Anthropodermic Bibliopegy: the macabre art of making books out of human skin

Tags

anthropodermic bibliopegy, dissection, doctors, execution, human skin, mass peptide fingerprinting, Murder, nineteenth century, PMF, post mortem, poverty, skin books

Introduction 

_{A 17th-century book on female virginity in the Wellcome Library,
rebound in human skin by Dr. Ludovic Bouland around 1865.
Wikimedia Commons.}

On 3^rd December 1817, Charles Smith was hanged on the Town Moor at Newcastle upon Tyne for “the barbarous and cruel murder of Charles Stewart at Ouseburn Pottery”. ¹

The condemned man left instructions that his body be released to his wife for burial. This request was denied, and his body sent to be anatomised at Surgeon’s Hall, Newcastle. So far, so unremarkable. The bodies of many hanged criminals ended up under the anatomist’s knife in Britain at this time. But that was not the end of Charles Smith’s story. The actual fate of at least part of Charles Smith’s body was both peculiar and macabre.  

Road to the gallows 

The story began the previous year, 1816, when the pottery was declared bankrupt, and a sheriff’s officer was authorised to sell goods to pay off debts. On the night of the 4th of December, Charles Stewart, the elderly Keeper appointed by the Sheriff, was sleeping on the premises, his task, to guard the money from the sale. In the early hours of the morning, he was woken from his slumber by the sound of loud banging on the door. Opening it, he was faced with two ruffians, intent on robbery. He was attacked and beaten severely. Although he eventually managed to summon help, his injuries were too severe and after lingering for several weeks he died on Christmas Day, 1816. 

_{Newcastle Gaol, early 20th Century. Designed by architect John Dobson c1822,
to replace the ruinous Newgate Gaol. Newcastle Central Library Collection.}

Before he died, Stewart was interviewed and pointed the finger of blame at Irishman Charles Smith, a former employee at the pottery, in a dramatic deathbed confrontation. When accused, Smith denied everything, even though a bloody stick and blood-spattered clothing had been found at his lodgings. Some doubt was cast on Stewart’s ability to identify Smith, and Smith did obtain a brief stay of execution. Ultimately however, Stewart’s testimony, along with some damning circumstantial evidence, and a dash of contemporary prejudice against the Irish, sealed Smith’s fate. He was found guilty of wilful murder and publicly executed the following December. The second assailant was never identified. ² 

And so ended the tragic life of Charles Smith.  

Afterlife  

On 3^rd of October 1818 the Durham County Advertiser reported the following curiosity: 

“Literary relic – An eminent collector and Antiquarian of Newcastle is possessed of a piece of the skin of the late Charles Smith, executed near the town last year for the murder of Charles Stewart, which he had washed, tanned and dressed for the purposes of binding a large paper copy of the murderer’s dying speech!!!” ³ 

I find the multiple exclamation marks interesting, while the eminent collector might find it acceptable to put human skin to this purpose, the author of the article clearly has his doubts. 

The eminent collector and antiquarian in question, was likely to have been John Bell, an avid collector of books and coins, who ran a bookshop on Newcastle’s Quayside.^4,5 

_{Newcastle Quayside, Arthur Edmund Grimshaw, 1865, Public
domain, via Wikimedia Commons}

The practice of binding books in human skin was hinted at in the ancient and Medieval periods. Some examples dating to the 16^th and 17th century have survived, but the trend really grew in popularity, amongst certain sections of society, in the 19^th century. But what was the motivation behind the practice? 

Punishment 

There are several reasons why a book might be bound in human skin. In the early nineteenth century it was occasionally used as a post-mortem punishment for an executed criminal, often adjacent to dissection.  Dissection had been an added post-mortem indignity for the executed person since the introduction of the Murder Act in 1752, which allowed the bodies of executed criminals to be publicly dissected (a boon to anatomy schools struggling to obtain cadavers). Both Charles Smith, and more famously, William Burke, half of the murderous duo Burke and Hare, were hanged, dissected, then had parts of their skin removed for book binding.  

_{A book bound in the skin of the murderer William Burke,
on display in Surgeons’ Hall Museum in Edinburgh
By Kim Traynor – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons}

Binding a book in the skin of the condemned man was a post-mortem mortification with metaphysical consequences. At a time when many Christian’s believed you needed your body to remain whole in order to rise on the day of judgement, having part of your skin made into a pocket notebook or used to bind a copy of your Gallows Speech and clippings about your crime, might well prevent you from entering the Kingdom of Heaven.  As an Irish Catholic, this may have been on Charles Smith’s mind when he entreated authorities to release his corpse to his wife, for Christian burial.  

The practice of public dissection, in this context, is a cruel and unusual punishment, a staggering display of callousness in disregarding the religious beliefs and dignity of the poor and criminal classes who were most likely to suffer this fate.   

Propaganda 

Some books purported to be made of human skin were used for political propaganda, such as the unproven rumours that French Revolutionaries set up a macabre tannery at Meudon. The tannery was supposed to have specialised in producing a range of fashionable leather breeches, boots, and book bindings, all using human skin. A copy of the Constitution and Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, dating from 1793, and supposedly made of human skin, helped feed into the legend of blood thirsty Revolutionaries tanning the hides of their enemies. This legend was still being taken at face value well into the twentieth century, until academics began to look to the original source of the rumour, the rabidly pro-monarchist Abbot of Montgaillard (or possibly his equally monarchist son). ^6,7 

Racial stereotypes 

The infamous Swaatland parchment claims to be an eighteenth-century artefact, linked to the experiences of the real historic figure Luke Swatland. Swatland was captured by Native Americans, and later escaped and wrote of his experiences.  The inscription on the piece of leather states that it was made from the skin of a ‘White Man taken by an Ingen, Scalped and skinned Alive[..]’ it went on to make the false claim that Native American’s were using the skin of Europeans as currency. Following testing by Megan Rosenbloom, the parchment proved to be made from cow hide, and was likely made at a much later date as a piece of racist propaganda to justify the treatment of Native Americans by settlers.⁸ 

_{A notebook allegedly covered in human skin.
The label reads ‘The cover of this book is made of
Tanned Skin from the Negro whose Execution caused
the War of Independence’. c. 1770 – 1850}. _{Wellcome Collection.}

Rarity 

Going back to the Charles Smith book for a moment, it is not known whether John Bell created the book for his own private amusement or as a commodity to sell. However, the fact that John Bell was a book collector is important, because, in the 19th century, in many cases books bound in human skin were made for collectors – enthusiastic bibliophiles with niche tastes in unusual and rare book bindings.  

Collectors of such rare commodities invariably considered themselves to be gentlemen and often they were also medical men, as evidenced by the extensive research of Megan Rosenbloom. Many of the authenticated human skin books originated in the libraries of doctors and surgeons.    

Medical men had two things in their favour – access to the raw materials, and clinical detachment.   

Anthropodermic book binding can be seen as an example of clinical detachment taken to its extreme, with doctors forgetting the essential humanity of their patients, patient consent not being considered, and the unspoken trust between doctor and patient being breached almost irrevocably.  

This idea of the gentleman collector is at odds with the popular image of human skin books. Most people’s first thoughts would probably run to HP Lovecraft’s ‘mad Arab’ Abdul al Hazred and his Necronomicon, and obsessive and insane occultists pouring over Grimoires of arcane knowledge.  That or serial killers and Nazis. In short, people you would want to avoid at all costs, not your trusted GP or hospital doctor! 

_{The Amateur Bibliophile. Liebig card, late 19th century/early
20th century. Look and Learn / Rosenberg Collection}

A matter of identity 

While the matter of who made books of human skin, and why they did so, is fascinating. The question also remains as to whose skin was used? 

Evidence would suggest that it was primarily the skin of the poorer classes, executed criminals and those who died in situations that left their bodies open to exploitation by medical men and collectors. 

Very occasionally someone might volunteer, like unlucky highwayman James Allen, who asked that his memoirs be bound in his own skin.⁹  But that was a rare occurrence – in most cases the skin was obtained without consent or in direct opposition to the wishes of the deceased. 

In cases where a book was bound in the skin of a criminal, such as William Burke or Charles Smith, we can be fairly sure of their identity. However, in many cases, particularly where the skin was obtained covertly in a medical setting, this is not possible, the identity of the unwilling donor left, quite literally, on the shelf.   

One notable exception to this anonymity was uncovered by Beth Lander, the librarian at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, in the United States. She uncovered a tale of medical malpractice from over 150 years ago.  In 1868, a young, up and coming doctor named John Stockton Hough, performed an autopsy on a twenty-eight-year-old woman who died of Tuberculosis at Philadelphia General Hospital.  During her autopsy, Dr Hough decided to take a macabre souvenir of the event, in the form of skin from the woman’s thighs. He held on to his gruesome treasure for many years, but eventually he found a use for it. Hough had an impressive library, and what better than to use this rarest of materials to bind three of his favourite books – on women’s health (which seems a particularly ghoulish choice).  Beth Lander was able to follow the clues left by Hough and identified the woman as being Mary Lynch, a twenty-eight-year-old, impoverished Irish widow. ¹⁰ 

_{Blockley Alms House, later Philadelphia General Hospital.
Penn archives digital image collection.}

Not everything you read is true 

One glaring fact about many ‘human skin’ books is that they do not all stand up to scrutiny, this seems to be particularly common where the subject matter is overtly macabre or has a definite political or racial agenda to promote.  This can be seen in the case of the Swaatland parchment, which, upon testing, proved to be cow hide, and this may also be true of the Constitution and Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, linked to the Meudon Tannery, which has yet to be tested. 

But why have so many books claiming to be bound in human skin been taken at face value?  One reason is clearly that these artefacts exert a morbid fascination. The other reason is that until recently, there was no fool proof, non-destructive way to authenticate them.   

Books bound in human skin don’t scream at you, they look like any other book on the shelf. Previous testing consisted of looking at the binding under a microscope to examine the pores of the hide and compare them to human, pig, cow, etc.   This method was not always accurate.

More modern techniques such as DNA testing are a no go because the tanning process destroys DNA, while repeated handling of the books over many years risks contaminating the sample and skewing the results.  

All of that has changed recently, with the advent of peptide mass finger printing (PMF).  This technique requires only a tiny sample of leather and can conclusively determine if a book is bound in human skin.  The Anthropodermic Book Project, co-founded by Megan Rosenbloom, is currently testing as many alleged human skin books as possible using this technique. And while many books are not what they claimed to be, many others prove to be the genuine article.¹¹

_{Necronomicon By Shubi(Shubi) – Self-made just for fun.,
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

Final thoughts 

While unusual cases, like that of James Allen, show that occasionally people did choose this method of post-mortem memorialisation, most did not. Whether the skin of a condemned criminal or impoverished hospital patient, one thing is clear, the men who created these artefacts, did so with little regard to the wishes of the deceased.  

This poses the question, should these books remain in museum and library collections? The curating and display of human remains is a challenging subject at the best of times, fraught with ethical, philosophical, and cultural dilemmas. 

My view, is that they are a valuable resource that can help us explore broader subjects, such as how attitudes to race and class have changed over time, issues surrounding informed patient consent, and how the medical gaze, taken to its extreme, can depersonalise the patient. 

Ultimately, these most macabre of artefacts can provide a window into a different time, a time when respectable gentlemen could blithely damn the criminal and the poor in the afterlife, and hide behind the clinical gaze, in search of that rarest most precious material to bind their books, human skin. 

But what do you think? 

Postscript 

As it happens, Bell never did bind his book in Smith’s skin, but instead fixed the sample of tanned flesh inside a rather ordinary half-bound volume (a leather spine, with darkly marbled covers), a particularly rare curio amongst newspaper clippings of the trial, commentary, and other ephemera.  He even ended the book with a pen and ink sketch of a devil merrily playing the fiddle, above a dangling noose – gallows humour indeed.

_{‘The Particulars of the trial and Execution of Charles Smith by John W Bell’,
on public display in Newcastle Central Library until 31 July 2022 as part of the
‘Life and Death of Newcastle Gaol 1822-1922’}

The Charles Smith Book is held at Newcastle Central Library, it is available to view by appointment, but is currently featured as part of an exhibition that runs until the end of July 2022. 

Edinburgh Surgeon’s Hall displays the pocketbook made from the skin of William Burke.  

Sources and credits 

I would like to thank Sarah at Newcastle Central Library, for facilitating my viewing of the fascinating human skin book relating to Charles Smith and answering my many questions. 

In researching this post, I found the most knowledgeable and accessible writer and speaker on the subject of anthropodermic bibliopegy to be Megan Rosenbloom. I have in particular relied on her excellent book ‘Dark Archives’ as well as several online interviews and articles. 

Ancient Origins website Books Bound in Human Skin – The Practice Isn’t As Rare As You Might Think! | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net) 

Bell, John, 1817(?) ‘The Particulars of the trial and Execution of Charles Smith by John W Bell’, Newcastle Central Library Special Collection. 

Ocker, JW, 2020, Cursed Objects, Philadelphia

Rosenbloom, Megan, 2020, Dark Archives, New York  

Rosenbloom, Megan, 2016, A Book by Its Cover | Lapham’s Quarterly (laphamsquarterly.org)  

Xavier, Paddy, 24/11/2016, Murder in the Ouseburn and Books of Human Skin – lastdyingwords 

Notes 

1. John Bell, ‘The Particulars of the trial and Execution of Charles Smith by John W Bell’
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. Paddy Xavier, Murder in the Ouseburn and Books of Human Skin – lastdyingwords 
6. Megan Rosenbloom, A Book by Its Cover | Lapham’s Quarterly (laphamsquarterly.org)  
7. Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives
8. Ibid
9. JW Ocker, Cursed Objects
10. Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives
11. Ibid

The Curse of Cleopatra’s Needle

Tags

Cleopatra, Cleopatras Needle, curse of the mummy, curses, Egyptian curses, Egyptian Obelisk, Embankment, London, London lore, sites, Thames, tourism, tourist sites

PART ONE: HOW IT ALL BEGAN!

_{Cleopatra’s Needle, London. Public Domain, ^{https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=735816}} 

If you stroll along the Victoria Embankment between Victoria Embankment and Temple underground stations, you will see a large obelisk flanked by two sphinxes jutting out into the sky. Cleopatra’s Needle is a distinctive landmark in London and a popular tourist spot but few people take the time to understand its history and the supernatural stories which surround it.

The Obelisk of Thutmose III

Although the obelisk in London is associated with Cleopatra, in reality its only connection to the famous Egyptian is that she moved it to Alexandria in 12 BCE, her royal city and set it up in Caesareum – a temple built in honour of Mark Anthony[1]. The obelisk was in fact carved over 1000 years before Cleopatra came to power. Hewed out of red granite from the quarries of Aswan and dedicated to Pharaoh Thutmose III[2], the obelisk was erected in the city of Heliopolis in around 1450 BCE. Two hundred years later inscriptions on the side lines of the shaft were carved out in honour of Rameses the Great commemorating his military victories[3].

