verandahs, affording much enjoyment to her ladyship, the colonel, and their guests, it is now propelled with grim menace by pairs of muscularly perspiring Amazons either locked in mortal combat, or else prepared clumsily to dump a match. The idea of disqualification for fraudulent conduct in the game of Badminton would surely have struck Victorian ladies and gentlemen as the height of improbability, but there it is. However, I am concerned here with the origins of the game. The Spectator goes on to state that Badminton was “invented in India by the British army, and brought back to Blighty in 1873 at a party given by the Duke of Beaufort at his country estate, hence the name.” Something about this struck an inauthentic note, so I checked. Sure enough, this claim is squarely contradicted by the Oxford English Dictionary in the article on badminton, n., and in suspiciously proximate language: “A popular tradition about the origins of the modern game, according to which it is said to have been developed by British army officers in India, and to have been so named after a version of the game which was played at Badminton House in 1873 by officers on leave, is not borne out by the evidence, although versions of the game were popular among the British in India by 1873.” (Unambiguous citations of shuttlecock, n., meanwhile, extend helpfully all the way back to the sixteenth century.) According to the Academy (226, September 2, 1876, p. 233), “Shuttlecock tennis [also known as battledore and shuttlecock] was probably played in some form or other in many private houses long before it received the meaningless or misleading name of “Badminton,” but if we go back two centuries or so we find it played also sometimes in tennis courts; so that this, as well as the ball-out-door-game [of tennis], is a revival, not an invention.” For some reason the issue must have been topical in September 1876, because according to the unsigned article “Varieties” that appeared a few weeks later in The Leisure Hour (1135, September 27, 1873, p. 624), “the game of battledore and shuttlecock is becoming popular in certain high circles of society, where it is known as ‘Badminton.’” Battledore and shuttlecock was certainly commonplace in England by 1852, when the following brief notice about a book for young people entitled The Heiress in her Minority [apparently a work by the notable political economist Jane Marcet] appeared in the Athenaeum (1266, January 31, 1852, p. 150):

On the whole, the book is a small, readable, compressed cyclopaedia, with a copious index and distinct chapter headings—a very mine for youth, and a happy anodyne for the restless hours of a wet day in a country house, when “bat and ball” are forbidden, the skipping-rope is laid aside, and les graces, battledore and shuttlecock, archery, and other amusements of the same genus are impossible.

However, the name badminton was certainly in use by 1863, though apparently not yet so widespread as to remove the need for explanation, because in December of that year an article entitled “Life in a Country House” (The Cornhill Magazine, 8:48, p. 711) stated:

After lunch, everybody is expected to hold themselves at the disposal of the lady of the house, for a ride, drive, or walk, as the case may be. If the weather be such as to induce you to remain within doors, your co-operation will be sought for a game at pool, badminton (which is battledore and shuttlecock played with sides, across a string suspended some five feet from the ground), and similar amusements.

Be that as it may, one of the more depressing things about Olympic sports is that they are in nature obviously about as distant from “amusements” as it is possible to be, so one wonders how corruption in Badminton will ever be eliminated. I daresay a Badminton doping scandal is not an inconceivable prospect.

The fan

In 1904 the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia purchased as a gift for her sister, Queen Alexandra, a fan composed of two-color gold, guilloché enamel, mother-of-pearl, gold sequins, silk, cabochon rubies, and rose diamonds from the House of Fabergé in Saint Petersburg. The Empress paid 325 rubles for it. At the published rates of exchange for January 1904, this was almost exactly the same as £13 7s (The Times, February 17, 1904, p. 13) or $64.25 (New York Times, January 3, 1904, p. 7). Today there are many online tools designed to calculate the equivalent of these prices in 2012, and all are based on formulas of varying degrees of complexity according to which essentially two sets of data—(a) prices (consumer goods, rent, stocks, bonds, gold, tariffs, etc.) and (b) earnings (salaries, wages, fees, charges, interest rates, etc.) are assembled and then indexed or adjusted in the light of annual inflation or depreciation, cyclical change, and a host of economic variables that obviously alter the value of money over time. Of these tools, and there are many, perhaps the most finely calibrated and reliable is the U.S. Department of Labor’s so-called Consumer Price Index, which is now nearly 100 years old. Between January 1913 and January 2012 this rose from 9.8 to 226.665, an aggregate increase of 2,212.9%. Upon that basis alone—and not taking into account any number of other factors that are uniquely applicable to the art of the eventailliste or fan-maker, or indeed the House of Fabergé, such as the economy of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, the fluctuating exchange rate of the ruble to the pound sterling, the scarcity of specialist skills of enriching and decoration, the availability of tortoise-shell, fine lace-making, etc.—today’s price for the fan ought to be in the vicinity of £295 or $1,422. And this is where we strike our principal problem, because it does not take an economic historian to grasp that in the context of today’s luxury goods business, in which a pair of Christian Louboutin high-heeled shoes now retails at Barney’s in New York for $795, the price tag of £295 for the fan is peanuts. One can account for this anomaly in various ways, but a keener elucidation of the original £13 7s will always take us back to plotting its equivalents in other 1904 wages and salaries on the one hand and/or costs and prices on the other.

