The annual Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages will take place on Monday 3 June 2019 in the Bronte Room of the British Library Knowledge Centre (formerly Conference Centre). The programme is:

11.00 Registration and Coffee

11.15 ALISON ADAMS (Glasgow), Claude de Seyssel’s La grand monarchie de France, Paris, Denis Janot, 1541: proof corrections

12.00 IAN MAGEDERA and ANDREW BOWHAY (Liverpool), French Books on India: Recent Developments

12.15 Lunch (Own arrangements).

1.30 LAURA CARNELOS (Reading), Choice or Mistake? Printing Defects in Italian Early Modern Books

2.15 JEREMY POTTER (Brighton), How to survive for 200 years: textbook lessons for book historians

3.00 Tea

3.30 ALEXANDRA WINGATE (London), ‘Prosigue la librería’: Analyzing the bookstore of Lorenzo Coroneu in seventeenth-century Pamplona

4.15 IAN CHRISTIE-MILLER, Lithuania, 1547, to Russia. Béarn, 1583, to Kralice with Watermarks

The Seminar will end at 5 pm.

The Seminar is free and all are welcome, but if you are planning to attend, please let the organisers, Susan Reed and Barry Taylor, know.

Printer’s device from  Wolfgang Kilian, Serenissimorum Saxoniæ Electorum et quorundam ducum agnatorum genuinæ effigies... (Augsburg, 1621)  551.e.22.(3)

A recent acquisition recalls the dark times of the religious conflicts of the 17th century.

 Thomás Aranha, Sermão que pregou o Muito Reverendo Padre Presentado Frey Thomas Aranha da Ordem dos Prégadores, Lente de Theologia no Real Collegio de S. Thomas de Coimbra, na festa, que celebrou ao glorioso martyr S. Iorge seu padroeiro a nobilissima naçaõ inglesa em S. Domingos de Lisboa no anno de 638 (Lisbon, [1638]). RB.23.a.38272

This sermon was preached at Lisbon on St George’s Day in 1638 to the community of English Catholic recusant exiles, “these gentlemen who have lived among us for so many years, and every year celebrate their patron saint” (fol. 12v). As a gesture of Anglo-Portuguese solidarity, he points out that in battle the Portuguese, like the English, used to invoke St George, unlike the Spaniards who called on St James (fol. 11v).

St George was of obvious appeal to the English. Of obvious relevance too was his status as a martyr at a time when Catholics were being martyred in England. Aranha says explicitly that England had once been as industrious and courageous in its faith, as those who still profess their Catholicism today (fols 11-12). Indeed, the English recusants in Portugal have made such sacrifices in being cut off from friends and family that they too may be called martyrs (fol. 13r). (This may not be as exaggerated as it sounds: a martyr is one who bears witness to his or her faith, not necessarily unto death.)

Eight of Fr Thomás’s sermons are recorded in the Tipografia portuguesa do século XVII: Letras A e B, pp. 130-32

Like many a preacher, he was also a poet. We have his poems on the occasion of the coronation of John IV.

Poesias compostas na Universidade de Coimbra na occasiaõ da felicissima, & milagrosa acclamaçaõ, & coroaçåo d'el Rei nosso Senhor Dom Ioaõ o quarto de Portugal, que se não ofereceraõ no Certamen Poetico, que na dita Vniveridade ouve nem andão no livro dos seus aplausos. (Lisbon, 1645). 1560/808.(1.) 

King John won back Portuguese independence from the ‘Philippine Domination’ by Philips II-IV of Spain from 1580 to 1640. Aranha is not named in the book, but Innocêncio Francisco da Silva in his dictionary of Portuguese biography gives him authorship.

His book of 1645 is a belated supplement to the poetic celebrations dedicated by the University of Coimbra to the new king:

 Invictissimo Regi Lusitaniæ Joanni. IV. Academia Conimbricensis libellum dicat in felicissima sua aclamatione .. (Coimbra, 1641). Cup.408.ww.8

Thus like many a Baroque author Fr Thomás wrote for the moment.

An indication of this little book’s rarity is that A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers didn’t include it in their classic bibliography, The contemporary printed literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640 : an annotated catalogue, Vol. 1, Works in languages other than English; with the collaboration of W. Lottes (Aldershot, 1989). RAR 230.242

Barry Taylor, Curator Romance Collections

References

Tipografia portuguesa do século XVII: Letras A e B (Lisbon, 1999), RAR 094.209469 LI.