A Gift for Great Britain

^{Lieutenant-General Sir James Alexander, c1880.
_{By Stephencdickson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66156088}} 

In 1819, the Albanian Ottoman governor and ruler of Egypt and Sudan, Muhammad Ali gave the obelisk as a gift to Great Britain. The obelisk was seen as a fitting monument to commemorate the British victories over Napoleon in the Battle of Nile (1798) and the Battle of Alexander (1801)[4]. Unfortunately, the cost of transporting the 224-ton obelisk proved too much and plans to bring it over to Great Britain were dropped. The subject was again unsuccessfully revisited in 1822 and 1832.

In 1867, Lieutenant-General Sir James Alexander read a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh outlining his ideas for bringing the obelisk to Britain[5]. In 1875, Alexander visited Egypt to assess its condition. On his trip he met with the civil engineer and Egyptology enthusiast Mr John Dixon who had already been researching the obelisk. At the end of 1876, Dixon and Alexander consulted with Sir William James Erasmus Wilson, a distinguished anatomist, who agreed to contribute £10,000 to the endeavour. Dixon accepted full responsibility for any other expenses incurred as well as transportation logistics. With a firm plan and the permission of the then Khedive Ismael Pasha, Dixon set about drawing up blueprints for a ship strong enough to hold the obelisk[6].

^{The iron cylinder barge, Cleopatra. Victoria and Albert Museum Collection.}

The Cleopatra

The ship, Cleopatra, built to transport the obelisk was ingenious in its design. The cigar-shaped iron cylinder (around 92 feet long by 16 feet wide) which encased the granite monolith was constructed around it, with the sheets of metal riveted together. A bridge was built to shelter the crew. Once the iron case was complete, it was towed to the dry-dock of the Egyptian Admiralty and converted into a ship. Here the internal ballast rails, stern and rudder were added[7].

A crew of eight Maltese sailors led by Captain Carter were hired to steer the Cleopatra whilst the Olga, a steam ship was engaged to act as a tow ship under the command of Captain Booth[8]. On 21 September 1877, the Cleopatra and the Olga left Egypt bound for Falmouth.

The Deadly Bay of Biscay

Initially the journey was uneventful but on the 14 October as the ship entered the Bay of Biscay, the weather took a turn for the worse. The violent storm whipped up the sea causing the iron rails to break loose. At 9.20pm the Cleopatra signalled to the Olga that they were in trouble and a small boat manned by six volunteers were sent over to assist them[9]. Tragically, the crew of the Cleopatra were unable to secure the ropes flung to them and the small boat drifted away, swallowed up by the rough water. Having not heard from the Cleopatra, Captain Booth was under the impression that she was safe. It was only when a few hours later he received a second distress signal asking for the Olga to pick them up, that he realised the seriousness of the situation. The Olga managed to pull up alongside the container ship, collect the crew and cut the tow-rope[10]. An attempt was made to find the six men but to no avail, the boat had disappeared. The names of the men who drowned were William Askin, Michael Burns, James Gardiner, William Donald, Joseph Benton and William Patan (their names are inscribed on the base of the Needle)[11]. Thinking the obelisk lost, the Olga returned to Falmouth.

Incredibly a few days later, the container ship was spotted still afloat proving Dixon’s faith in his design correct, “its buoyancy and sailing qualities have been shown to be of a high order by one of the severest tests to which a vessel, likely to encounter ocean storms can be exposed”. The Cleopatra was picked up by the English steamer ship, Fitzmaunce and brought into the port of Ferrol. After a short and tricky negotiation (the captain of the Fitzmaunce had placed a lien for salvage on the container[12]), the steam ship Anglia was sent to bring the monolith to Britain. On the 21 January 1878, the obelisk arrived at Gravesend (school children in Gravesend were given the day off to welcome the Cleopatra[13]). Even at this stage, the obelisk’s final home had not been decided. Many sites were suggested but in the end the decision was made by the two men who had paid for its journey, Sir Wilson and John Dixon[14]. In September 1878, the obelisk was at last installed to cheers from the crowds and the 68 feet (21 metres) monolith became Cleopatra’s Needle.

_{The Cleopatra hits storm weather in the Bay of Biscay.
Victoria and Albert Museum Collection.}

PART TWO: THE CURSE OF THE OBELISK

Cleopatra’s Needle has developed a strange reputation. A reputation which probably stemmed from the idea that Egyptian objects are by their nature cursed and the tragic story of its journey to Britain.

The Suicidal Lady

For some unknown reason the site of Cleopatra’s Needle has become a popular suicide spot. On two separate occasions, a policeman was approached by a distressed woman urging him to come to the banks of the River Thames to prevent someone from jumping into the water. As the policeman reach the area of the needle, they see the same woman, who had just stopped them, leap into the river[15].

The Phantom Sailor

Unearthly laughter has been heard coming from the Needle at night. This eerie sound has been linked to the ghost of a naked man who has been witnessed on a number of occasions, running from out behind the obelisk and throwing himself into the River without making a splash[16]. The first sighting of this apparition occurred a few weeks after the installation of the obelisk leading many people to believe it was in fact the ghost of one of the sailors who died in the Bay of Biscay.

An Egyptian Curse

_{Aleister Crowley. Unknown author, Public domain, via
Wikimedia Commons} 
 

As with many Egyptian artifacts some believe the obelisk is cursed and that the soul of Rameses II has been imprisoned inside the granite.

There is a very odd tale relating to the obelisk and Egypt which may or may not have any basis in truth and which is closer to a horror than ghost story. In 1880, a Miss Davies, aged 27 from Pimlico, was wandering along the Embankment when she felt herself being unwillingly pulled towards the site of the Needle. As she got closer to the obelisk, she heard unearthly laughter and losing control of her legs she flung herself into the water. Luckily for her, she was saved by a vagrant. She was taken to hospital to recover. Although physically healed, she experienced terrifying nightmares in which a tall woman with a white face and black almond eyes wearing red robes appeared. As the woman opened its mouth, she revealed sharp pointed teeth and the flesh from her face is ripped off[17]. Miss Davies believed her ordeal to be caused by the obelisk. The description of the woman’s appearance conjures up the image of an Egyptian priestess or member of the Egyptian nobility.

The Crowley Connection

Another unsubstantiated story regards the occultist Aleister Crowley. It is said that Crowley performed dark sorcery one dark night at the base of the obelisk in order to release Rameses’ trapped spirit. The ceremony involved the feeding of animal blood to a human skeleton. Crowley was unsuccess and It is said that Rameses mockingly laughed at Cowley’s failure[18].

The Ill-fated Needle

Many believe that the curse of the obelisk lead to it being bombed in an air-raid during the First World War. At midnight on Tuesday, 14 September 1917, the obelisk was hit disfiguring the pedestal[19]. After the war ended, it was decided not to repair the bomb damage – the scars having become part of its history and its cursed legend.

A Haunting Time Capsule?

When the obelisk was erected, a time capsule was inserted into the pedestal. This capsule contains many objects including 12 photographs of the best looking women of the day,  box of hairpins, a box of cigars, tobacco pipes, a set of imperial weights, a baby’s bottle, toys, a shilling razor, samples of cables used in the erection of the obelisk, a portrait or Queen Victoria, a written history of the transportation of the obelisk and a map of London[20].

Could the time capsule contain objects which are themselves haunted? Is that what is responsible for the ghostly stories associated with the obelisk?

The Guardian Sphinxes

Lastly, there are the sphinxes. The sphinxes (as well as the pedestal) were sculptured by the English architect, George John Vulliamy[21]. As with the pedestal, the sphinxes were damaged by the same bomb. It has long been said that the sphinxes were accidentally placed the wrong way round. Logically, they should have been facing outwards, symbolising protection for the obelisk, but maybe the sphinxes were positioned correctly. Maybe their role was not to stop harm from coming to the obelisk but rather to prevent anything from getting out!

^{Inward facing sphinx, showing shell damage from World War I. This file is licensed under the 
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Subject to disclaimers.} 

Final Word

The history of Cleopatra’s Needle is a fascinating and sad one and the obelisk itself is very beautiful. Personally, I highly doubt that there is any Egyptian curse on it. Egyptian curses became fashionable after the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun and are now a mainstay of films and books but it is a mystery as to why the site has become a magnet for those with a desire to commit suicide. Does the obelisk have some sort of power or magnetic pull? I have visited it on numerous occasions at all times of the day and night and have never felt any particular draw to it but if you are brave enough there is a legend that if you want a particular question answered you should look at the pyramidon at the top and say the words “I call spirits from the vasty deep”[22]. Maybe you will receive an answer from the spirit of the obelisk!

Cleopatra’s Needle from across the Thames. Lenora 2022

Bibliography and Further Reading

Brier, Bob (Dr), Cleopatra’s Needles: The Lost Obelisks of Egypt, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Sir Erasmus Wilson, Cleopatra’s Needle: With Brief Notes on Egypt and Egyptian Obelisks, London: Brain & Co, 1877

---

Notes

[1] THROUGH THE ARCHIVES: Cleopatra’s needle arrives in London from Egypt From the News Letter, January 24, 1878, https://www.newsletter.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/retro/through-archives-cleopatras-needle-arrives-london-egypt-3103696

[2] Cleopatra’s Needle: The Story Behind Three Awe-Inspiring Obelisks, https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/cleopatra-s-needle-story-behind-obelisks-007051

[3] Sir Erasmus Wilson, Cleopatra’s Needle: With Brief Notes on Egypt and Egyptian Obelisks

[4] Cleopatra’s Needle: The Story Behind Three Awe-Inspiring Obelisks

[5] Cleopatra’s Needle: With Brief Notes on Egypt and Egyptian Obelisks

[6] Ibid

[7] Cleopatra (cylinder ship), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_(cylinder_ship)

[8] William Penman Lyon, Cleopatra’s needle, London: The Book Society, https://books.google.co.il/books?id=RoYDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA5&dq=cleopatra%27s+needle&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjt77DGuLnvAhUIrRQKHdICBYoQ6AEwA3oECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=london&f=false

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] Cleopatra’s Needle, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Cleopatras-Needle/

[12] William Penman Lyon, Cleopatra’s needle

[13] THROUGH THE ARCHIVES: Cleopatra’s needle arrives in London from Egypt

From the News Letter

[14] Dr Bob Brier, Cleopatra’s Needles: The Lost Obelisks of Egypt

[15] Cleopatra’s Needle and Haunted Victoria Embankment in London, http://hauntedearthghostvideos.blogspot.com/2012/05/cleopatras-needle-and-haunted-victoria.html

[16] Cleopatra’s Needle, https://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/hauntings/cleopatras-needle/

[17] Cleopatra’s Needle Exorcism, https://www.wattpad.com/331285523-voodoo-creepypasta-1-cleopatra%27s-needle-exorcism

[18] Cleopatra’s Needle, https://topicaltens.blogspot.com/2014/09/12th-september-cleopatras-needle.html

[19] Cleopatra’s Needle, London, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra’s_Needle,_London

[20] Cleopatra’s Needle and Haunted Victoria Embankment in London

[21] George John Vulliamy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_John_Vulliamy

[22] The London Obelisk: Cleopatra’s Ghosts, https://glennashton.blogspot.com/2010/12/the-london-obelisk-cleopatra-ghosts.html

The Lambton Worm: the dragon-slayer and the radical politician

Tags

chivalry, county durham, dragon slayer, dragons, Fatfield, Lampton worm, legends, radical jack, worms

_{Image from More English Fairy Tales
by Joseph Jacobs 1894– Illustrated by John D. Batten}

‘Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs,

An Aa’ll tell ye’s aall an aaful story

Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs,

An’ Aa’ll tell ye ‘boot the worm ¹

Anyone who went to school in the North East of England will probably be familiar with the famous chorus from the folk-song The Lambton Worm. The song was written in 1867 by C M Leumane and quickly took on a life of its own in popular culture. My own memories of learning it as an eight-year-old, were that I loved the catchy chorus, but there were way too many verses to memorise! 

Tales of worms or dragons are not uncommon in British folklore, one only has to think of St George and the Dragon to appreciate how entwined dragon-slayers are in national and regional identity.  

But is the tale of the Lambton Worm simply another Dragon Slaying tale, or is there more to it than that?  

The Legend of the Lambton Worm 

The Legend of the Lambton Worm first appeared in print in 1785. Antiquarian William Hutchinson outlined the folk explanations of the formation of Worm Hill, a glacial moraine, in Fatfield, Washington:

“Near this place is an eminence called the Worm Hill, which tradition says once possessed by an enormous serpent, that wound its horrid body round the base; that it destroyed much provision, and used to infest the Lambton estate, till some hero in that family engaged it, cased in armour set with razors…the whole miraculous tale has no other evidence than the memories of old women…” ²

This figure from the distant past was often identified as Sir John Lambton, Knight of Rhodes.³

However, these written accounts draw on older local oral traditions.

Here is my summary of the Legend of the Lambton  Worm, as we know it today:  

Young Lambton, the heir to the Lambton Estate, was fishing in the River Wear one Sunday, when he should have been in church, when he caught a very strange eel-like creature with a dragons head. Unhappy with his scrawny catch, he blithely discarded it down a well, later known as Worm Well, and went on his merry way. Young Lambton grew to repent of his profane ways, and joined a crusade, leaving his home for many years.  The worm, however, did not leave, and was thriving and growing to a prodigious size at the bottom of the well where it was discarded.  So much so, that it had to relocate to a larger habitat, choosing first to wrap itself around a local hill, which became known as Worm Hill, and later favouring a rock in the River Wear.  

^{Image via Pinterest, source unknown}

All would have been well enough, had the worm not also had a very large appetite. Cattle, Sheep, and even the occasional child all made it onto the worm’s menu.  Consequently, the locals lived in terror of the poisonous and very hungry worm that young Lambton had unwittingly set loose amongst them.  Finally, young Lambton returned, a new man, from the crusades and set about righting the wrong he had set in motion in his youth.  His initial skirmishes with the worm were unsuccessful until he consulted with a local witch or wise woman.   

The wise woman gave him some sage advice on how to tackle the slippery beast, which asides from being extremely dangerous, had a habit of being able to pull itself back together if it was ever cut in half. Following her advice almost to the letter (this will be important later) he donned a suite of armour studded with razors and took on the worm on its home territory, the River Wear.  The worm, seeing Lambton as another tasty snack, wrapped itself round the knight, in order to crush him, but was instead sliced and diced, with all of its pieces flowing away in the river, never to reform again.  The Worm was dead, and the local people were saved and there was much rejoicing! 

