Vanity, Delirium, Folly, and Oblivion

What I read

Finished Poor Caroline which is one of those novels - ?I think they went on being a thing beyond the period when this was written? - where you have several ill-assorted people's stories through them being brought together through some reason cutting across their usual associations, in this case, via the eponymous Caroline who is a dotty and determined ageing spinster who is trying to set up a Christian film company. And everyone has their own motivations, and so on, which have little or nothing to do with any stated purpose. Not a top Holtby but has its moments.

Re-read of NK Jemisin, The City We Became (Great Cities, #1) (2020) and The World We Make (Great Cities #2) (2022) - slightly less whelmed by the first perhaps but still gripped by the second.

Started to re-read KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025) and realised why it had not made much impression upon me. Well off-form - clunky, sluggish and has a lot of one of my pet peeves, very distinctively of-the-present-day expressions and word-usage in a period setting. Decided not to continue.

On the go

Foluso Agbaje, The Talk of the Party (2026) a mystery/thriller about wealthy socialite family in Lagos. Just started.

Up next

Have not yet got to Literary Review.

Okay, maybe billionaires who can pay molto moolah for dinosaur skeletons have also invested in conservationally appropriate quarters to put them in, and they don't actually have them in wherever they receive company as a conversation piece?

Sale of multimillion-dollar T rex skeleton is big headache for scientists. Palaeontologists warn before auction at Sotheby’s in New York that super-rich collectors are harming research

And supposing - which is probably a bit of a reach anyway - that they give access to scientists to examine the bones -

Is that going to be once and done and nobody else gets a crack at it?

I'm just thinking of instances from my own sphere of historical documents, e.g. the scholar who was given privileged access to some private muniment, tough luck, subsequent scholars who want to check whether he actually transcribed the quotations correctly and got the dates right.

Or indeed, do New Research.

Dr Thomas Carr, a vertebrate palaeontologist and associate professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin, US, said it was not enough for private owners to allow scientists access to fossils.
“A private collection has no guarantee that a fossil will stay in a collection for all time, whereas a public trust’s mission is to maintain, conserve and curate its collection indefinitely,” he said. “Fossils need to be available to test previous observations and to make new insights; the fossils are the data so they must always be available for study.”
Museum loans were also problematic, Carr said. “The problem is that a privately owned fossil can be recalled from a museum at any moment back into an owner’s home, so the principles of availability and replicability are not guaranteed.”

Boy, did institutions start tightening up their agreements after that.

I do wonder, given the way people think that there is some Natural Way Of Childbirth that awful modern life has overridden and they need to get back to (yes, screaming), whether there is a similar kind of myth about the potent sperm of Men In The Past?

‘Spermageddon’: is the world facing a male reproductive crisis?

It's not just thinking of the levels of various kinds of STIs swilling around, it's the effects of all sorts of other diseases (MUMPS, for instance), and if you are going to going WO WO about chemicals and pollution, I think you might give some thought to the kinds of exposure to chemicals going on in unregulated workplaces, the pollution that generated the Smoke Abatement Society in 1890s, all of which we feel probably had some effect on the male reproductive system even before they started chugging those remedies full of arsenic, strychnine, etc, to boost their manliness.

Fifty springs are little room to make a definitive argument about changes in male reproductivity.

And on boosting MANLINESS, I was thoroughly boggled at this guy who was actually injecting GOLD, which honestly sounds like Ye Olde Alchemy, no?

Though those of us who read The Nun's Story may recall that she was given gold treatment for her TB, but it was very carefully managed.

I also read a murder mystery once in which the method was poisoning by gold (I think actually by some doc or pharmacist's leftover vials from that era) by an author who had form for unusual mostly poison methods (and not a lot of human interest).

I suppose people will never not be interested in the Mary Toft rabbit-birth case: this however is a somewhat different take born of going into a particular archive, Mary Toft and the Radical Birth Control Movement (an archive of which I have knowledge), though I am perhaps more interested that Griffith was asking Helena Wright to ask her side-piece, Kenneth Bruce MacFarlane, a distinguished historian, for reading recommendations. But that is because the ladies running that clinic, who were trying to make birth control a respectable cause were all into all sorts of what would now be considered polyamorous configurations.

(I will not advance my critiques from my personal knowledge of the birth control movement of the 20s and 30s....)

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Baptism record at Manchester Cathedral offers insight into Black Mancunian life in Georgian-era England:

When the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson gave a sermon in 1787 at Manchester Cathedral – during the city’s first mass meeting against the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans – he saw a “great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit”.
However, little is known about Black Mancunians in the Georgian era, which makes one recently rediscovered entry in parish records at Manchester Cathedral particularly significant.

The 6‑7 craze offered a brief window into the hidden world of children:

But as media scholars who study children’s culture, we didn’t view the meme with bewilderment or exasperation. Instead, we thought back to our own childhoods on three different continents – and all the secret languages we spoke.
....
With or without access to the internet, children will continue to transform language and games to suit their needs – which, yes, includes getting under the skin of adults.

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Not precisely 'history from below' - this was still the monarch's court, after all - but looking beyond the obvious players and how much there is to discover about them beyond the immediately apparent: Dwarfism, Institutionalisation and Marginalisation at the Court in Early Bourbon France:

I aim to demonstrate through my new Transactions article that a meticulous examination of archival sources can reveal far more about the lives and activities of people with dwarfism – and marginalised people in general – than the archive’s apparent silence initially suggests.
At the same time, I hope this study can serve as another example, alongside my book on Louis XIII’s court, of the rich potential in an approach to court studies that de-centres the monarch, his ministers and absolutism to better understand the court – its institutions and its culture – in its own right.

The man who invented the Tube: or rather, had the idea and campaigned for it, died shortly before the opening of the Metropolitan line, which may have something to do with his absence from the annals.