It's Always More Complicated

Dept, Mr Badger against the golfers (don't we think Toad must have had a golfing phase?): Why badgers are digging up Britain’s lovingly maintained golf courses.

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Dept, Price of Everything, Value of Nothing: One of UK’s best fossil collections sold overseas in ‘loss to the nation’. One is not entirely missing the irony of 'one of the most important collections of fossils ever made on the world-famous Jurassic Coast of Dorset' ending up in Abu Dhabi. Private collector's collection....

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Dept, sort of fossils? Tudor survivals in and around London: The Complete Tudor. Part 1: Central London, The Complete Tudor Part 2: Tudor Buildings Beyond Central London.

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Dept, slaying zombie law: Repeal of the 1824 Vagrancy Act – finally! - this was one of the laws which was used, although sex-work was itself not illegal, to harry women engaging in, or suspected of engaging in, street prostitution.

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Dept, no, it IS more complicated: Variations in sex characteristics (VSC): experiences of life in the UK for people with VSC and those who care for them.

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Dept, tempting to say 'how could they tell?': ‘Of unsound mind’? MPs, mental health and the 1886 Lunacy (Vacating of Seats) Act.

Endangered Greek dialect is ‘living bridge’ to ancient world, researchers say:

An endangered form of Greek that is spoken by only a few thousand people in remote mountain villages of northern Turkey has been described as a “living bridge” to the ancient world, after researchers identified characteristics that have more in common with the language of Homer than with modern Greek. The precise number of speakers of Romeyka is hard to quantify. It has no written form, but has survived orally in the mountain villages around Trabzon*, near the Black Sea coast. With its remaining speakers ageing, the dialect is now threatened with extinction, leading a University of Cambridge academic to launch a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record its unique linguistic structures before it is too late.

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Okay, this is Humour: It's that time of year when we carry out our annual manuscripts weigh-in:

In keeping with tradition, teams work overnight to weigh every manuscript in our collection. They then compare the results with the famous table compiled by Sir Horace Round (after whom the British Museum Round Reading Room was named). This enables scholars worldwide to embellish their papers with little-known facts that no-one could possibly verify, along the lines 'the Luttrell Psalter weighs as much as next door's dog'.
Here are some results from this year's survey. Note: manuscripts tend to gain an extra gram or two during Leap Years.
- The Bedford Hours, a masterpiece of 15th-century Parisian illumination: 9.0114 kg, or the same as a baby Pygmy Hippo (unwashed)

Kew Gardens blog: Uncovering our oldest specimen and the poisonous scandal behind its collector:

Unfortunately, Browne’s medical career did not proceed as smoothly as his botanical one. In 1693, he was at the centre of a poisoning scandal when James Wheeler, a member of the governing council of Fort St George, died after treatment under his care. Wheeler fell ill having been given medication ground in the same mortar in which arsenic had been prepared for another patient. Even though the medicine had been compounded by his assistant, Browne confessed to murder and went on trial, but was acquitted. His troubles did not stop there. In 1695, he was arrested for drunkenly challenging another former EIC surgeon to duel and two years later he was fined for robbing and attacking a Mughal customs official.

She was a leading patron of the natural sciences, with an extensive natural history collection of her own, and she hosted leading scientific figures at her grand house in Buckinghamshire, including Sir Joseph Banks, who became Kew's first unofficial director on his return from the travelling the South Seas with Captain Cook.

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Yorkshire estate known as world’s first nature reserve gets Grade II listing:

A Yorkshire parkland regarded as the world’s first nature reserve – which was created by an eccentric pioneering 19th-century environmentalist – has been given a Grade II listing. Historic England said Waterton Park, near Wakefield, was the earliest known example of a landscape designed specifically to attract and protect native wildlife. It was created by Charles Waterton, who is as interesting as the land he transformed.
....
Yet his contemporaries often thought him eccentric for the way he managed his estate, such as his decisions to ban shooting on his land and to invite members of the public to visit it for free. Asylum patients were welcomed as part of their treatment.