All would have been well and good, except for one small omission by Lambton, the witch had warned him that once his mission was accomplished, he must kill the first thing that greeted him on his return home, or else the next nine generations of Lambton chiefs would not die in their beds. Despite taking some precautions, Lambton’s father was the first to greet him on his return, and well, young John couldn’t bring himself to kill his own father, so the curse fell upon the Lambton’s and the next nine generations did not die in their beds.  

Dragon Tales 

^{St George and the Dragon, Newcastle War Memorial, image by Lenora}

Tales of Dragon Slayers are common throughout Medieval Britain and Europe.  The Northeast of England (taking in Northumberland, County Durham and Yorkshire) has twenty or so tales of Dragons and their slayers, for example, the Sockburn Worm and The Laidly Worm to name but two.⁴ 

What has been noted to be different about English, and these Northern tales, is that, unlike many of the European tales, the hero is not seeking to win treasure or maiden fair, but has a more pragmatic aim, often to save the local area from some peril (as in the Sockburn and Lambton stories). ^5,6

What is particularly distinctive about the Legend of the Lambton Worm, is that once the hero has slayed the dragon, he does not win maiden fair or treasure, in fact he and his family are cursed for several generations to come.  

Unpacking the Worm 

There are certain elements in the Lambton Worm tale that are worth unpacking. 

Dragons and Worms (terms often used interchangeably in historic texts) can mean different things in different cultures and depending on who is using them (see Miss Jessel’s excellent post for more on Dragons in general).  For the Medieval church, dragons often represented evil, but for many noble families they represented valour in fighting, so appear on many family crests.⁷ They have also been linked to natural and manmade catastrophes, water spirits, and remnants of ancient nature religions (of which more below).  

Monster theory 

Jeffrey Jerome in Monster Culture considers the monster to be a cultural body.  The device of the monster can be used to present a warning (of lines not to be crossed), to reveal a truth, to represent the ‘other’ (both within society or external to it), or to embody a cultural moment (often a moment of change). In killing the monster, the hero reaffirms group identity and order.  And of course, as any horror fan will know, even if you kill the monster, it may still return.⁸

The Legend of the Lambton Worm can be seen to contain many of these attributes.  

Toxic Masculinity  

In folklore, fishing on a Sunday can be seen as shorthand for profane behaviour, young Sir John should be in church attending to his Christian duty.  One interpretation of the legend, suggested by Tom Murray and discussed in his interview with James Tehrani, an anthropological folklorist, is that the worm as a metaphor for toxic masculinity.  It is Sir John’s own out of control behaviour that has put the community in danger, and only Sir John can defeat it, by reforming himself through Christian duty (going on a crusade) then defeating the very phallic worm on his return.⁹

This idea of toxic masculinity has something of a pedigree, in 1823, William Hutchinson suggested that worm tales, such as the Lambton Worm, could represent a folk memory of the disastrous Viking raids on the Northeast coast that took place in the eighth and nineth centuries.  It could perhaps commemorate a local hero who protected his community from them, or more broadly, show the community dealing with the threat itself, without outside assistance. ¹⁰ 

Water beings and the old religion 

Another interesting interpretation of the Lambton Worm is that the worm is a metaphor for the relationship between man and water, and that this is part of a global tradition. Veronica Strang¹¹ sees the popularity of dragons in the Medieval period as linked to the changing relationship with water and nature, new technologies and new social and political organisation both controlled water (e.g., through irrigation) also commodified it.  

The Lambton worm is set in the Medieval period, at this time Church felt it was facing an existential threat on two fronts: externally in the form of the Islamic world, and internally from lingering nature worship amongst supposedly Christain communities (evident in the churches concerted effort to rededicate pagan holy wells to Christian saints). 

_{anonymus, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons}

Strang projects that the tale of the Lambton Worm could be read as the story of a local lord who fails in his Christian duty, allows pagan nature worship to flourish in his community, and, metaphorically, poison the well.  Only when he has taken up his Christian duty and defeated another set of ‘pagans’ by joining the crusade against Islam, can he return home and re-assert Christianity in his local community.  Here then, the worm represents the ‘other’ or pagan, which must be defeated in order to restore the established order. [strang]  This potentially also links into the worm’s ability to come back to life, until the wise woman offers her advice to Lambton on how to vanquish it for good, if there was a fear that old nature religion would keep on resurfacing if left unchecked.¹²   

A Local tales for local people  

Another important factor in the Legend of the Lambton Worm is that it provides a heroic and ancient pedigree for a prominent local family, the Lambton’s, setting up one of their ancestors as the hero of the hour, protecting his community. It also incorporates tangible local landmarks – Worm Hill in Fatfield, Washington – further fixing the legend to the local imagination. 

_{Lambton Castle, early nineteenth century, public domain}

Jamie Beckett¹³ has identified the Legend of the Sockburn Worm as a potential inspiration for the Lambton Worm.  The Sockburn Worm is attached to the ancient and once powerful Coyners’ family and is a much older tale but running along similar lines.  Sir John Conyer’s defeats the dragon and saves the day with his trusty falchion sword. Visible reminders of Conyers bravery and chivalric pedigree remained for all to see in the ‘greystone’ marking the worm’s burial place and the Conyers’ Falchion, still extant today and held in the Treasury at Durham Cathedral (it forms part of the ceremony of enthroning new Bishop’s of Durham to this day).  

Beckett sees the rise of the Legend of the Lambton Worm growing out of this tale, and coinciding with the declining fortunes of the Conyers family in the seventeenth century, and the rise of the ancient but not previously powerful Lambton’s from that period onwards. ¹⁴

The Lambton Worm and the Radical Politician 

Folktales and legends morph and change over time.  The Legend of the Lambton Worm is no different. One element of the tale that I certainly grew up believing, was that the Worm wound its tale around Penshaw’s Monument.  I’d never heard of Worm Hill or Fatfield.  So why is Penshaw’s Monument (or Penshaw’s Folly) come to be intrinsically linked to the Legend of the Lambton Worm? 

The simple answer is that in 1867 C.M. Leumane wrote a very catchy tune about the Lambton Worm, forever linking it with Penshaw: 

This feorful woorm wad often feed
On calves an’ lambs an’ sheep,
An’ swally little bairns alive
When they laid doon to sleep.
An’ when he’d eaten aal he cud
An’ he had has he’s fill,
Away he went an’ lapped his tail
Ten times roond Pensher Hill. [Cj]

_{John George Lambton Portrait, after Sir Thomas Lawrence. Print after 1850 (author’s collection)}

The Penshaw Monument, visible for miles around, is a Greek Temple on a hill in Penshaw Village Co Durham.  It was built by public subscription in 1844/5 in honour of John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, who died a few years earlier in 1840.   

John Lambton was born in 1792, he was Byronically handsome, rebellious, and had suffered many tragedies in his life (his first wife, Harriet, who he married for love, in 1812, died only three years later, they had three children who all pre-deceased him).  While he was undoubtedly a tragic and romantic figure, what endeared him to the local population was his politics.   

Known as Radical Jack, he was MP for Co Durham from 1812, pursuing radical Whig politics, he was in favour of a number of very progressive reforms such as secret ballots, fixed term parliaments, universal suffrage.  Following the shocking Peterloo Massacre in 1819, where a large crowd of unarmed people, campaigning for parliamentary reform, were violently attacked by the cavalry, resulting in many deaths and injuries, Lambton controversially criticised the actions of the establishment in attacking and killing innocent people.  He was later instrumental in the passing of the 1832 Reform Bill. All of this made him terrifying to the establishment and beloved of the working classes.  

Such was his reputation, that by the 1820’s and 30’s at least three chapbooks existed that told the tale of the Lambton Worm, with the inferred compassion between the contemporary John Lambton defending the poor from political and social oppression, and his Romantic and heroic namesake ancestor, protecting the poor from a dangerous worm, in the distant chivalric past.¹⁵ 

Such was his popular appeal, that a lasting monument, funded by public subscription, was erected in his honour on Penshaw Hill. Tens of thousands of spectators watched as it’s foundation stone was laid in a Masonic Ceremony by the 2nd Earl of Zetland.¹⁶

_{Penshaw monument by Lenora}

In conclusion  

I am drawn to Veronica Strang’s interpretation of the Worm as a metaphor for the church suppressing lingering elements of nature religion in its congregation, whilst fighting off ‘pagan’s abroad. This would seem a good fit if the legend was of Medieval or earlier origin.  However, if the tale was created later, then Jamie Beckett’s view that these type of Legends were used by prominent families to establish their pedigree in the dim and distant past, then the legend of the Worm might be best interpreted as a public relations exercise by a family on the rise.   

Perhaps more likely, is that it may contains elements both these theories, and others, with the most recent and most popular written iterations of the legend, from 1785 and onwards, being designed to give prominence to the powerful Lambtons, and to handsome, radical, John 1st Earl Lambton, in a fashionably Romantic and nostalgic way.   

Perhaps it is appropriate that the worm is still slippery enough to both elude and fascinates us today, like all good folktales, it is alive and well and no doubt, continuing to evolve through the ages with each retelling.  

There is undoubtably a lot more that could be said about the Legend of the Lambton Worm, its origin (ancient or otherwise), and its deeper meanings. For anyone interested in finding out more about the Lambton  Worm (and other worms, dragons, and water spirits), I have provided a list of excellent sources below.

You can hear The Lambton Worm (C.M. Leumane, 1867) arranged and performed by Geordie Wilson on YouTube, via the link below.

Notes

1. The Lambton Worm composed in 1867 by C. M. Leumane
2. Jamie Beckett, The History of the Lambton Worm and Sockburn Worm
3. Robert Surtees et al, The history and antiquities of the county palatine of Durham 1816-40
4. Jamie Beckett, The History of the Lambton Worm and Sockburn Worm
5. Icy Sedgwick, The Lambton Worm and Penshaw Monument
6. Jacqueline Simpson and Jennifer Westwood, The Lore of the Land
7. Icy Sedgwick, The Lambton Worm and Penshaw Monument
8. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Culture
9. Tom Murray, Tracing the Cultural History of the Monstrous Lambton Worm
10. Veronica Strang, Reflecting nature: water beings in history
11. ibid
12. ibid
13. Jamie Beckett, The History of the Lambton Worm and Sockburn Worm
14. ibid
15. ibid

Sources

Beckett, Jamie, The History of the Lambton Worm and Sockburn Worm https://community.dur.ac.uk/reed.ne/?page_id=2322#:~:text=The%20History%20of%20the%20Lambton%20Worm%20and%20Sockburn,can%20boast%20a%20few%20dragon-slayers%20of%20its%20own. edited by Laura McKenzie.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, Ed.,  1996, Monster Theory: Reading Culture [chapter 1 Monster Culture]

Leumane, CJ, 1867, The Ballad of the Lambton Worm, available at: https://wp.sunderland.ac.uk/seagullcity/the-ballad-of-the-lambton-worm/

Murray, T, 2016, Tracing the Cultural History of the Monstrous Lambton Worm, https://www.modernaustralian.com/news/2237-tracing-the-cultural-history-of-the-monstrous-lambton-worm

Sedgwick, Icy, The Lambton Worm and Penshaw Monument, https://www.icysedgwick.com/lambton-worm/ 13 July 2017

Simpson, Jacqueline, Westwood, Jennifer, 2006, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends, from Spring-heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys

Strang, Veronica, 2015, Reflecting nature: water beings in history in Waterworlds : anthropology in fluid environments. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 247-278. Ethnography, theory, experiment. (3).

Surtees, Robert, Taylor, George, Raine, James, pre-1850, The history and antiquities of the county palatine of Durham 1816-40

The Hidden History of Shrunken Heads (Tsantsas)

Tags

Achuar, Amazon, Colonialism, Ecuador, fakes, Jivaro, museum collections, rituals, Shrunken heads, Shuar, tourism, Tsantsas

_{Credit: Shrunken heads. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY} 4.0)

The hidden history of shrunken heads 

Across Europe and America, if you visit a museum with an Ethnography section, you may come across a display of shrunken heads, or Tsantsas, from South America. The heads are no larger than a man’s fist, with lips and eyes stitched up, threads hanging from them, and framed by long black hair. If you haven’t seen one in a museum, then you’ve likely seen one depicted in popular culture, the movies Beetlejuice and more recently Harry Potter both feature shrunken heads in a horror/comedy setting. 

But how did shrunken heads from the Amazon basin find their way into the museums and collections of Britain, Europe and the USA and how did interaction with western societies influence and change this indigenous tradition? 

Who made them? 

Tsantsas were created by the Shuar, Achuar, Awajun/Aguaruna, Wampis/Huambisa, Candoshi-Shampra, who are now collectively known as SAAWC. Europeans historically referred to this group of peoples as Jivaro, however, this became synonymous with being uncivilized or savage, so is considered offensive in Ecuador [1].  

These groups lived in the Amazon, in small villages often based on family groups. They subsisted primarily from hunting, fishing, raising pigs and gardening. They also traded with other indigenous groups, and later with European settlers.  

The Shuar’s primary claim to fame is that they successfully thew off the yoke of the Spanish Conquistadors in 1599, earning themselves a legendary reputation for fierceness and independence. This love of independence is reflected in the structure of their society, which was based on family groups and existed without any centralised authority [2]. 

_{Family group c1901. Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons}

More than just a war trophy 

It is fair to say that even now the popular view in the West is that all headhunting cultures took heads as war trophies. And while some did, this is a reductive view, for the SAAWC peoples the head of an enemy killed in combat was much more than simply a brutal material symbol of victory. The power of Tsantsas came from harnessing the power imbued in them from the dead man’s soul for the benefit of the warrior’s family. The process of obtaining and preparing a Tsantsa was complex, time consuming and resource intensive, it was also fraught with danger. This meant that the practice of headhunting was not taken lightly, nor one practiced frequently by SAAWC peoples.  

SAAWC peoples believed that the soul of a man was made up of separate components the Arutam and the Muisak. The Arutam was the soul-power, the spirit, power, and knowledge of the man. A man became Kakaram through killing and this strengthened his Arutam, this power was obtained through raids on other tribes to obtain Tsantsas. So, the best Tsantsas, the most powerful, came from a man who had killed a lot of people and therefore had strong Arutam. However, taking the head of such a man (and it invariably was a man, as a woman was not thought to be possessed of a strong Arutam), a powerful enemy warrior, possessed of such power, required careful rituals, or else his Muisak, his avenging soul which came into being at the point of death, could wreak havoc on his killer [3] [4].

_{Objets dAmazonie (réserves visitables du musée national dethnologie).  Dalbera from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

How were they made? 

The skills involved would be passed down from father to son [5]. The process was both practical and ritual. To ensure the head could be transported away from the enemy village quickly, the skull, brains, muscle were removed, making it lighter to carry. This skin ‘bag’ was then filled with hot sand and pebbles repeatedly until it shrunk to the size of a man’s fist [6]. Shrinking the head was the beginning of the ritual process of trapping power in the artefact.  