Innocêncio Francisco da Silva, Diccionario bibliographico portuguez, VII (Lisbon, 1872). HLR 011.269

 

The egg, as a symbol of life, fertility, purity and eternity, has figured in the rituals, traditions and beliefs of people around the world, in a wide range of geographical regions and cultures, as documented in Venetia Newall’s comprehensive study An Egg at Easter.

Painted eggs, from An Egg at Easter (London, 1971) X.200/4543.

In Ukraine the custom of decorating eggs and the related rituals pre-date Christianity, and were initially associated with the pagan new year (the re-birth of spring). With the official Christianisation of Ukraine in the tenth century, the tradition was subsumed into the Christian system of belief, without ever completely losing its former significance. Among the techniques used, the most significant is “writing” on the egg (using the wax-resist method), which results in the pysanka (from the verb pysaty, to write or ornament). The pysanka’s enduring nature and ubiquity is due largely to the fact that it was one of the most accessible means for ordinary people (even if they were not literate in the accepted sense) to create ritual objects and to record their lives and beliefs, albeit in a different kind of language. This resulted in a continuity which has much to tell researchers into Ukraine’s cultural past. An overview of the pysanka tradition, by Gloria Surmach, can be found in Ukrainian Arts, compiled by Olya Dmytriw. Additionally, there are now many websites on this topic (e.g. www.pysanky.info).

Cover of Ukrainian Arts (New York, 1952) 7946.e.98

Possibly the earliest mention of the pysanka in print is in Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan’s Description d’Ukranie, in which the author describes the celebration of Easter in Ukraine. After a service in Kyiv, for example, each member of the congregation:

kneels before the Bishop [...] and presents him with a red or yellow painted egg, while greeting him with the words ‘Christos vos Christ’ (sic)*, and the Bishop, raising each from their knees, replies ‘Oustinos vos Christos’ (sic)*, at the same time kissing the women and girls, so that My Lord Bishop, in less than two hours, amasses over five or six thousand eggs, and has the pleasure of kissing the prettiest women and girls present in his Church ...

            *Beauplan’s attempt to transliterate the traditional Easter greeting: “Christ is risen – He is risen indeed”

Cover of Description d’Ukranie (Rouen, 1660) 980.f.6.

Whilst this may have been a slightly unusual way of acquiring a collection of eggs, in the 19th century, with the rise of interest in ethnography, collectors all over Ukraine (in lands within both the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires) started collecting pysankas, both as objets d’art and for their cultural significance. This, in turn, sparked the interest of scholars, who began to study these collections and present academic papers on them. For example, the anthropologist Fedir Vovk mentioned the uniqueness of pysankas at the Third Archaeological Congress in Kyiv in 1874:

there is fairly rich, very original and interesting material [...] in the motifs on krashankas or pysankas [...] As far as I am aware, the custom of decorating Easter eggs with motifs does not appear to exist in the Great Russian gubernias, and for that reason the forms of ornamentation of pysankas constitute material which is probably distinctive within the ethnographic context ... (Proceedings of the Congress, vol.2 )

One collection of pysankas, amassed by arts patron Kateryna Skarzhynska in Lubny, Poltava Region, formed the basis for the first comprehensive publication on the subject, Opisanie kollektsii narodnikh pisanok, by the ethnographer and archaeologist Serhii Kulzhynskyi (written in Russian at a time when publications in Ukrainian in the Russian Empire were severely restricted by tsarist decree). Lamenting the paucity of published material relating to the Ukrainian pysanka, Kulzhynskyi emphasises “the extraordinary interest which pysankas represent for scholarship and art”.

Above: Cover of Opisanie kollektsii narodnikh pisanok (Moscow, 1899) 1711.a.3. Below: Plate XVI from the book.