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Not so much relevant to my interests as, I have been muttering about this for a very long time myself ahem ahem: review of Amy Milne-Smith. Out of His Mind: Masculinity and Mental Illness in Victorian Britain:

[T]urns attention to "madmen in the attic" during the period from 1845 until the First World War.... seeks to address a "lopsided" historiography that has tended to concentrate on madness among Victorian women (p. 5). Although women did tend to outnumber men in public asylums at any given time, this did not represent "a plague of women being locked away by a misogynistic culture" (p. 26). The fact that women tended to live longer meant that they might linger within the asylum, while male patients dominated military and criminal institutions.

This put a different spin on Lonely Goatherd for me: Old Irish goats return to County Dublin to protect hills from wildfires:

Jeuken, 31, had an edge: she ran her own herd on her family farm, earning the nickname “the goat lady”. Last year she graduated as a veterinary nurse. She spent a few weeks at Mulranny getting to know the Old Irish goats, and letting them get to know her, before their move to Dublin. Trust is key. Unlike sheep, which can be driven forward, goats will only follow, so the herder must walk ahead, said Jeuken. “They’re a bit sexist: they respond better to females than males.”

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Former colleague on amazing things you can discover from the stuff you might usually discard: Archive Treasures: Travel and travails - musicians on the road in 1950:

One of the joys of the Britten Pears archive is the light it sheds on everyday practicalities, the nuts and bolts of Britten and Pears’ life and careers together. The financial papers in the collection are a rich source for this: as self-employed men Britten and Pears had to keep evidence of purchases and earnings in case their annual tax returns were audited, and the receipts that they retained for this purpose flesh out their lives in remarkable detail.
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Those receipts reveal another of the fascinations of this documentation: peeling back the little sticker on the bill that notes that it was settled up by Pears, we see that the occupants of Room 51 are given as Messrs Britten and Pears. Presumably this was a twin room rather than a double, but nonetheless this is an indication of how their travelling as professional partners allowed them to share a room as personal partners also.

Women's stories: what do we miss by focusing on the successful pioneers? The Forgotten Life of Annie Reay Barker, M.D:

Annie Reay Barker (1851–1945) was a medical pioneer who was amongst the first women to qualify as a doctor in the late nineteenth century. Unlike other medical women of her time, Barker did not attract notable attention or publicity, therefore little has been written about her personal and professional life. Following a successful, yet tragically short-lived, career at the Birmingham and Midland Hospital for Women, Barker was committed to Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water with a diagnosis of ‘Chronic Mania’. Barker’s story sheds new light on the pressures placed on early women doctors to succeed, as well as the troubled internal dynamics of this pioneering group of women.

Brutally Suppressed in Her Lifetime, Gertrude Beasley Is Finally on Our Bookshelves: A searingly feminist 1925 memoir of life in small-town Texas rises from the dustbin of patriarchy.

For almost a century in Texas literary circles, Gertrude Beasley’s 1925 memoir My First Thirty Years has been more a legend than a book. Although it was published to a favorable review in the New Yorker and high praise from both preeminent American literary critic H. L. Mencken (“the first genuinely realistic picture of the Southern poor white trash”) and British Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell (“truthful, which is illegal”), the book was quickly banned in the U.S. and Britain and remained almost unobtainable for decades. The tangled history of My First Thirty Years, and Beasley’s horrific personal fate, are case studies in society’s merciless treatment of women of her era who gave voice to socially unspeakable truths.

In her will, MRD left… 'my botanical collection of dried plants and my paintings of them my collection of seaweeds and my paintings of fungi to the Hancock Museum Newcastle upon Tyne as well as any other articles of mine of scientific interest which the Committee of the Museum may choose to accept'.

I did know about this researcher, but I would, wouldn't I: Why We Should Recognize Dr. Katharine Bement Davis Alongside Dr. Alfred Kinsey as a Pioneering Sex Researcher:

Davis’s pathbreaking study of female sexuality and her founding membership in the nation’s first committee for the study of sex made her a pioneering sexologist, but her desire to “put sex on the scientific map” also caused her to lose her job—and ultimately led to her erasure from the official annals of the Rockefeller Foundation. Gender discrimination, as well as disagreement over the aims of the organization, also played an important role in Davis’s downfall, as her male colleagues, who had long resented her leadership, used Davis’s most innovative ideas against her.