A series of rituals and feasts were held, the first of which was a binding ritual. It was crucial to trap the Muisak in the head before it could escape and seek revenge. The Muisak would try and escape through the mouth, so it was vital to sew up the lips of the decapitated head quickly. Similarly, eyes were sewn shut to prevent it from seeing, and the skin was blackened with charcoal [7] [8]. Once the Muisak was trapped, the owner could begin to use the soul- power of the Tsantsa, and transfer it to others, through a series of ritual feasts.  

The feasts could take place over several years, this allowed the owner and his family to grow enough food to feed the many guests that would be expected to attend. The purpose of the feasts was to harness the power of the individual warrior’s Arutam (his skills and knowledge} and pass them on to the women of the owner’s family, so that they would be more productive. The final ritual would expel the Muisak from the head, rendering the physical head less valuable to the village. Sometimes the warrior would keep the head, but more often than not the head, once divested of its spiritual power, would be discarded, or traded away [9]. As the whole ritual process associated with creating and utilising a Tsantsa was a lengthy one, and required extensive resources, it was not done often. 

The Shuar themselves have emphasised that it is not the head per se that interests them [10], it was the soul-power of the warrior, which was contained in the decapitated head, that was their object in creating Tsantsas. However, by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century the production of tsantsas escalated rapidly. Now women, even children might find themselves targets of head-hunting raids.  

So, how, and why did this tradition change? 

Guns for heads 

In the late nineteenth century, Europeans began to encroach on Shuar lands in search of rubber and cinchona bark, which was used to make Quinine, and this led to more interactions between the Shuar and neighbouring tribes and westerners. Quickly trade began between the groups, the Shuar providing settlers with much needed pigs, deer, salt and occasional Tsantsas, in return for cloth, machetes and guns. The dynamic changed when the settlers began raising their own livestock, the Shuar still wished to trade for goods such as machetes and guns, which made their lives easier, (they did not make their own metal) but the only thing the settlers wanted now was Tsantsas [11][12]. 

_{Webley & Scott Mk VI. Caliber .455 Collection Paul Regnier, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12346282}

A trade had rapidly grown up around Tsantsas with North American and European Museums, collectors, and souvenir hunters all eager to snap up these curious tribal artefacts. Because the numbers of Tsantsas produced for ritual purposes was so limited, demand soon outstripped supply.  

To meet this demand for Tsantsas, the Shuar and other tribes, massively increase in head-hunting raids, often using the guns they so keenly traded for. Raids involved hundreds of people, and now encompassed the murder of women and even children, who would not have previously been victims as their soul-power was considered lesser than a man’s. Frances Larson notes that the going rate for one gun was one Tsantsa, and commented that the Tsantsas on display in museums show more of the history of “white man’s gun” as an economic incentive for the Shuar to kill [13]. Tsantsas produced for trade would not be ritual Tsantsas, they were produced specifically for the open market.  

This trade in tribal curios led to many fake shrunken heads being created, with some reports of the bodies of the poor-dead in morgues being used to create Tstantsas, along with the heads of countless monkeys and sloths [14]. Some of these fakes even ended up in distinguished museums in North America and Europe.  Charlie Morgan of the Wellcome Collection, estimates that up to 80% of Tsantsas on display could in fact be fakes [15].

The Holy Grail of Ethnography 

From the enlightenment onwards western society has been obsessed with cataloguing everything, from plants and animals to humans. However, in the nineteenth century this drive to understand the world soon became a tool for justifying an ethnocentric world view. The gap created by the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the early nineteenth century, was filled the European Imperial Project. Imperialism often wore a paternalistic face, civilised western nations claimed to be improving the lives of less advanced races who were unable to govern themselves.  

_{Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, shrunken heads (pre-1946). Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)}

This Imperialist project was quick to co-opt science to support colonialist expansion. In a similar way that the pseudo-science of phrenology began as a genuine endeavour to understand how the brain worked but ended up being used to justify eugenics and racism, so ethnographic hierarchies of people (with white Europeans at top of the evolutionary tree, and brown and black races at the bottom) were used to promote a race theory which justified the ‘superior’ races colonising less civilised races. The fall-out from this is still being felt today. 

The position of Shuar peoples, never having been colonised meant they fell into that Holy Grail of Victorian Ethnography: the untouched tribe. A tribe in need of being studied and civilised.  

Education, entertainment, exploitation 

In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Human Zoos or ‘ethnological expositions’ were extremely popular. These exhibits would have people from traditional societies displayed in a ‘natural setting,’ ostensibly for the education of Western spectators, but in reality, as a way contrasting ‘primitive’ peoples and societies unfavourably to the more advanced nations of the West [16].  

_{By Henri Sicard and Farradesche Lithographers – Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41478061}

People are still drawn to the exotic and the ‘other.’  Museum visitors today, when faced with Tsantsas, often experience a sense of horror and an underlying feeling of cultural superiority, in that the viewer, is perhaps grateful that they do not belong to a culture that could produce such unnerving artefacts, that they themselves live in a ‘civilized’ culture where these things do not happen [17].  

A review by Peter Gordon in 2003, reinforced this view as he found that visitors to the Pitt Rivers Museum often viewed the Shrunken heads for entertainment purposes, using words like ‘gruesome’ ‘barbaric’ and evoked ‘a freakshow element’ [18]. This led the museum to re-evaluate their display and whether it was achieving its intended aims to teach visitors about how other cultures treated their dead enemies. 

This is in part because Tsantsas have come to represent an entire culture, this is all many people will ever know of the SAAWC peoples. Head-hunters have become synonymous with primitive and savage practices that the march of human progress has suppressed. However, this is a distortion of the rich symbolic meaning behind these sacred ritual objects. 

Should the Tsantsas head home? 

At a time when museums are being challenged to de-colonise their collections and address their imperial past, the history of the trade in shrunken heads is a timely reminder of the impact European colonisation had on the indigenous cultures they encountered.  

Greater involvement and dialogue with indigenous cultures whose artefacts, particularly those that constitute human remains, are in western museums has changed the landscape of many museums. Museums, such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, have now removed their displays of Tsantsas, and have reconsidered how they present information about indigenous cultures.  This moved has been a polarising one, with some people welcoming the change and others against it.

The debate over the role of Western museums in curating artefacts from the colonial past, especially human remains, is a highly fraught area, with excellent arguments on both sides. There is a vocal lobby for the for the role of museums as conservators of our shared past, and educators, and equally strong lobby against that, and that the views of other cultures and their struggle to regain control over their own identities and heritage should take precedence.  And of course there is also the problem of identifying real Tsantsas from the many historic fakes on display.

The issues of repatriation of cultural objects is a very controversial area, with genuine fears of great museum collections being broken up and lost forever. Use of modern technologies, such as digitised collections, contextualisation of collections and most importantly, involvement from colonised cultures could be one way to build a bridge between the rights of those cultures that were colonised alongside the valuable role of museums to protect and educate using artefacts from our shared past. I suspect this is an argument that will continue for many years to come, and may never have an outcome that will please everyone.

The last word 

But what of the people whose ancestors made these artefacts, what are their views? Currently SAAWC peoples are engaged in a political and cultural fight for survival against the pressures of mining and the oil industry, sacred objects created by their ancestors, are potent symbol of cultural unity, and many now want them returned.  Federación Interprovincial de Centros Shuar-Achuar now represent the interests of the SAAWC peoples.

The last word should go to Shuar themselves, Indigenous leaders Miguel Puwainchir and Felipe Tsenkush:

“Our ancestors handed over these sacred objects without full realising the implications” [19]

“We don’t want to be thought of as dead people to be exhibited in a museum, described in a book, or recorded on film.” [20]

I would love to hear your views on this topic.  

_{Modern Shuar dance in Logroño, Ecuador. IJlh249, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Sources

My primary inspiration for writing this article was the chapter on Tsantsas in Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Found, by Frances Larson, a fabulously witty, erudite, and thought provoking book.

Byron, C.D., Kiefer, A.M., Thomas, J. et al. The authentication and repatriation of a ceremonial tsantsa to its country of origin (Ecuador). Herit Sci 9, 50 (2021).

Harner, J, The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls, 1984

Houlton,Tobias M.R.and Wilkinson, Caroline M., Recently identified features that help to distinguish ceremonial tsantsa from commercial shrunken heads – ScienceDirect

Larson, Frances, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, 2015

McGreevy, Nora, Oxford Museum Permanently Removes Controversial Display of Shrunken Heads | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

Morgan, Charlie, Shrunken Heads Real and Fake, Wellcome Collection Blog, 27 June 2014

Peers, Laura, Shrunken Heads, (Pitt Rivers Museum publication)

Rubenstein, Steven Lee, Circulation, Accumulation, and the Power of Shuar Shrunken Heads in Cultural Anthropology Vol. 22, No. 3 (Aug., 2007), pp. 357-399 (43 pages)

shrunken « Bizzarro Bazar

Shrunken heads | Pitt Rivers Museum (ox.ac.uk)

The Pitt Rivers Museum and its Shrunken Heads – Sang Bleu

Wikipedia, Shuar

Wikipedia, Human Zoo

Notes

[1] Shuar

[2] The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls

[3] ibid

[4] ibid

[5] Oxford Museum Permanently Removes Controversial Display of Shrunken Heads

[6] Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

[7] Shrunken Heads

[8] Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

[9] ibid

[10] Shuar, Wikipedia

[11] Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

[12] Shrunken Heads

[13] Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

[14] ibid

[15] Shrunken heads real and fake

[16] Human Zoo

[17] Shrunken Heads

[18] ibid

[19] Oxford Museum Permanently Removes Controversial Display of Shrunken Heads

[20] The authentication and repatriation of a ceremonial tsantsa to its country of origin (Ecuador)

Reading a headstone – popular graveyard symbols and their meanings

Tags

cemetery symbols, Christianity, death, Felbrigg, Free masons, Funerary art, graveystone, headstones, iconography, memento mori, monuments, mourning, reading gravestones, skulls, symbols, tombstones, Victorian Death

Popular graveyard images explained

This is the companion piece to my stroll through a graveyard post, which covered a very brief history of British cemeteries and headstones. In this post, I’ll be looking at the meaning of some of the common images and symbols that can be found on historic headstones up and down the UK. It’s important to be aware that because the topic of graveyard iconography is so vast, and can vary widely depending upon locality and beliefs, this article is not intended to be comprehensive. Instead I will focus on some popular eighteenth and nineteenth century memorial styles, many of which I have come across during coronavirus inspired rambles around my local area.

Anchors

Anchors have Christian symbolism as well as a more prosaic meaning denoting sailors or the Royal Navy. In Christian tradition they go back to the catacombs of the early Christians, and were secrete symbols of Christianity, like the fish. Anchors symbolise hope[1]. The example below is from a war grave and denotes a member of the Royal Navy, the other from an earlier grave, possibly of a mariner.

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Angels

Cemeteries are often filled with sculpted angels casting their benign gaze over the graves of the Victorian departed. There are several popular types of angel with different meanings. Grieving angels drape themselves in mourning over the dismantled altar of life, angels clutching flowers rue the fleeting nature of life, praying angels emphasise religious faith. Other angels are more judgemental – the recording angel with their book and the angel Gabriel with his horn, a sentinel waiting to call the Christian dead to rise of the day of the last judgement. and some angel images are unique, such as in the monument to Mary Nichols in Highgate Cemetery, which depicts an angel sleeping on a bed of clouds.

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Arches

Arches symbolise victory of life or victory in death [2] or the gateway to heaven [3]. This would send a reassuring message to the mourners as they passed under the grand arched entrance to All Saints Cemetery in Jesmond.

All Saints Cemetery entrance, Jesmond, Newcastle.

Arrows

Arrows are memento mori, symbolising the dart of death piercing life, and can sometimes be found wielded by skeletons, to drive home the link to mortality. The arrow below is linked with a pick, symbolising mortality, and a knot which was often used to symbolise eternal life.

Books

Books can appear in a variety of forms, open, closed, piled up. They can represent the Bible or word of God, the book of life, learning. A closed book might symbolise a long life, an open or draped book can symbolise a life cut short (4). The example below acts as a Memento Mori, reminding the living that they too will die, and is augmented with a skull and bones rising up through the earth.

Chest tombs

Chest tombs were popular from the seventeenth century, the leger stone on top, with details of the deceased, was raised up on a chest-like structure. The body is not buried in the chest, but beneath the structure. The example below is from St Lawrence’s church, Eyam, Derbyshire, and incorporates the skull and crossbones iconography (the essential remains that Christians believed were required in order to rise on Judgement Day).

Cherubs

Cherubs often symbolise innocence and are popular on the tombs of children. The cherub below left is from Grey Friars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, and rests its elbow on a skull, an obvious symbol of death and mortality. The example on the right, from Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle, the cherub holds arose and flower bud, the rose can symbolise heavenly perfection or mother, while the broken bud could represent the fleeting nature of the young lives commemorated by the monument [5].

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Clouds

Clouds represent the heavens, below, an angel peeks out from behind the clouds, which are pierced by the rays of the sun.

Columns/broken columns

Columns again hark back to a classical tradition. A broken column represents a life cut short, often the head of the family. The example on the left is from Jesmond Old Cemtetery, Newcastle, while the one on the right, with the addition of a wreath for remembrance is from Highgate Cemetery, London.

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Coats of arms

Usually designates a family or individual or location. The example below seems to be from a proud Novocastrian, as it was erected in St Andrew’s church in Newcastle and the crest bears some similarity to the coast of arms of Newcastle (three towers), rather than to the family name of the deceased. It also shows a mason’s compass and set square.

Crown

The kingdom of heaven.

Doves

Doves can be seen flying downwards and upwards, with broken wings and carrying olive branches. Broadly speaking a dove flying up is the soul flying up to heaven, flying down, the holy spirit coming from heaven.

Flying faces

As discussed in my previous post A stroll through a graveyard a flying faces developed out of the Memento Mori image of the flying skull, reminding the living that they too would die. Winged skulls gradually morphed into flying faces during the eighteenth century, representing the soul flying up to heaven. Later the face became cherubic and represented innocence. The Three examples below are, from left to right, from All Saints Churchyard, Newcastle and Holy Trinity, Washington Tyne & Wear.

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Globe

See world, below.

Hands

Hands are popular motifs on headstones and can have a variety of meanings, from the hand of god coming out of the clouds, to the offering of prayers in blessings. Hands can also indicate that the deceased is going to heaven (pointing upwards) or may have died suddenly (pointing downwards). The example below left shows a handshake, which can be between a married couple or fraternal, alternatively, if one hand appears limp, it can indicate God taking the hand of the departed [6]. The example on the right shows a hand with a heart, this can indicate charity and generosity, but it can also indicate the deceased was a member of the Oddfellows fraternity [7].