From Kulzhynskyi’s time onwards, interest in the pysanka as an object of serious study has fluctuated, often depending on the political situation in Ukraine. In the 1920s a number of Ukrainian-language books and articles on the subject were published: in the Ukrainian SSR, for example Ukrainski pysanky iak pamiatky narodnoho maliarstva, by Stefan Taranushchenko (Kharkiv, 1927); in Galicia under Polish rule, for example Pysanky Skhidnoi Halychyny i Bukovyny u zbirtsi Natsionalnoho muzeiu u Lvovi, by Iryna Gurgula (Lviv, 1929), and Boikivski pysanky, by Mykhailo Skoryk (Sambir, 1934); and in the near diaspora, where there were considerable concentrations of Ukrainian writers and intellectuals, such as Vadym Shcherbakivskyi, author of Osnovni elementy ornamentatsii pysanok ta ikhnie pokhodzhennia.

Reprint of Osnovni elementy ornamentatsii pysanok ta ikhnie pokhodzhennia (Prague, 1925) YA.1992.b.2180 (original available online)

After the Stalinist crackdown in the late 1920s and early 1930s (and the suppression of most Christian denominations in the USSR), little was published in Ukraine, and it fell to the post-Second World War diasporas, particularly in the USA, Canada and the UK, to popularise the pysanka as a cultural tradition, to re-introduce it as an Easter ritual and to produce publications on the subject. In Ukraine, it was not until the post-Stalinist thaw in the 1960s that a small but significant work on the pysanka (drawing in part on Kulzhynskyi’s work) was published, namely Ukrainski pysanky, compiled by Erast Biniashevskyi.

The political repressions of the 1970s again limited the practice of, and research into, the pysanka in the Soviet Bloc. An exception was the publication of Ukrainski pysanky Skhidnoi Slovachchyny by Pavlo Markovych, a scholarly book on Ukrainian pysankas in Eastern Slovakia.

Women decorating pysankas, from Ukrainski pysanky Skhidnoi Slovachchyny (Prešov, 1972) X.0800/181[no.6,kn.2]

Since Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, much has been published, both in Ukraine and abroad (in various languages), promoting the pysanka as an objet d’art, its symbolism, methods, designs and associated traditions, for example Ukrainska narodna pysanka, by Vira Manko.

Cover of Ukrainska narodna pysanka (Lviv, 2005); YF.2007.b.2920

There are collections of pysankas in many museums, both in Ukraine and abroad, as, for example, in the Ukrainian Museum in New York. In Kolomyia, in western Ukraine, a pysanka museum (established in 1987) currently houses over 12,000 exhibits. Today, the pysanka is undergoing a revival and, as in the villages of Ukraine in past centuries, people all over the world (and not just of Ukrainian heritage) are experiencing this unique phenomenon for themselves. There is, though, so much more to learn about the pysanka.

Marta Jenkala, Senior Teaching Fellow in Ukrainian, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies

In April 1919, Munich was briefly the seat of one of the strangest governments in the history of any country. Led initially by men who were writers and thinkers first and politicians second (if at all), the Munich Räterepublik – a ‘Soviet’ or ‘Council’ Republic – was the culmination of Bavaria’s revolution of 1918-19, and its defeat would see Bavaria turn decisively to the political right.

Cover of O. Estée, München auf dem Kopf: die Geschichte einer Räterepublik in 40 Bildern (Munich, 1919) 12316.w.1. A collection of drawings of Munich and its people during the Soviet Republic with an ironic commentary from a conservative perspective. The image of the city's iconic Frauenkirche turned upside down reflects the chaos of the period.

Revolution had broken out in Bavaria, as elsewhere in Germany, during the last days of the First World War. Journalist and Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) member Kurt Eisner had seized the initiative ahead of more established politicians, declaring a People’s State of Bavaria on 8 November and becoming its first Prime Minister. However, he faced opposition not only from the political right but also from other left-wing factions: too radical for the mainstream Social Democrats (SPD), not radical enough for the Communists. Elections in January 1919 saw his party come a humiliating last, with less than three per cent of the vote.

In February Eisner was assassinated, inflaming an already chaotic political situation. Johannes Hoffmann of the SPD was elected Prime Minister, but there were still deep divisions over whether the new state should be a parliamentary or soviet-style republic. On 6 April, a group of idealistic pacifists and anarchists decided for the latter and, as Hoffmann and his government retreated to Bamberg, proclaimed a Bavarian Soviet Republic. At its head was the poet and playwright Ernst Toller, supported by, among others, fellow-writers Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam.

The proclamation of a Bavarian Soviet Republic on the front page of the newspaper Münchener Neueste Nachrichten (MFM.MF461)  on 7 April 1919.