And the formerly immensely famous women who just slip out of history...: Joanna Baillie's

contemporaries placed her above all women poets except Sappho. According to Harriet Martineau she had 'enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and … been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare'.... But even when Martineau met her, in the 1830s, that fame seemed to belong to a bygone era. There were no revivals of her plays in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; and yet, as psychological studies, her tragedies would seem very suited to the intimacy of television or film. Twentieth-century scholars have recognized her importance as an innovator on the stage and as a dramatic theorist, and revisionary critics and literary historians of the Romantic period concerned to reassess the place of women writers are acknowledging her significance.

This morning I had a text to say my new glasses had arrived at the opticians, so this afternoon I went down to Oxford Street to collect them: and was exhorted by the person fitting them that I should not wear them home, as I would still be adjusting. This made me suspect that they had recently had somebody in their nice new glasses fall down the stairs (the opticians dept being on the first floor).

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I realise that there are whole swathes of the oeuvre of HG Wells with which very few people are acquainted, and indeed, the titles of which will not be known to the generality (he wrote a hell of a lot, really). So Christina Alberta's Father (1925) will not ring bells with many people. In fact I only read it myself because I had come across it in the context of it being Wells's Lunacy-Law-Reform novel, which in some respects it is.

There is an account of it here, by Adam Roberts, who set himself the task of reading and blogging Wells' entire output.

But when I saw that there was some alt-right person whose nom-de-pixel is Sargon, currently cosying up to UKIP, I could not help but snigger a little, because in the novel it is Sargon the Great whom the pathetic dreamer Mr Preemby becomes convinced that he is the reincarnation of, a delusion that leads to him being incarcerated in a lunatic asylum.

Somebody has written a book on Victorian lunacy which appears to be doing it RITE more than RONG for a change, even if it's actually about the campaigns over 'alleged lunatics'* who were not actually mad but banged up by their covetous relatives, rather than the less contentious cases who, like Uncle Louie, 'were mad'.

And these involve mostly men, and it was all about property-property-property and Hard Cash, even when things like sex and religion were in the mix, as those tended to involve moving money out of the kinship network within which concerned family members felt it ought to stay.

Anyway, the book is, and I haven't read it yet, just seen a review, Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England, just out. Review here, I note the irony of who is actually reviewing it. A blog post about her talk on the book at the Ilkley Literature Festival.

As review in The Literary Review - not online, at least, not yet - points out, this undermines the popular myth circulated by literary sources that it was all about unwanted wives or inconvenient women.

The review cites a nice quote by Wilkie Collins (who did so much to establish the trope):

The victim, to be interesting, must be a woman, to be very interesting she must be a lady

But oh dear yes, that does explain quite a lot of popular fictions across a range of media.

I suspect that analysis of asylum records of a more routine nature for the period would suggest that men and their mishandling of money, whether thriftlessness and extravagance or melancholic lack of interest in business, was a lot more common as a reason for certification than the standard narratives suggest.

*The Alleged Lunatics Friend Society vs the After Care Association for Friendless Females Recently Discharged from Lunatic Asylums - which is the better Victorian philanthropic organisation name?

How much do I like this page? (pdf) Schedules of the Commissioners in Lunacy, 1907-1948 or so:
Schedule of the Forms of Insanity
and
Schedule of Causes and Associated Factors of Insanity: To be returned as Principal Causes, or as Contributory or Associated Factors,with Symbols for purposes of Tabulation.

This is the answer, bless the Health Archives Group, for all those family historians who want to know what the cryptic code on their ancestor's record actually meant. (Do they really want to know, I think.)

And how thrilled am I to discover code G.4 under 'Physiological Defects and Errors'?

Well, I'm not sure thrilled is precisely the word, but extremely interested to see that masturbation was still seen as potentially causative, several decades after such proponents of the connection as Henry Maudsley and Thomas Clouston had retreated from their previous position and thought it might be the fear of insanity created by the discourse that was the problem? And was not amended in the 1931 revision.