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Hourglass

Hourglasses are memento mori, reminders of mortality and that life on earth passes quickly. They can appear with wings, to symbolise how ‘time flies’ and on their side, to demonstrate how time has stopped for the deceased. Below left, from an eighteenth century headstone from St Andrews, Newcastle, on the right, a more pointed link between the hour glass and mortality, from Holy Trinity, Washington, Tyne and Wear.

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Ledger stones

Ledger stones are flat against the ground and often cover family plots, the stones filling up as the graves receive more burials.

Memento Mori Scenes

Many early headstones from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries combine a variety of memento mori images into scenes designed to remind the living of their own mortality and the importance of living a good life in order to go to heaven. The examples below are from various graveyards around Newcastle and show that some masons had seemed to have a particular flair for the macabre!

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Obelisks

Obelisks are an ancient Egyptian symbol that represented life and health, and/or a ray of the sun. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, Europe was gripped by a passion for all things Egyptian. Obelisks became popular as funerary monuments, particularly in the Victorian era. On the left, obelisks in an overgrown patch of St Peters, Wallsend, and on the right, from Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle.

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Occupations

Many headstones list the occupation of the deceased, but some go further, below left is an example of an artist’s paint palette and to the right, a classical scene depicting a physician, naturally enough, on the side of the monument to a doctor.

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Portraiture

Funerary portraiture can be found on monuments and tombs from ancient times and isn’t always restricted to those of historical importance or aristocratic lineage. In the Victorian period, photography became more widespread and trends such as post mortem photography were embraced, photographs can even found on some headstones from the period. Preston Cemetery in North Shields has a rare surviving example, I viewed it once many years ago, but I’ve not been able to locate it since.

The example below left, is that of Dr James Milne at St Peter’s churchyard Wallsend (the above classical scene is also from his monument) a man well respected locally, the monument was erected by his friends. The other example shows renowned renaissance humanist scholar, and one-time tutor to Mary Queen of Scots, George Buchanan, and can be found in Grey Friars Kirkyard, Edinburgh.

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Scythes

Memento mori symbols, carried by Death or the grim reaper, symbolising the cutting off of life. The example below, from Grey Friars Kirkyard incorporates the hourglass to emphasise the fleetingness of time.

Sexton’s tools

Sexton’s are the church officials who look after the churchyard and dig graves. Their tools can appear on gravestones as an indication of their occupation, or more generally as a symbol of mortality. This example is from the Covenanters Prison, in Grey Friars Kirkyard, Edinburgh.

Shells

Shells can be used as a decorative motif, but also have a Christian origin, in particular scallop shells are associated with pilgrimages (still popular today on the Camino Trail). After the Jacobite rebellions in the eighteenth century, they could also be a political gesture, indicating allegiance with the king over the water. The example below is from the seventeenth century mausoleum of the infamous Bloody Mackenzie in Grey Friars Kirkyard.

Skulls

Whether winged or floating above cross bones, skulls represent mortality and act as Memento Mori. Trevor Yorke notes that from the medieval period onwards, it was believed that the skull and crossbones were the bare minimum bodily parts required to ensure resurrection on the day of judgement.

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Left, a particularly sinister looking winged skull from an eighteenth century headstone in St Margaret’s, Felbrigg, Norfolk. Right, skull and crossbones from a seventeenth century chest tomb in St Lawrence’s, Eyam, Derbyshire.

Snakes/Ouroborus

Originally an ancient Egyptian symbol for health that entered the western tradition via the Greek Ouroboros, a snake swallowing it’s own tail, symbolises eternal life. This example is from All Saints Cemetery, Jesmond, Newcastle.

Here the Ouroboros symbol for eternal life is coupled with the scythe symbolic of death.

Square and compass (Masonic/Freemasons)

The square and compass is a found on the funerary monuments of members of the Freemasons, often accompanied by a ‘G’ representing God and Geometry. The Square and compass are a reminder to Freemasons to keep their actions within the tenets of Freemasonry [8].

Table tombs

Table tombs have the ledger stone on top, supported by legs and forming a table structure. The burial is beneath. The examples below are from Tynemouth Priory in Tyne and Wear.

Torches

Torches represent human life, death, and eternal life. If they are pointing down and have no flame they represent a life extinguished, whereas if they are pointing down but still alight the represent the eternal life of the soul. The example below symbolises bodily death but the eternal life of the soul.

Urns

Urns hark back to the funerary urns of ancient Greece, in which cremated remains would be interred. They became popular from the eighteenth century and endured into the Victorian period, possibly because they denote the body being cast off in preparation for the souls journey to heaven [9]. They could also appear with flames atop – symbolising the eternal flame of friendship or religious fervour. Other urns appear are covered with drapery, which can symbolised the curtain between life and death or the casting off of worldly garments[10] and often denoted the death of an older person [11] (and when coupled with a weeper, became a popular classical image).

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These examples are from Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle.

Wheatsheaves

Wheatsheaves are most often associated with a long life, although where only few stalks are found, this can indicate that the deceased was young. The example below, from Grey Friars Kirkyard, is combined with a skull and crossbones.

Women in mourning (weepers)

The image of a woman, with loose flowing hair, mourning over a tomb or an urn, was very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In this example from Jesmond, the weeper holds a wreath (see below for meaning).

World (globe)

The world or globe image represents worldly pleasure and is often coupled with death in order to emphasis the wages of worldly pleasure (and sin) are death, as shown in these examples from Grey Friars Kirkyard, Edinburgh.

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Wreaths

Wreaths are classical in origin, being awarded to athletes in the ancient Olympic games. In funerary art their circular shape represents eternal memory. Wreaths of bay leaves represent triumph over death, while wreaths of roses, like the example below, from Highgate Cemetery, London, can represent virtue and heavenly bliss (12).

This list represents only a snippet of the cemetery symbols that can be found. I hope this encourages you to go out and explore your local historic cemeteries and graveyards and to be able to read some of the richly symbolic funerary language used by our ancestors. Please remember to be quiet and respectful when you visit your local historic cemeteries, some may still be in use, and many monuments may be fragile.

Happy headstone hunting!

Sources

BBC – London – History – Victorian Memorial Symbols

Snider, Tui, 2017, Understanding Cemetery Symbols

Symbolism Meaning: Animals – Art of Mourning

Symbols – TheCemeteryClub.com

The Symbolism of Victorian Funerary Art – Undercliffe Cemetery

Yorke, Trevor, 2017, Gravestones, Tombs & Memorials

Notes

1. The Cemetery Club, Symbols
2. ibid
3. BBC, Victorian Memorial Symbols
4. Tui Snider, Understanding Cemetery Symbols
5. ibid
6. ibid
7. ibid
8. ibid
9. ibid
10. ibid
11. The Cemetery Club, Symbols

Available now on Amazon! The Haunted Mirror: History, Folklore and the Supernatural, from the Haunted Palace Blog

Tags

dark history, folklore, Ghosts, Haunted Palace book, haunted palace collection, Macabre, new book, supernatural

Published 16 May 2021, 230 pages

Paperback £8.99

Kindle £3.99

Buy now on Amazon, click here: The Haunted Mirror: History, Folklore and the Supernatural from the Haunted Palace Blog (The Haunted Palace Blog Collection): Amazon.co.uk: ., Lenora, Jessel, Miss: 9798505220504: Books

_@chknstyn

A compendium of dark history, strange folklore and mysterious hauntings culled from the Haunted Palace Blog. Lenora and Miss Jessel have selected and re-worked some of their favourite posts for your enjoyment.

Did you know that a prodigious palace once stood in the London Borough of Wanstead and Woodford but a dissolute Earl threw it all away, leaving his heart-broken wife to haunt its ruins forever? Or that Victorian tourists flocked to the grim spectacle provided by the Paris Morgue – the best free theatre in town? Or that a murderous jester is reputed to have lured people to their deaths at a castle in Cumbria? Join us as we explore a past populated by highwaymen, murderers, eccentrics, and lost souls.

Lavishly illustrated with specially commissioned art, engravings and photographs from the Haunted Palace Collection, and national collections.

@igamagination

The Art of the Pickpocket and Cutpurse: Schools of Fobology – Part 1

Tags

child crime, crime, cut purses, Fagan, pickpockets, poverty, slums, theft

Training with Fagin

When the breakfast was cleared away, the merry old gentleman and the two boys played at a very curious and uncommon game…The merry old gentleman, placing a snuff-box in one pocket of his trousers, a note-case in the other, and a watch in his waistcoat pocket, with a guard chain round his neck, and sticking a mock diamond pin his shirt, buttoned his coat right round him, and putting his spectacle-case and handkerchief in his pockets, trotted up and down the room with a stick…All this time the two boys followed him closely about; getting out of his sight so nimbly, every time he turned round…If the old gentleman felt a hand in any one of his pockets he cried out where it was; and then the game began all over again. [1]

“The merry old gentleman’s pretty little game” by Frederic W. Pailthorpe — seventh illustration for “Oliver Twist” (1886) (victorianweb.org)

This passage from Oliver Twist is the most famous description of the training of young thieves in literature. Although it is a fictional account, as with all Dickens’ books it was taken from real life stories and events he had witnessed, read about or heard of from the people involved. The details of how pickpockets learnt their trade are corroborated by numerous factual accounts and Saffron Hill where Dickens placed The Three Cripples, Bill Sikes favourite alehouse was actually a lodging house in the Victorian period. Next to the lodging house was a pub called The One Tun which Dickens patronised. This public house was established in 1759, and is one of only two pubs of this name still in existence and trading in London today[2].

The One Tun of Old Pye Street

Incredibly there was another One Tun public house during the same period which also boasted a connection to Dickens. Although both pubs were located in slums, the pub in Old Pye Street managed to reach new lows even in a city noted for areas of abject poverty. The name of this infamous area of London paints a vivid picture – The Devil’s Acre. The Devil’s Acre was only a few yards from Westminster Abbey and the prestigious houses which surrounded it. The irony of its location was not missed by Dickens who wrote “The most lordly streets are frequently but a mask for the squalid districts which lie behind them, whilst spots consecrated to the most hallowed of purposes are begirt by scenes of indescribably infamy and pollution; the blackest tide of moral turpitude that flows in the capital rolls its filthy wavelets up to the very walls of Westminster Abbey”[3]. This notorious rookery (a popular slang word for slum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) with its narrow streets, gloomy alleyways, overcrowded and dilapidated buildings was home to thousands of destitute and poor inhabitants, many of whom eked out a meagre living through criminal activities and prostitution.

Dorset Street 1902. Jack London, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The pub in Old Pye Street was known to be a hideout for a thief-trainer and his boys, orphans who had been taken off the streets. On a visit, Andrew Walker, a member of The City of London Mission, was horrified to find the children living in such a place. He nicknamed it ‘The School of Fobology’[4] and witnessed first-hand, children being taught the art of pickpocketing. His report so shocked the Mission that the wealthy philanthropist, Adeline Cooper in 1853, bought the pub and along with the famous social reformer, the Earl of Shaftesbury, founded the first Ragged School which gave free basic education for poor children. Interestingly the landlord left without paying his rent and stripped the pub of all its furnishings and fittings. By 1871, the school had around 133 pupils[5].

The Billigsgate Cutpurses

One of the earliest known schools of theft was found at an alehouse at Smarts Key near Billingsgate in 1585. It was run by Wotton, a gentleman who had fallen on hard times. The Recorder, Fleetwood, wrote that somehow Wotton convinced all the cutpurses in the area to come to his house. He set up a school to train thieves and devised some ingenious methods to help them learn their trade. Two objects were hung from the roof, one a pocket and the other a purse. The pocket contained counters and was hung up with hawk’s bells and a little scaring bell. The purse held silver. The boys would try to remove a counter and the silver without disturbing the bells. Those that managed to get the counter became a “public foyster”(pick-pocket) and those that took out the silver was “adjudged a judicial nypper” (cutpurse or pick-purse)[6].

Life on the Streets

Amongst the filth and poverty and largely ignored were the street children. Neglected and abandoned both by their parents who were often in prison, absent or dead and society to whom they were either invisible or treated like vermin, they stole to survive. The large number of children in prison or in Houses of Correction is heart-breaking. In 1849, in England and Wales 10,460 children under 17 had been arrested and convicted[7]. Living on the streets, preferable to the brutal workhouse, was dangerous and so many preferred to band together into child gangs as there was safety in numbers.

See page for author, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It is therefore no wonder that the professional thief-trainers had their pick of candidates. For street children suffering malnutrition and living in filth this represented a step up as they would gain a roof over their head and food in their belly. Thief-trainers would look out for boys and girls who were quick, sharp and steady. Sometimes they would notice a child stealing and approach them. If the child was good-looking this would be another point in their favour.

As well as teaching them the tools of their trade they would also instruct them on how to behave and dress in fashionable places such as railway stations and race-courses so they could blend in with the crowd. As for the thief-trainers they gained a source of income and knew that if the child got caught it was nearly impossible to trace the crime back to them and so they could “concoct crimes with a readiness and a recklessness arising only from impunity”.[8]

“Oliver amazed at the Dodger’s mode of going to work,” fifth illustration of “Oliver Twist” by George Cruikshank (victorianweb.org)

How to be a Thief

Nearly two hundred years later the Annual Register of the 5 March 1756, records another school which had managed to achieve notoriety[9]. The school was sited in a public house near Fleet Market where a club of boys were instructed on pickpocketing. Taken from the evidence given by the four boys who were arrested, an idea emerges of the techniques and skills which the boys were taught at this school.

Stage One: The ability to remove a handkerchief out of the thief trainer’s pocket and then a watch. They were taught to go for small light objects such as scarf pins which were easy to remove and hide; how to bump into and distract their prey; and where they could find the best pickings such as at crowded fairs and firework displays. Practice made perfect and eventually the trainee thief could remove the items without the owner being aware that their property had gone.

Image courtesy of www.janeaustenslondon.com

Stage Two: The next stage was how to pilfer from a shop. The first important step was to choose a shop with a hatch. One boy would distract the owner or manager by gaining entry whilst the other would lie on his belly close to the hatch. The hatch would be left slightly ajar when the first boy left. Once the owner had disappeared from the shop floor the second boy would crawl in on all fours and take whatever items they could, including money from the till. They would then escape the same way.

Stage Three: This stage saw the pickpocket move on to breaking and entering. Here they were instructed to work in pairs. The boys would be sent to a potentially lucrative target and pretend to be beggars. They would then lie down under the shop’s window and feign sleep whenever someone passed them. During the intervals when they were unobserved they would scrape out the mortar from around the bricks in the wall (which were usually thin and poorly constructed). Once they had a hole big enough, one of them would crawl in and steal anything they could carry and the other would hide the gap with his body, pretending to be asleep[10].

Lodging Houses and Flash Houses

Lodging houses also gained a bad reputation and as with public houses sometimes functioned as schools for thieves. These schools flourished during the Victorian era largely due to the end of apprenticeships and the march of industrialisation which worsened conditions in the slums.