Accordingly, the sum of £13 7s was roughly 2.78% of the yearly earnings of a London barrister; 3.37% of a Harley Street physician’s; 6.47% of a Church of England clergyman’s; 7.84% of a middle-ranking army officer’s; a clerk in the civil service: 11.49%; a carpenter: 11.9%; a lady typist in the civil service: 16.87%; an unskilled male laborer 24.45%; a seasonal agricultural worker 27.77%, and a poor married woman who took in sewing as and when she could: 51.34%. These hard numbers are derived from the testimony of real people, and are set out in John Burnett’s fascinating A History of the Cost of Living in England from the Middle Ages to the 1960s, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, pp. 268–278, 298–301). Let us look a little more closely at the example of the London barrister. If we assume that a reasonably all-right London barrister now earns approximately £200,000 per annum (in many cases this is demonstrably conservative), it will be found that the CPI-adjusted price of £295 for the fan is only 0.1475% of his or her yearly earnings. On the other hand, if, as in 1904, the Dowager Empress’s fan today cost the equivalent of 2.78% of our barrister’s annual income, the price would be a great deal higher, approximately £5,560—so we are obliged to tear up the CPI. Incidentally, I would argue that this steeper sum is much nearer the mark because of the enormous increase in the price of gold and precious stones, and of the steady rise in the cost and scarcity of highly skilled artisanal labor—which we can assume is probably beyond the remit of the CPI. Thus the fan might easily now cost £20,000 or more. In any case tortoiseshell is critically endangered and permanently removed from the luxury goods menu, so the case is entirely academic. Indeed what was once a useful personal accessory has by historical slight of hand turned into a work of art, and thus migrated into a completely different market with its own completely different and rather more volatile criteria of value, but that is another story.

            Returning to the solid 1904 fan benchmark of 325 rubles and £13 7s, let us assemble a few more comparisons. That sum was in 1904 the same as 44 weeks’ rent for a three-room flat in an East London tenement; one sixteenth of the price of a brand new Humberette motor car; roughly a quarter of the price of a good-quality saddle, or a third of that of a gig or jinker harness; the cost of 76 bottles of whisky or 200 lbs. of loose tea or 229 lbs. of Danish butter or 427 lbs. of British (and not colonial) beef; a fraction less than two years’ supply of coal and firewood for a working-class family; 178 two-ounce flasks of mastic varnish; 97 yards of best quality, 27 inch-wide artists’ Spanish linen canvas; three evenings’ entertainment in the best private box at the Hippodrome; two-thirds of the cost of an exotic hothouse shower bouquet from one of the better Mayfair Court florists; 1,780 copies of The Times newspaper (one a day for four years and nine months); about a quarter of the price of a first class ticket from Southampton to Melbourne via the Cape of Good Hope and Natal aboard a Blue Anchor Line steamer; 0.13% of the value of the estate of Alfred Wiggs, an industrious London builder, which was granted probate on January 12, 1904. Even if you could locate and defend an equivalent of any one of these comparisons today (which is doubtful), you would assemble a wide range of theoretical prices for the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna’s fan that differ sharply from the CPI adjusted figure of £295, in other words a spectrum so wide as to be entirely useless. Note also that by their particularity these comparisons form a picture that is unique to 1904, and are bound to shuffle out of alignment in any other year. The quest for relative historical value is, in this sense, fruitless—tools or no tools. However, the exercise can be suggestive. Perhaps the most revealing point of comparison is the prices of food. Today at Waitrose online, for example, 76 bottles of Johnny Walker black label whisky cost £2,155; 200 lbs. of loose Twinings English breakfast tea £1,420; 229 lbs. of Danish butter £366.40, and 427 lbs. of British beef a staggering £11,951, although that is for rump steak at a high-end premium, so a more accurate figure ought to be considerably less than that, say £5,000 wholesale, or for lesser cuts. Therefore the best that we can say is that over the past 100 years the London fan to butter index has evolved in a relatively orderly manner, but that the fan to tea, fan to whisky, and, above all, the fan to beef indices have gone berzerk. All have outstripped the CPI by some considerable margin, which no doubt says something about the evolving cost of the most expensive food in the developed economies, but rather less about high-end fans. Such are the pleasures and frustrations experienced by the economic historian straying into the world of art, but more properly by the art historian or museum curator seeking in vain the aid of economic history in his quest for relative values. And now I must take out the rubbish.