Landauer was made commissar for education and culture, and dreamed of creating progressive schools and free museums. He wrote to a friend: “If they give me a couple of weeks, I hope to achieve something; but it’s possible it will only be a couple of days, and then all a dream.” His pessimism was well founded: for all its conviction and high ideals, the new regime was ill-equipped to govern, especially in an already confused and chaotic situation. Landauer himself claimed that he had no time for the everyday work of government since he was too busy reshaping society. Toller was besieged in his office by petitioners asking every kind of favour, many of them far beyond his remit. The behaviour of the commissar for foreign affairs, Franz Lipp, grew increasingly eccentric; after he sent a telegram to the Pope claiming, among other things, that Hoffmann had stolen the key to his lavatory, Toller was forced to remove him from office.

Ernst Toller, frontispiece portrait from his autobiography, Eine Jugend in Deutschland (Amsterdam, 1933) 10709.a.29

Meanwhile the Communist leader Eugen Leviné was accusing Toller of leading a “pseudo-soviet” and demanding a harder line more in keeping with that of Lenin’s Russia. On 13 April he succeeded in ousting Toller and began to impose what he saw as more genuine soviet rule, confiscating weapons, houses and food from the ‘bourgeoisie’, and calling a general strike. Ironically, the committed pacifist Toller ended up commanding a unit of Bavaria’s newly-formed ‘Red Army’ against the right-wing Freikorps militias with which Hoffmann’s Bamberg government had allied itself in the hope of regaining power.

Cover of Erich Wollenberg, Als Rotarmist vor München: Reportage aus der Münchener Räterepublik (Berlin, 1929)  X.0700/10339. Wollenberg was Infantry Commander of the Bavarian Red Army. As a committed Communist, his account of the struggle to defend the Soviet Republic is critical of more moderate figures such as Toller.

Despite initial Red Army successes against the Freikorps, it was clear that the Soviet Republic could not hold out, not least because of schisms caused by factional infighting: by the end of April, Toller recalls in his autobiography, “two separate governments were operating at once in Munich.” The general strike was exacerbating food shortages, and the people were growing tired of and angry at the ongoing chaos. When Freikorps troops finally entered and re-took the city at the beginning of May, they were welcomed by many as liberators, but the liberation was a brutal one. Street fighting left over 600 dead, more than half civilians, and the retaliation against the supporters of the Soviet Republic saw some 2200 people imprisoned or executed. Landauer was murdered in prison and Leviné executed for high treason.

Police poster offering a reward for the capture of Toller, wanted for high treason. Reproduced in Edward Crankshaw’s translation of Toller’s autobiography, I was  a German (London, 1934) 2402.a.14

Toller faced the same charge, but was comparatively fortunate in receiving only a five-year prison sentence. Although he was judged to have committed high treason, the court believed that he had done so “with honourable intent”. In his case at least, then, the high initial ideals of the Bavarian Soviet Republic were given a kind of official, if grudging, respect.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator, Germanic Studies

References/Further reading

Volker Weidermann, Träumer: als die Dichter die Macht übernahmen. (Cologne, 2017) [Awaiting shelfmark] English translation by Ruth Martin, Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany 1918 (London, 2018) ELD.DS.338669

Kurt Kreiler, Die Schriftstellerrepublik: zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Politik in der Münchner Räterepublik: ein systematisches Kapitel politischer Literaturgeschichte (Berlin, 1978) X:709/28448

Gerhard Schmolze (ed.), Revolution und Räterepublik in München 1918/19 in Augenzeugenberichten (Düsseldorf, 1969) X.809/9992.

Richard Dove, He was a German: a Biography of Ernst Toller (London, 1990) YK.1990.a.7

Herbert Kapfer, Carl-Ludwig Reichert (ed.), Umsturz in München : Schriftsteller erzählen die Räterepublik (Munich, 1988)

In the second half of the 18th century, Britain attracted a great deal of interest as a destination for the European aristocracy and nobility. This was a result of the country’s Industrial Revolution and rising political power in the world. Traditionally trips to Europe, called the Grand Tour, were a regular feature of aristocratic education in the 17th and 18th centuries. The typical itinerary included countries such as France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and the German-speaking parts of the continent, with Britain joining this list in the end.

Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1746-1835) was a member of one of Poland’s most prominent aristocratic families. She was a writer, patron of the arts, and founder of Poland’s first museum, the Czartoryski Museum. Politically and socially active, Izabela also travelled around Europe. Her manuscript diary of her tour through England and Scotland in 1790 surprisingly survived the turbulent periods of wars and relocations of the archives. Translated from French into Polish and English, the diary was recently published in Poland. It is a record of her observations and impressions and gives an insight into urban and rural life in England at the end of the 18th century.

Izabela Czartoryska. Caption: Cover of Izabela Czartoryska, Tour through England: diary of Princess Izabela Czartoryska from travels around England and Scotland in 1790 (Warsaw, 2015) LD.31.a.2829

In 1790, Izabela visited England as a chaperone to her twenty-year-old son Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (1770-1861). The first port of call was London. While Adam was busy with his six-month studies, his mother occupied herself with excursions around London and visits to the city’s attractions. Although impressed with London’s diversity, she wrote to her friend: “I will never be able to accustom myself to the climate and the people. One is humid to the extreme and the other is unspeakably cold; one is bad for my health, the other is damaging my soul”.

However, in the summer of that year they both embarked on a tour of England and Scotland. This was a very fruitful expedition – they travelled through the whole country, covering 3000 kilometres. The visits included cities and industrial estates as well as nature sites and agricultural wastelands. The route followed the well-beaten track recommended in numerous guides to the country. In nearly three months of travelling, the party spent most of their time visiting gardens and residences. Izabela mainly focused on country houses with rich collections of works of art. Places visited included Stowe, Blenheim, Stourhead, Castle Howard, Studley Royal and many more. However, landscape gardens and parks were her particular interest, as she was a skilled gardener herself. She admired some of them for their beauty and calming and consoling effect, while those neglected provoked her criticism. In Scotland, Czartoryska considered Dunkeld the most beautiful site she had ever seen, and its description is the most sophisticated of all in her diary.

View of Dunkeld, from A Series of Select Views in Perthshire with historical and descriptive illustration … (London, 1844) 010370.dd.26

Upon her return to her palace in Pulawy, Izabela redesigned the garden in the English style with the help of James Savage, a gardener from London. He was only employed for three years; however, he stayed in Poland for the rest of his life. As a lover of Shakespeare’s poetry, Izabela was delighted to see what she was told was his chair in Stratford-upon-Avon and became obsessed with it. Using all her energy and charm, she managed to secure its purchase.

Czartoryska had great admiration for industrial landscapes, finding them to be complementary to the natural beauty of the countryside. As much as she enthused about industrialisation, she nevertheless noticed, on a tour of the factories, the exploitation of both women and men. She also noted the changes in agriculture resulting in mass misery for ordinary people.

Magda Szkuta, Curator of East European Collections

 

In September 2018, an exhibition Language Learning through the Ages was on display at the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford. In the section on Conversation books, one could observe J.H.Wisdom’s The Briton in Russia, published by Leopold B. Hill in 1915. In the words of the exhibition curators, this was “a guide not just to the language but also to Russia”. Also, “the other big step forward is that an attempt is made to help the traveller with pronunciation. The International Phonetic Alphabet had been in existence since 1888 and increasing knowledge of phonetics influenced phrasebooks in that they started to contain phonetic information but would have been too complex to use in a phrasebook”.

J. H. Wisdom, The Briton in Russia: a pocket interpreter and guide to Russia and its language (London, 1915) 012902.eee.31/8.

Alongside other genres and titles, the publisher was clearly specialising in travel guides and ‘pocket interpreters’, such as The Briton in Spain, The Briton in France, and The Briton in Flanders within The Briton Abroad series. Interestingly, in her book of travel memoirs Honeymooning in Russia (London, 1911; 10291.bbb.10.), Ruth Kedzie Wood complained that having arrived in London from America, they had to buy “Baedeker’s Russian in French”, as “none being published in English”.

The gap in guidebooks in English started to get filled in the next couple of years and, ironically, production was in full swing during the time when Europe was being torn apart by the bloodiest war ever experienced. However, not only Britons travelled the world. The British publisher also was interested in profiting from guests to the islands. But while the book in German Der Deutsche in England: Taschenbuch für nach Grossbritannien Reisende was published in 1912, The Russian in Britain = Russkii v Anglii (yes, one may say that the Russians didn’t care about Britain and were preparing to visit England only, and therefore the titles in English and Russian were different!), came out in 1917, when the Russians were probably the least inclined travelling for leisure and sightseeing.