Generally the training techniques did not vary that much wherever the children received their education. An unidentified lodging house trained both boys and girls (girls were often used as decoys and could be more successful as thieves since they could get closer to wealthy ladies without arousing suspicion). In this school a doll was hung up and dressed in the image of a gentleman or lady and a purse placed in its pocket. The purse contained 6 old pence and a bell. Again the children had to remove the money without ringing the bell[11].

Pubs because they sold alcohol were seen as places of vice and disrepute and so it is not surprising that they often became centres “for thieves and other evil-doers”[12]. Those pubs which had a particularly bad reputation became known as ‘flash-houses’ and were labelled “nurseries of crime”[13]. It was believed that in the first half of the 1800s, at least 200 flash-houses functioned in London. Here the police and crooks would drink side by side. Often the police ignored any dubious goings on within their walls such as the fencing of stolen goods since they provided such a rich source of information for any more serious criminal activities in the area. The infamous Mrs Jennings of the Red Lion in White Cross Street ran a very profitable flash-house where she acted as a fence, hiding goods behind cupboards and at the same time controlled a number of boys and girls who reported to her and lived with her [14].

Final Thoughts

In my mind the image of the Victorian thief and their training will always bring to mind Ron Moody from the musical Oliver dressed in a tatty green coat with handkerchiefs hanging out of his pockets dancing and singing You’ve got to pick a pocket or two to a group of cheerful urchins. Although, I know that in reality life for these children was far from jovial, I do find it fascinating that the musical does in its own way show the reality of how juvenile pickpockets and cutpurses were trained.

So who were the thief-trainers? That is another post…

Ron Moody as Fagin in Carol Reed’s 1968 musical drama film, Oliver!

Bibliography

Thomson, J. & Smith, Adolphe: Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – Street Life in London, 1877, http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications/thomson-35.htm

Garwood, John: Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – The Million-Peopled City, 1853, http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications4/peopled-01.htm

Rookeries, flash houses and academies of vice, https://forromancereaders.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/rookeries-flash-houses-and-academies-of-vice/

Slum Living: London’s Rookeries-, http://georgianlondon.com/post/49461306842/slum-living-londons-rookeries

Cholera and the Thames: The Devil’s Acre, https://www.choleraandthethames.co.uk/cholera-in-london/cholera-in-westminster/the-devils-arce/

White, Jerry: London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘a Human Awful Wonder of God’,  Bodley Head , 2016

Hindley, Charles (ed.): Curiosities of Street Literature: Comprising ‘Cocks,’ Or ‘Catchpennies’, Palala Press, 2012

Lower Thames Street, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol2/pp41-60

Saffron Hill, https://exploring-london.com/tag/the-three-cripples/

Day, Samuel Philips: Juvenile Crime: Its Causes, Character, and Cure, Samuel Phillips Day, (originally published 1858), 2014

Rookery (slum), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rookery_(slum)

Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist

Plaque: One Tun pub – Saffron Hill, https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/one-tun-pub-saffron-hill

The One Tun Ragged School, Perkins Rents, c.1870, http://www.museumoflondonprints.com/image/750780/the-one-tun-ragged-school-perkins-rents-c-1870

Rookeries, flash houses and academies of vice, https://forromancereaders.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/rookeries-flash-houses-and-academies-of-vice/

One Tun, 3 Perkins Rents, St John, Westminster, https://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/WestminsterStJohn/OneTun.shtml

Notes

[1] Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

[2] Plaque: One Tun pub – Saffron Hill

[3] The Devil’s Acre

[4] Cholera and the Thames – The Devil’s Acre

[5] The One Tun Ragged School, Perkins Rents, c.1870

[6] Thames Street

[7] Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – The Million-Peopled City

[8] Juvenile Crime: Its Causes, Character, and Cure

[9] Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – The Million-Peopled City

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] One Tun, 3 Perkins Rents, St John, Westminster

[13] Juvenile Crime: Its Causes, Character, and Cure

[14] Rookeries, flash houses and academies of vice

A Stroll through a graveyard: a very brief history of British cemeteries

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burial, burial practice, Cemeteries, charnel house, Christian burial, churchyards, Graveyards, headstones, history, monuments, tombstones, Victorian Cemeteries, victorian graveyards

With the Coronavirus lockdowns of 2020/2021 many of us have had to find our pleasures closer to home than usual.  One of my favourite past-times has been visiting some of my local graveyards and taking a leisurely stroll amongst the tombstones and monuments.

Overgrown urban cemeteries and churchyards provide a haven for nature, an escape from the bustle of the modern world, and respite from the claustrophobia of a national lockdown. Often protected from traffic and pollution, and hidden from sight behind high walls, they can easily be overlooked by passers by. Yet within those high walls you can find butterflies dancing on delicate wildflowers, squirrels sheltering in the branches of ancient trees and foxes hiding amongst the tangled brambles.  Cemeteries are also steeped in cultural history and rich in public art, with elaborate memorials and tombs, describing a rich and varied iconography of death and remembrance. I have done a separate post on some of the common cemetery symbols found on headstones.

As the subject of burial and funeral monuments is a vast one, this article will be by nature selective, focusing mainly on traditional Christian burial practices found in mainly English cemeteries and churchyards. However, it is important to note that there are also many examples of different regional styles and practices as well as those of other faiths, all of which can also be found in our historic graveyards.

A very brief history of traditional British cemeteries and their monuments

Romans, Saxons and Medieval burial

Many British churchyards sit on much older pre-Christian burial grounds, and may contain remnants of those earlier times, occasionally these remnants can be seen today. It has been suggested that the Romans may have invented (or at least developed the idea of) the headstone as we know it [1]. The Roman tombstone below (L) can be found in Holy Trinity Churchyard, Washington, Tyne and Wear, and does look remarkably similar to later headstones.

Medieval churchyards did not contain many stone grave markers, so were ideal places for community activities such as fairs and village games (until the puritans put a stop to jollity, that is). Often the only stone monument was a large cross, although many of these were destroyed during the Reformation of the sixteenth century [2]. The example below (M) is the Mercian Cross, a Saxon cross from the eighth-tenth centuries, which can be found in St Lawrence’s church, Eyam, Derbyshire. In this period, only those of very high status would merit an individual burial and memorial, many people would expect to end up in a charnel house. Initially ‘wet’ bodies (i.e. fresh, fleshy bodies) were stored in stone coffins until they decomposed and became ‘dry’ (i.e. bones). The bones would then be stacked in the charnel house. The stone coffins below (R) can be seen at Tynemouth Priory, Tyne and Wear. If you were wondering where the corpse liquor went, some stone coffins also contained a hole to let it drain out [3].

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From pomp and purgatory to the resurrection men

Richard Fleming’s tomb and chantry chapel, Lincoln Cathedral.

Our relationship with the dead has changed over time. Purgatory as an actual place was introduced as a concept from the late twelfth/early thirteenth centuries. This lead to a drive to encourage the living to ease the passage of the deceased through purgatory with prayer. Gruesome monuments, such as Cadaver Tombs, (which depicted the deceased as rotting corpses) were often linked to chantry chapels to elicit prayers for the dead. This provided the living a sense of moral and religious satisfaction while assisting the dead towards  salvation [4, 5]. Other, less macabre tomb monuments, called gisants, emphasised the earthly status of the deceased, showed them in fine regalia, as if in prayer or sleeping.

The Gisant style monument for Sir Ralph Grey (d1443) and his wife, Elizabeth. St Peter’s church, Chillingham, Northumberland.

While most people in the medieval period were buried in unmarked graves, tombs or memorials of the great and (often not so) good were sighted inside churches and the higher the status of the deceased, the closer to the altar (and God) they would be placed. In later times this also protected the dead from body snatchers. This resulted in some very dubious practices, such as at Enon Chapel in London, where cut price burials resulted in the dead being piled up to the rafters in a tiny crypt, in order to line the pockets of the rapacious minister.   In the past, these intramural burials in churches were notorious for causing a bit of a stink (and worse in the case of Enon chapel), but such burials can result in problems even today. Recently, the floor of Bath Abbey, which is paved with ledger stones, flat grave markers, was restored to stop the floor sinking into the cavities caused by the decayed bodies beneath. (Somerset Live).

The Reformation of the church in the sixteenth century, which made the concept of purgatory redundant for many, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 that ousted the party-pooping puritans, combined with a rising class of wealthier farmers and merchants, created a sea-change in funeral monuments. From the end of the seventeenth century churchyards begin to fill up with tombstones, recording personal status, family ties, occupation and epitaphs, as well as some very macabre iconography [6].

As with burials inside the church, burials outside had their pecking order. Burial on the east side of a churchyard was preferred, with the body facing east in order to rise on the day of judgement. Burial on the north side was reserved for the illegitimate, criminals, suicides and strangers, and was therefore a less favourable location [7]. There is a wonderful description of this in MR James’s The Ash Tree, the executed witch, Mrs Mothersole, is said to have been buried on ‘that unhallowed side of the building‘. In some areas these ‘undesirable’ burials would take place outside the church yard itself or the corpse would have to be unceremoniously bundled over the wall of the churchyard, after being refused the usual welcome by the vicar at the lych-gate [8].

While post mortem social status was a pressing issue for some, from the late eighteenth century, body snatchers were a real fear for many. This was the case right up until the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832 (which solved the problem of supply of cadavers for the anatomists table by co-opting the corpses of the poor and destitute). To protect the dearly departed from such ‘resurrection men’ elaborate precautions were put in place and they can still be found in some graveyards today.

Image by https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/0a/b0/95f14983a9a287f3932cd1e71806.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0010462.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-24): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/b2gb3sp8 CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36452434

Famous examples of post mortem protection can be found in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh which boasts a very fine mortsafe.  While the infamous Burke and Hare may have preferred to obtain their bodies by seeking out ‘future corpses'[9] in the drinking dens of the old Town, many others were stealing corpses from graveyards to supply Edinburgh’s famous medical schools. 

Tombstone trends

As more people were able to afford permanent grave markers, churchyards began to fill up and certain styles of headstone became popular. Headstones began short and stout, gradually becoming taller and less chunky as the centuries progressed – although this could depend on the quality of the local stone. More elaborate ornamentation and inscriptions became popular, however, the execution of the design could depend on the skill of the mason, many of whom may have been illiterate, as is seen below.

The examples above, from St Andrew’s, Newcastle, and Tynemouth Priory, Tynemouth, show eighteenth century grave stones with the text cramped together, of uneven size, and occasionally with words broken over lines. The example on the right also shows some naïve attempts at decoration.

The size difference between the early 18th Century gravestone on the left, and the nineteenth century one on the right. St Peter’s Church, Chillingham.

These headstones were often in three parts – decoration at the top, details about the deceased (names, dates, occupation, family ties) then an epitaph or scriptural quote at the bottom. Some stones also have the mason’s name as well.

These earlier grave stones had their inscriptions facing away from the actual burial plot, and some had a ‘body stone’ covering the burial, or a small ‘footstone’ indicating the length of the grave. In some cases the direction of the headstone was reoriented by the Victorians. The Victorians often marked the limits of a grave or family plot using kerbstones or railings [10].

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As the times changed, so did decorative motifs, one of the most notable metamorphosis being that of the infamous grinning skull and crossbones. This first evolved into a flying head before morphing into a chubby cheeked cherub (a more sentimental, but no less disquieting images, to my mind).

Seventeenth and early eighteenth century skull and crossbones motifs, usually found in the top section of decoration, acted as a memento mori, reminding the living that they too would soon be dust (so they should behave themselves and lead good lives). This tradition evolved into flying faces, which symbolised the soul flying up to heaven, and later still, in the late Georgian and Victorian period, morphed into flying angels/cherubs, symbolising innocence (they were often used on the graves of children [11].

The taste for the macabre in graveyard symbols lingered well into the eighteenth century, but by the closing decades, tombstones could be found with tranquil classical iconography, in keeping with Georgian taste for all things ancient Roman and Greek. 

Late eighteenth century tombstone with classical motifs, St Andrew’s, Newcastle.

By the nineteenth century, it was the rising urban middle classes who drove the developments of tombstone designs.  Huge gothic follies, classical urns and columns sprouted up across the land. Crosses and Angels as grave markers even made a come-back, shunned after the Reformation and centuries of anti-Catholic feeling in England, they underwent a renaissance in the nineteenth century and can be found in abundance in many Victorian cemeteries. 

Victorian Gothic, the funerary monument of the Reed family, at Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle.

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Angels and crosses from Highgate Cemetery, London, Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle and Tynemouth Priory, Tyne and wear.

The Civic minded Victorians also came up with the concept of the Garden Cemetery, situated in the suburbs, laid out like parks and dotted with attractive grave monuments, these cemeteries not only addressed the problems of overfull and unsanitary urban burial grounds, but made a visit to the grave of a loved one into a pleasurable day out [12]. 

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The difference between the overcrowded headstones in Bunhill burial ground, in use in the centre of London since the seventeenth century, and the elegant nineteenth century suburban garden cemetery, in this case Jesmond Old Cemetery in Newcastle, was plain to see.

The Victorians also helped to democratise death, through their more industrialised production techniques, machine cutting inscriptions, standardised patterns, and a budget range of guinea graves, and community burial clubs. As the nineteenth century progressed more and more people could have a permanent marker to meet their budget. The downside of this was that the idiosyncratic and personal memorials of earlier times were often replaced with standard shapes, such as the ubiquitous lancet gravestone,  and more generic  religious or moral sentiments. Of course, this doesn’t meant that the families and friends of the departed grieved any less, only that the outward language of death and the business of burial had become more of an industry [13, 14].

The ubiquitous lancet headstones found in Victorian cemeteries across Britain.

New materials also played their part, with machine cut inscriptions, lead lettering and occasional iron headstones (very appropriate for such an industrial age).

This unusual but appropriate iron headstone was chosen for William Crawford, an Iron Founder, and can be found in Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle. Unfortunately, it has weathered badly.

The twentieth century saw the mass death of the First World War, with Cenotaphs, empty tombs, for recording the deaths of millions, and many soldiers buried on foreign shores.  You can find the occasional pristine war grave, striking in its simple poignancy, amongst the unruly ivy clad headstones of a previous era. However, it was inevitable that death on such an industrial scale, with so many families left grieving without a body to bury, would cause a fundamental change in how the dead were commemorated, World War I was the beginning of the end of the lavish Victorian way of death. 

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Gone but not forgotten. A solitary war grave sits amongst older graves at Church Bank Cemetery in Wallsend; while a war grave from 1917, in Jesmond Old Cemetery, is adorned with a recent poppy tribute.

Today, in Britain, cremation far outstrips burial, nevertheless, you can still find some unique and personal grave monuments on occasion. A particularly poignant example can be found in Westgate Crematorium in Newcastle, where a huge black marble edifice stands for a young man, dead before his time, and which includes a marble motorbike. While this may not be to every ones taste, it is a unique and very personal memorial.