Burne-Jones in Australia

I am always surprised and occasionally delighted by what found its way into the columns of the comparatively enormous number of well-written nineteenth-century Australian newspapers. This was, it seems to me, not often the result of any formal processes of syndication flowing from the imperial capital to distant colonies. It was far more probably the fruit of desperate cherry-picking by single-handed editors industriously toiling under deadline, and referring to a stack of six month-old London weeklies near at hand. For example, the following excerpt of an article in the Fortnightly Review about Edward Burne-Jones by the eighth Duke of Marlborough appeared in the Brisbane Courier on Monday, January 2, 1893, on page 6. There are numerous points of emphasis that alert one to the existence of a completely alien ordering of what we would probably call “cultural priorities,” above all the recurring sense of going head to head with German art more, say, than French or Italian, but also the telling concentration upon Burne-Jones’s brilliance as a colorist; the pairing of Corot (famous) with Hook (now almost completely forgotten); the use of an analogy built upon the accepted notion that mid-Victorian legal Latin usage was stylistically terrible; and the crazy idea that Lorenzo de’ Medici would have understood Wagner, but been scandalized by Leighton. True, this is the Duke of Marlborough speaking, so a margin of comprehensibility (or otherwise) was presumably dictated by the effects of compression produced by the House of Lords Robing Room, White’s, or Badminton. Still, I wonder what on earth they made of all this at the height of the wet season on the soggy verandahs of New Farm, Paddington, or Sandgate:

A FUTURE SCHOOL OF ENGLISH ART

The late [George Charles Spencer-Churchill, eighth] Duke of Marlborough affirmed we are not without an interpreter of the spirit of the school of mediæval romance. In the Fortnightly Review he says:—“The greatest living painter of this school, and perhaps of any other in this field of romance, is undoubtedly Mr. Burne Jones. The public may not be aware of the quiet retiring prophet who is living in their midst, and who can reproduce on canvas this field of conception. Were it this alone that Mr. Burne Jones represents he would not be destined to become the founder of a great English school of thought and realization. Others have tried to tread this road and have made no perceptible mark on public taste. With Mr. Burne Jones it will be different. He has imparted the sacred fire of dramatic instinct into all his works, and with it all a laborious and patient technique of the most refined character. His scheme of color is a revelation to this age. Let the merest tyro in pictures see a work of his hanging in a gallery by the side of one by any other artist; his work stands out solid and brilliant, with beautifully selected tones such as an old fifteenth-century German artist might have been proud of. Such pictures, too, will last. No vanishing into the canvas here. The intense delicacy and refinement of his art does not depend solely on his choice of composition. Other artists, such as Mr. [Alma-]Tadema, have cultivated archaeology, and some of these compositions as such are most beautiful and scholarly. The qualities whereby Mr. Burne Jones will live are his scheme of color and the infinite pains he has given to everything he has produced. He has, in his work, the serious purpose of an early German or Italian, together with the instinctive love of a poet for the whole field of chivalry and romance. He gives us just sufficient of the nineteenth century daintiness to render his work delightful to all beholders or possessors of his pictures. I bring this instance of a great artist forward with due humility for venturing to praise him. To me he is the Wagner of modern painting, and, in the truest sense of the word, a great artist whom England maybe proud of. I have seen nothing in any other country which bears any resemblance to his work. Neither France nor Germany has attained his power of color or mastery of design. You may say, my reader, that you do not understand this form of art. So it was with Wagner in music. Yet you may thank the Fates that you lived in an age when you could hear the mystic rhythm of the Lohengrin and the grand epic of the Siegfried and the Tristan und Isolde. It is not given to all of us to understand these things, and there will always be an exoteric and an esoteric school in art. The Egyptian priests alone understood the drama. For the rest of the world comedy is sufficient. A Lorenzo de’ Medici would have understood Wagner. He would have also understood Burne Jones. He would not have understood [Jean-Baptiste-Camille] Corot or [James Clarke] Hook, while Sir Frederic Leighton would have shocked him, as much as some of our celebrated Judges and professors of the last generation would have shocked Cicero or Tacitus if they had recited to these eminent Roman writers any of their Latin prose and poetry.”