There has been a church on this site since the 12th Century, St Peter’s church was rebuilt in 1809 and remodelled in 1892. Wallsend, North Tyneside.

Who lies beneath

Cemeteries are filled with the famous and not so famous, all with their individual tales that remind us that these mossy and ivy cloaked monuments hid the bones of people just like us, who lived and loved and sometimes suffered.

Dame Mary Page, 1729, Bunhilll, London

Grave monuments could be very personal in the eighteenth century, one could say, too personal, as this famous monument to Dame Mary Page at Bunhill cemetery in London demonstrates. The unfortunate Dame Mary died in 1729, the inscription describes her final years “In 67 months she was tap’d [tapped] 66 times, Had taken away 240 gallons of water without ever repining at her case or ever fearing the operation.”

The Keenleyside Monument, 1841/2, Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle

This canopied monument featuring a reclining cherub rests beneath mature trees in Jesmond Old Cemetery and hides a terrible family tragedy. The monument was erected by Thomas William and Louisa Keenleyside in memory of their children, Eleanor, 2 years old, Charles, 12 years old, and James who was 10 years old. The children died in quick succession between December 1841 to January 1842, victims of the Cholera epidemic that raged through the city. Epidemics and other diseases such as scarlet fever were common in the Victorian period, and could rip through a family taking siblings one after another. It is hard to comprehend how Thomas and Louisa came to terms with this heart wrenching loss, although this monument may have been part of that process.

Tom Sayers, 1865, Highgate Cemetery, London

You would be forgiven for thinking this monument in London’s Highgate Cemetery was the grave of a large dog, but in fact is commemorates Tom Sayers, Victorian superstar prize-fighting bare-knuckle boxer, who died in 1865. Sayers had a turbulent personal life, so the chief mourner at his funeral was his mastiff, Lion, who rode alone in a pony cart behind the hearse. Sayers kept the hound next to him even in death, and Lion was immortalised by sculptor Morton Edwards and forms the most prominent feature of Sayers monument [15].

Epilogue

For me, the apogee of cemetery design came in the nineteenth century, when over-crowded, unsanitary urban cemeteries, such as Bunhill Fields, were replaced with leafy suburban garden cemeteries.  Highgate cemetery, Abney Park and Kensal Green were intended as pleasure grounds as much as for memorialising the dead.  Recently, I have spent many hours exploring my local cemeteries and churchyards, discovering fascinating facts about my area – the pastoral poet buried in the centre of Newcastle, the Georgian composer, organist and music critic buried in St Andrews, as well as countless ordinary people, whose lives flicker before us briefly in their epitaphs.

Ledger stone for eighteenth century Newcastle composer and organist Charles Avison. Avison died in 1770, but the ledger stone was replaced in the nineteenth century.

The Coronavirus pandemic has claimed so many lives, however, once the pandemic itself has entered into the pages of history, I hope that we will not forget the quite pleasures of walking in these public gardens of the past and experiencing that fleeting connection with those who have gone before us.

All Saints, Newcastle.

Part 2 will look at the meaning behind some of the symbols found on headstones.

Sources

Cohen, Kathleen, 1973, Metamorphosis of a death symbol

King, Pamela, 1987, Contexts of the cadaver tomb in fifteenth century England

Morgan, Alan, 2004, Beyond the Grave, Exploring Newcastle’s Burial Grounds

Ross, Peter, 2020, A Tomb With a View, The Stories and Glories of Graveyards

Rutherford, Sarah, 2008, The Victorian Cemetery

Snider, Tui, 2017, Understanding Cemetery Symbols

Victorian Web, Funerary monument to Thomas Sayers (1826-1865), Western Cemetery, Highgate, London N.6. (victorianweb.org)

Yorke, Trevor, 2017, Gravestones, Tombs & Memorials

Notes

1. Alan Morgan, Beyond the Grave, Exploring Newcastle’s Burial Grounds
2. Trevor Yorke, Understanding Gravestones, Tombs & Memorials
3. ibid
4. Pamela King, Contexts of the cadaver tomb in fifteenth century England
5. Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a death symbol
6. Trevor Yorke, Understanding Gravestones, Tombs & Memorials
7. Tui Snider, Understanding Cemetery Symbols
8. Peter Ross, A Tomb with a View, The Stories and Glories of Graveyards
9. The Order of the Good Death (death positive movement)
10. Trevor Yorke, Understanding Gravestones, Tombs & Memorials
11. Tui Snider, Understanding Cemetery Symbols
12. Sarah Rutherford, The Victorian Cemetery
13. Tui Snider, Understanding Cemetery Symbols
14. Trevor Yorke, Understanding Gravestones, Tombs & Memorials
15. Victorian Web, Funerary monument to Thomas Sayers

Which Mortality Remindin’ Shirt is for You? | The Order of the Good Death

The White Plague: TB the world’s forgotten killer

Tags

Caves, Consumption, cures, Dr Croghan, Hospital, HP Lovecraft, medical history, Scrofula, TB, Tuberculosis, underground

Dr Croghan and the Coughing Cave People

In the state of Kentucky, beneath a national park, you will find the longest known cave system in the world. Mammoth Cave lives up to its name, comprising more that 630km (400 miles) of known passageways, but it is not the geology which is the subject of this blog. It is a story so dark and extraordinary that it has inspired visitors to believe that even now, they still hear spectral coughing in the endless caverns.

Mammoth Caves, Kentucky by Dr. Nuno Carvalho de Sousa Private Collections – Lisbon Date: 1887. Public domain.

In  1842, a Kentucky doctor lead a group of volunteers to live deep within the bowels of the cave, in the pitch-darkness, for months on end. Who was Dr John Croghan? And why did he believe that leading 15 patients into the unique conditions of Mammoth Cave may be the key to treating tuberculosis?

Tuberculosis

In the nineteenth century, Tuberculosis was an un-treatable condition. Germ theory was not yet dominant in understanding the cause of disease, and a working antibiotic would not be developed for more than 100 years, meaning that this mysterious illness was most often a death sentence. Known variably as Consumption, Pthisis, Scrofula, and the White Plague, Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease which most commonly affects the respiratory system. Those who did survive would frequently suffer with flare-ups and respiratory difficulties for the rest of their lives.

Dropsy Courting Consumption, Thomas Rowlandson, 1810. Public Domain.

The most common lay term for Tuberculosis was Consumption, referring to the wasting effects of the disease. This rapid weight loss, pale skin, and fever lead to a gaunt and spectral appearance and extreme fatigue. Much has been made in historiography and popular culture of the ways in which Tuberculosis was portrayed at the time as a ‘romantic disease’, revealing the sensibility of the sufferer, and leading to the creation of some of the world’s greatest art and literature. So influential was this romanticization of tuberculosis that it became fashionable for both women and men to be waif-thin, emphasize their collarbones, and powder their faces to appear as pale and feverish as possible.

Late-stage tuberculosis is nonetheless extremely uncomfortable for those infected and, despite this morbid link between beauty, genius, and death in the wealthier sections of society, tuberculosis did not discriminate based on class and was an epidemic of biblical proportions amongst the lower classes in urban areas.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, a great deal of effort and resource was being invested by the learned men and philanthropists of the age to find a cure and a means to prevent transmission. Though medical professionals disagreed about the cause of the disease, many understood it to be contagious and public health campaigns often encouraged quarantine (a next to impossible feat in the cramped and squalid conditions in which poor and working-class individuals lived and worked). Meanwhile, charitable organisations funded sanatoriums to separate sufferers from the general populous, and learned men continued to argue and debate over their observations and experimental treatments.

Unfortunately, their valiant efforts were limited by contemporary understanding of what diseases were and how they were transmitted. Whilst Galenic medicine and the notion that diseases were caused by an imbalance in the four humours continued a significant decline as a prevalent way of understanding the body and diagnosing patients throughout the nineteenth century, treatments for diseases did not keep pace with the new discoveries of anatomy and pathology. For this reason, despite the improvements in observation and diagnosis, the treatment for many diseases by even the most preeminent doctors continued in the tradition of focusing on emetics, bleeding, and regimen. The term ‘regimen’ refers to a prescribed daily routine based the idea that certain food, drinks, locations, and temperatures may have an impact on the health of patients. However, the prevailing, and best available treatment for tuberculosis in the early and mid-nineteenth century was bed rest, short walks, and fresh air.

Dr John Croghan and the Mammoth Cave

John Croghan of Louisville, Kentucky was a doctor from a wealthy local family, searching for a treatment for tuberculosis. Having worked as a founder and director of the Louisville Marine Hospital from 1823 to 1832, he was himself diagnosed with Tuberculosis. In 1839, Croghan purchased 2,000 acres of land, including Mammoth Cave, and several enslaved individuals for $10,000. Part of his intention was to profit from the tours of the cave, which had been started in 1816. However, Croghan also had another motive…

His plan was to open a large health resort deep within the cave system. The foundation of his experimental treatment was to use the temperate climate of the cave, and its presumed stabilizing effect on the body to potentially temper or cure tuberculosis. Croghan noted the steady temperature of the cave and believed the air to have curative properties, observing that other organic matter did not appear to wither or decay in the cave. Croghan confirmed 11 tuberculosis patients, four companions, and the child of a patient to live in the cave over the winter of 1842.

The logic of the assumption that the conditions in the cave may improve their condition rested in the humoral tradition, whereby respiratory issues were usually attributed to an excess of phlegm; an imbalance of coldness and wetness. Therefore, the appropriate treatment to correct this imbalance was to maintain a consistent, temperate environment, devoid of changes and extremes, as could be experienced in Mammoth Cave. (This may seem an odd logic but to this day, you may still receive advice that exposure to intemperate climates and wetness may induce illness, despite nigh on a century of evidence that colds are caused by viruses. Thus, still why we refer to rhinoviruses as the common ‘cold’.)

The characteristics of the cave which Dr Croghan chose seemed ideal for his purpose. In the winter of 1842, Dr Croghan led his patients down into the caves where they, as far as we know, willingly engaged in his experiment. They were to live in the cave indefinitely, or until they were well enough to leave. The residents of the cave had little access to anything beyond the meals delivered to them by enslaved people. Photographs show individuals standing and sitting on simple stone and wooden huts, some of which are still standing to this day in the belly of the cave.

Consumptive’s Room, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-64952)

For five months, Dr Croghan’s patients lived as a commune in the depths of the limestone caves. Their only light came from lard-oil lamps and simple fires, with the constant belch of smoke and fumes filling chambers and lungs with noxious gases. They read episcopal sermons and ate wholesome food, delivered by the enslaved persons who lived outside the cave formation.

A server named Alfred noted, “I used to stand on that rock and blow the horn to call them to dinner. There were fifteen of them and they looked more like a company of skeletons than anything else.”

All the while the experiment ensued, tourists were still being guided throughout the cave system. Both servers and tourists alike spoke of the eerie sight of pale, spectres emerging from shadow, smoke, and flame, hacking and coughing in the muted torchlight.

They encountered “a bizarre scene. Pale, spectral figures in dressing-gowns moved weakly along the passageway, slipping in and out of shadowed huts, the silence of the cave broken by hollow coughing and muttered conversations.”

The results of this experiment, to the modern observer, would appear almost inevitable. Of the fifteen people who descended into the Mammoth Caves, five died before the experiment was unceremoniously ended. Their bodies were laid out on a stone now known as ‘Corpse Rock’. Whether the time which the remaining participants spent in the cave had any bearing whatsoever on their lifespan is impossible to say now in any certainty. However, with the benefit of modern medicine it is reasonable to state that confining tuberculosis patients together in damp, dark environments brimming with toxic smoke pollution is unlikely to have had any sort of positive effect on their vitality. Dr Croghan himself passed away as a result of Tuberculosis in 1849.

Legacy

The unequivocal failure of Dr Croghan’s experiment was commonly discussed in the popular press, but the story seemed only to gain more traction as the American middle-classes gained more disposable income, and tourism became a common all-American pass-time. A very famous and entertaining spooky story has always been a very good selling point when advertising a tour… Just ask the tour guides of Whitechapel. Remarkably, the industry around these tours in the late nineteenth century became so acrimonious that it led to the wonderfully named ‘Kentucky Cave Wars’, where rival land-owners would sabotage signs and spread misinformation about Mammoth Cave in order to deceive the public to coming to their own private cave tours. Like an episode of Wacky Races.

By the late nineteenth century, Mammoth Cave was an internationally noteworthy natural curiosity and was the subject of a number of short stories and periodicals. In 1877, 35 years after the beginning of the experiment in Mammoth Cave, Harper’s Weekly published an article which included two engravings, documenting and dramatizing the morbid history of the cave. With a circulation in excess of 100,000, Harper’s Weekly was a very successful and ubiquitous publication in the USA. The inclusion of such an article suggests that there was still significant interest in the story of Dr Croghan and his patients long after their demise. In fact, the first line of the page reads “The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky has been so frequently described both in our own and other periodicals that the two engravings on this page will need but a brief mention.”

Henry Duff Linton’s Harper’s Weekly engraving The Mammoth Cave – House Formerly Used by Consumptive Patients, 1877. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-119566)

The engravings are accompanied by the following, very short description:

“[The first image] represents the ruins of a hotel which was built in one of the larger chambers of the caves for the accommodation of consumptive and asthmatic patients, the equable temperature and nitrous atmosphere having been recommended as a remedy for diseases of the lungs. It has been long abandoned, however, invalids having found little to no alleviation for their sufferings, whatever benefit may have been derived from the peculiar air having been more than counterbalanced by the depressing influences of a sojourn under-ground/ the second sketch shows a party crossing the cave river, which has received the somber[sic] name of the Styx.”

Named for the mythological Greek river which marked the boundary of the lands of the living and the dead, it is possible that the macabre history of the cave also wound its way into the naming of landmarks and features.

H.P. Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft by Lucian Bert Truesdale, 1934.

H.P. Lovecraft was an American writer, famed for his horror and science fiction.

In 1905, Lovecraft published a short story about a man lost in Mammoth Cave who comes across an anthropomorphic beast in the darkness. He writes:

“The creature was described as having snow-white hair, rat-like claws on its hands and feet with pale, white skin.  Its eyes were black, lacking irises and sunken into its skull.  Finally, it was very gaunt.”

In the story, Lovecraft mentions that a colony of consumptives lived in the cave in a gigantic grotto.

Knowing what we do about the physical symptoms of tuberculosis, and the infamy which of the story of Dr Croghan and the consumptives maintained in the popular psyche, it appears that the beast in the cave is heavily inspired by the stories of those tourists who claim to have seen patients shuffling about the cave in their dressing gowns, looking pale, gaunt, and one step from death.

Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, During the Year 1844 by a Visiter (via Walkabout books)

Modern TB

In 1882, more than 40 years after Dr Croghan’s experiments, Dr Robert Koch isolated the cause of Tuberculosis: Mycobacterium Tuberculosis. This discovery was the first step on our continuing journey to finally understand, control, and treat Tuberculosis; from the development of the BCG vaccine in 1921 and the discovery of the antibiotic Streoptomycin in 1943, to the four drug cocktail which was discovered in 1966 and is still widely used in treatment today. Contemporary scientists continue to work tirelessly, pushing on in leaps and bounds to imagine new, innovative ways to improve the health of people all over the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) have an ambitious target to eradicate Tuberculosis by 2030.

However, as concerns rise about increasing incidences in the UK, multi-drug resistance, and how to combat the socio-economic inequality which continues to stifle our ability to manage pandemic and endemic diseases, one has to wonder; have they tried Mammoth Caves?

Sources

Length of caves : http://www.caverbob.com/wlong.htm

Main source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/tuberculosis-mammoth-cave.htm

Lovecraft: https://lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com/tag/dr-john-croghan/

Tuberculosis and Fashion: https://www.rookiemag.com/2014/03/a-fashionable-death/

History of Tuberculosis:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095461110600401X

https://www.cdc.gov/tb/worldtbday/history.htm#:~:text=TB%20in%20humans%20can%20be,China%20(2%2C300%20years%20ago).

The Nation’s First Tuberculosis Hospital Was Built Inside a Cave – Atlas Obscura

Drowned maidens: Victorian depictions of female suicide

Tags

anatomist, Elizabeth Siddall, Fallen women, found drowned, gender roles, John Waterhouse, Ludovico Brunetti, nineteenth century, Ophelia, Padua, Paris, Sir John Everett Millais, suicide, The Bridge of Sighs, The punished suicide, Thomas Hood, Victorian

Trigger warnings: this post references some recent cases of suicide that some readers may find distressing.

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“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”  Edgar Allan Poe

Ruslana Korshunova’s suicide reported on Fox News 2008.

In 2008, Fox News aired a crime scene video showing a twenty-year-old Model, Ruslana Korshunova, lying dead on the street, after apparently committing suicide by throwing herself from the 9th floor of her New York apartment block. Blood could still be seen oozing from her nose. The image was both shocking and intrusive. But, intrusive media coverage of death and disaster has become an accepted part of our appetite for sensation – a malady we like to think of as particularly modern. However, comments from the reporter, and subsequent comments on social media, which focused on the unworldly beauty of the woman’s corpse, revealed attitudes toward female suicide that find their origin in a much earlier nineteenth-century aesthetic. One that both romanticized female suicide for a male gaze, whilst also serving as a warning to women daring to step outside their proscribed gender roles.

Death becomes her

In the eighteenth-century, male suicide was fairly commonly depicted in art and literature, with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, perhaps the most famous example. The novel created something of a moral panic and ‘Werther Fever’ and the ‘Werther Effect’ were linked to several copy-cat suicides of young men overcome by unrequited love or their own heightened sensibilities [1].

The Werther Effect. Public domain (?)

During the nineteenth century, the depiction of suicide underwent something of a gendered transformation which saw a proliferation in images of female suicide and far fewer images of male suicide [2]. This belied the reality, that in fact, in the nineteenth century, men were (and still are) much more likely to successfully commit suicide than women [3].  Before looking at why this change took place, let’s look at some examples of nineteenth-century images of female suicides.

Firstly, anyone who ever had a Pre-Raphaelite phase at college will be familiar with the poster-girl of drowned maidens, Ophelia.  Painted in 1851 by John Everett Millais, this is considered to be artistic ground zero for the huge proliferation of depictions of drowned females in the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain.

Ophelia, 1851, by John Everett Millais. Google Art Project.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is pulled this way and that by the men in her life. Used by her father and brother in their court intrigues because of her implied liaison with Hamlet, she is then cast off by Hamlet and ultimately drowns through her own actions.  Maybe she was an innocent victim, maybe a fallen woman. Maybe it was an accident, maybe suicide.

Millais’s iconic image presents her watery death in a very eroticized way.  Her lips are half-open, singing as she drowned, perhaps, or expelling her dying breath; or just maybe her parted lips are meant to evoke something far more sexual. It is for the viewer to decide. There is a voyeuristic element to the picture, it is even framed in a proscenium-style arch, giving it a theatrical air – even though the actual death of Ophelia was not usually depicted on stage. [4]

L’inconnue_de_la_Seine. Image via Wikimedia.

The Second image will be familiar to anyone who has done CPR Training.  L’Inconnue de la Seine is said to be the death mask of an unknown woman found drowned in the Seine in the 1880s (although this has been debated).  She was judged to be a suicide. Her corpse was displayed in the Paris Morgue, as was the custom.  One of the morticians was supposed to have been so taken with her beauty, that he cast her death mask.

The image caused a sensation, Richard le Gallienne called her a modern Ophelia while Albert Camus described her ‘Mona Lisa Smile’.  Her mask became a popular, if morbid, fixture in many private homes.  Her image was romanticized and eroticized.  It became a ‘look’ to be emulated by the popular actresses of the day [5].

In 1955 Asmund Laerdal made her even more famous by using her image to create Resusci Anne, giving the unknown woman of the Seine the dubious distinction of having ‘the most kissed lips in history’.  That’s not creepy in the slightest!

The third image, Found Drowned, by George Frederic Watts, c. 1850, presents the scene following a woman’s apparent suicide by drowning. The title reveals something important about how female suicide was recorded, often there were no witnesses to drowning, so while the assumption might be that it was a suicide, societal taboos around female suicide often led to such deaths being hidden under the ambiguous label of ‘found drowned’. [6].

Found Drowned by George Frederick Watts 1850. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The picture, which was inspired by the influential poem The Bridge of Sighs by Thomas Hood, assumes that the viewer understands the implicit backstory of this image.  The drowned woman is a fallen woman.  Seduced, abandoned and pregnant.  Rather than descend into shame, poverty, and prostitution, the only route left open to her by society, she has chosen to take her life and thereby redeem herself.

Despite the more sympathetic message of the image, the depiction of the woman is still sensual. The woman’s face appears luminous and her limbs flung wide, displaying the victim’s figure to the viewer.

Hood wrote the poem in 1844 and it helped to raise society’s awareness of the plight of the ‘fallen’ woman – who found the only option left to her was suicide.  In one famous passage, he describes how her sin has been washed away by her death:

Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Rash and undutiful:
Past all dishonour,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.

However, its idea of a fallen-women gaining redemption through drowning, while generating public sympathy, may have also led to an unfortunate increase in life imitating art, as women saw their only option for social redemption, suicide, reinforced [7].

The Punished Suicide. 1863. Photograph by Carlo Vannini and from Ivan Cenzi’s book His Anatomical Majesty

Finally, a lesser-known image of female suicide, this time from Italy.   Ivan Cenzi has brought the story of how this extraordinary image was created to an English speaking audience [8][9]. The subject of this human taxidermy project was an unknown 18-year-old seamstress who drowned herself in the river at Padua, sometime in 1863.  It was pronounced that she had killed herself over an ‘amorous delusion’.

The nearby University of Padova had a long history of anatomical study, and the girl’s body was handed over to the chair of Anatomy himself, Ludovico Brunetti (1813-1899).

Brunetti had a very unusual plan – this was to be no simple anatomical dissection. He intended to create Great Art out of this girl’s pain. He proceeded to take a cast of the girl’s face and bust, then he skinned her, taking care to keep her hair pristine.  He then treated the skin with sulfuric ether and his own special tanning formula, in order to preserve her image for eternity.  The resulting bust is truly startling.

Unfortunately, as the girl had been dragged out of the river using hooks, her face had sustained some damage. However, Brunetti used these flaws to his advantage, seeing them as a way to convey a moral message, as well as display his skill at preservation.  What emerged from his creative processes was a shocking image known as ‘The Punished Suicide‘.  To ram the moral home, that suicide was a mortal sin and suicides would be forever tormented in Hell,  he enveloped her face in writhing snakes and used red candle wax to imitate blood gushing from her wounds.

Somewhat perversely, to modern sensibilities at least, her parents loved it. Brunetti and his Punished Suicide, later wowed the audiences at the Universal Exposition in Paris where he won the Grand Prix in the Arts and Professions category, which in itself says a lot about public attitudes to images of female suicide and public entertainment. This image is still on display in Padova University, and, to modern eyes at least, evokes a strong reaction. Personally, I find the use and display of human remains as art, without the informed consent of the subject, to be highly problematic.  However, nineteenth-century attitudes were clearly very different.

These are only a few of the many such images in nineteenth-century art, literature, and sculpture.  But why were they so popular and what was their purpose?

Women behaving badly

During the nineteenth century, Western Societies underwent a huge demographic shift as the Industrial Revolution lead to mass migrations from the countryside to towns and cities.  From living in traditional rural communities, where everyone knew one and other, many people now found themselves amongst strangers.  Factory work saw more women working outside the home and competing with men.  Poverty and overcrowded housing brought disease and disorderly behavior, drunkenness was a common outlet for the lower classes.  Add to this the blatant social inequality of Victorian society, where the poor (and particularly the female poor) were routinely exploited by those higher up the social ladder, and you and you can begin to see the cracks undermining the edifice of respectable Victorian society.

Overcrowding in Victorian London. Gustave Dore. 1872. British Library.

The Victorian establishment did not only fear the working class becoming politicized or organized via trade unions, they feared the traditional gender roles of society were being challenged.  Women were supposed to be the ‘Angel in the house’ described in Coventry Patmore’s poem, a sweet and passive homemaker for her husband and family.  However the economic reality for many women was very different, and when a woman transgressed society’s norms, particularly if she was considered a ‘fallen’ woman, she could suffer terrible consequences.

The Outcast. Richard Redgrave. 1851. Public domain via Wikimedia.

Influential sociologists writing about suicide, such as Henry Morselli, writing in 1881, and Emile Durkheim, writing in 1897, both linked urbanization and the breakdown of traditional gender roles as a factor in female suicide. While the stats they relied upon showed that male suicide was more common than female suicide, both promoted the view that women were weaker morally and were safer when protected from the struggles of society [10].

In doing so, they used the stats to reinforced traditional Victorian gender roles by concluding that married people and married people with children were less susceptible to suicide, whereas the unmarried, divorced, widowed or childless were more at risk.  In short, women should stay at home and look after their husbands and family – or risk the consequences. Of course, as Deacon has pointed out, the stats don’t tell the whole picture [11].

There was an underlying hint that perhaps suicide was one way to rid society of unwanted, ungovernable and surplus women.

Idealized family life – the woman is focused on the private home sphere.

Another popular Victorian preconception was that men tended to commit suicide for more important reasons.  Male suicide was viewed as linked to the social and economic well-being of the country, while women were seen as committing suicide for personal and emotional reasons, which were considered less important to society. This had the effect of trivializing female narratives and the reasons for female suicide, often downgrading them by centering them on women’s (failed) relationships with men [12].

As the century progressed, attitudes to suicide also changed, from being considered a sin and a shameful crime, people began to link mental illness to suicide. While this was a good thing, as it led to more understanding of the underlying causes of suicide, it also played into the idea of women as weak, emotional creatures who needed to be protected from themselves or risk the consequences. From Ophelia to the Italian seamstress suffering from ‘Amorous delusions’, women’s suicide was linked to madness and instability in the nineteenth-century mind, further devaluing it by refusing to see it as a final, if desperate, act of autonomy.

From sexual sirens to found drowned

The Mermaid by John Waterhouse, 1900. Via Wikimedia.

The Victorians had a particular fondness for depicting women in water, no doubt because of the long-standing associations between femininity and water.  Women were seen as fickle and changeable as the sea, with sexual undercurrents and life-cycles made up of water, blood, and milk [13]. While sexual sirens might be depicted as mermaids or aquatic nymphs, leading men to drown in their transgressive embrace, the fallen woman was often depicted floating serenely, a beatific expression on her face, lovely to behold. Not remotely like a real drowning victim -bloated and muddy.

It has been suggested that this elevated the fallen woman’s suicide to a kind of redemption and washing away of sins – as implied in Hood’s poem. While this sounds romantic and sympathetic, it also created the pernicious cycle of life imitating art, real fallen women, cast out by society and facing a future of shame and prostitution, saw suicide as a way to redeem themselves and avoid becoming a burden on society because it was tacitly reinforced in popular culture.

Conclusion

To sum up, the Victorians fetishized the image of female suicide.  While male suicide was often seen as a final, possibly heroic, act of autonomy, for women, it was quite different.

Artistic images of female suicide had multiple purposes and meanings.  One of the most obvious was to commodify and pacify the female body by creating an ideal,  female beauty for the (male) viewer to appreciate.  The threatening unruly female, stripped of all power and autonomy after death, but still possessed of erotic and romantic fascination.

In addition this, in a society undergoing radical change, images of female suicide, bound up as they were with ideas of shame, madness, and sexual transgression were often used as a warning to women to keep to their proscribed roles and not try to compete with men in the public sphere.

In the 20th Century, widespread publication of Robert Wiles photograph of Evelyn McHale’s suicide made her death both public and iconic -which went against her expressed wishes for privacy.  More recently,  the 21st Century case of Ruslana Korshunova, where the reporter talked of Ruslana’s life and death, as a fairy-tale-gone-wrong, show that in some ways,  attitudes to representations of female suicide have not changed much since the nineteenth century.

However, more nuanced readings of these images are possible, readings that provide a deeper understanding of attitudes society held towards women and the public consumption of their bodies, both then and now.

While male suicides still predominate today, as in the Victorian age,  the recent tragic suicide of Love Island’s Caroline Flack, in the face of much negative media attention, has made it more important than ever to consider the unrealistic expectations that our society and the media still place on women.

Sources and notes

**Firstly, if you are having a hard time and need to talk to someone, you can contact Samaritans: https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

Cenzi, Ivan, The Punished Suicide, 24 Oct 2016, <https://deadmaidens.com/2016/10/24/the-punished-suicide/> [8] [9

Deacon, Deborah, Fallen Women: The Popular Image of Female Suicide in Victorian England, c1837-1901, 7 April 2015, <https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/history/assets/docs/Honours%20Thesis%20-%20Deborah%20Deacon%202015%20.pdf> [2][4][6][7][11]-[13]

Durkheim, Emile, 1952, (originally published 1897) Suicide a Study in Sociology [3][10]

Meeson, Valerie, Res.Ma HLCS, Post-Mortems: Representations of Female Suicide by Drowning in Victorian Culture, [date unknown], <https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/123456789/3754/Meessen%2c_V.P.H._1.pdf?sequence=1> [4]

Mulhall, Brenna, The Romanticization of the the Dead Female Body in Victorian and Contemporary Culture, 2017, Aisthesis Vol 8 [5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#Cultural_impact [1]