S. I. Lyubov,The Russian in Britain = Russkii v Anglii (London, 1917) 012002.eee.31/11.

However, the phrase book caters for much more than a short city break with simple ordering from an a-la carte menu and enquiring about vacant rooms. The book suggests that a traveller might need to visit a barber or do extensive shopping.

Polite greetings, small talk, and that ever-useful British topic of the weather from The Russian in Britain.

 ‘At the Hairdresser’s’ from The Russian in Britain.

Apart from phrases, the book contains practical advice, such as the most convenient itineraries, the gist of the British Aliens’ Act of 1905, information on customs regulations, recommendation of hotels and restaurants, lists of places for sightseeing and entertainment, a section on the British currency and the measurement system.

 Guide to British coins from The Russian in Britain.

In a time when a transatlantic flight seems like a very long journey, it is quite refreshing to imagine, what it meant to organise a journey from Moscow to London via Warsaw, Berlin, Rotterdam (route 1) or Petrograd, Helsingfors (Helsinki), Stockholm, Christiania (Oslo), Bergen, and Newcastle (route 2). It is not clear whether the 1st and 2nd class passengers were admitted to Britain without any restrictions, but passengers of the 3rd class were supposed to demonstrate that they had enough means to sustain themselves in the country, and to have on them no less than £5 (50 Roubles) and at least £2 per each family member travelling with them. According to the author, travellers would be pleased to see how wonderful the public transport was in London and around. The author claims that trains consist of mostly 1st and 3rd class carriages, but 3rd class carriages are surprisingly clean and comfortable, just as the 2nd class in Russia.

 ‘The Bill of Fare’ from The Russian in Britain

From the recommended restaurants, some are very famous and have a long history, such as, for example, the Horseshoe pub in the former Horseshoe Hotel at 264-267 Tottenham Court Road, the building of which was only demolished in 2004. It was also interesting to learn about the ‘precursor’ of NHS – a free French hospital for anyone who could speak French, regardless of nationality, which was situated in Shaftesbury Avenue.

We could find nothing about the author, S.I. Liubov, and may suggest that this could be a pseudonym.

To learn more about a history of tourism, explore our print resources and the digital collection recently released by Adam Mathews and available in the British Library’s reading rooms: http://www.masstourism.amdigital.co.uk/ 

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator East European Collections

Further reading

Dr Susan Barton, review of ‘Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture – The History of Tourism’, Reviews in History. Review no. 2114. DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2114 (https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2114). Date accessed: 1 April, 2019.

It’s English Tourism Week and what better to guide prospective visitors to these shores than an anonymous compilation of English customs published nearly 200 years ago in Stockholm. John Bull eller Engleska folket i sin stora Besynnerlighet was recently acquired by the British Library and appears to be a translation from multiple contemporary sources of anecdotes and summaries of Englishness. It contains all manner of veritable traditions, half-truths and fake news that you might expect.

Title page from John Bull eller Engleska folket i sin stora Besynnerlighet (Stockholm, 1826) RB.23.a.28622

In no seeming order, the book takes us from Charles I to the Lord Mayor’s Day via brief glimpses at the Fairlop Fair, ‘Riding the Stang’, football and funeral ceremonies, and anecdotes that illuminate British attitudes under titles such as ‘The Compassionate Traveller’, ‘Paternal Tenderness’, or ‘Exceptional Orderliness’, all in just over 50 pages.

Contents from John Bull, eller Engelska folket...

One possible source for the work is Popular Pastimes, being a selection of picturesque representations of the customs & amusements of Great Britain, in ancient and modern times (London, 1816; 785.h.8), which includes drawings by F. P. Stephanoff and historical descriptions by Edward Wedlake Brayley. A second source could be the less structured but equally enjoyable John Bull ou Londresiana, attributed to a ‘C.D’

Engraving from John Bull ou Londresiana, Recueil d’originalités et de singularités anglaises, avec les anecdotes, bons mots, plaisanteries, sarcasmes, et railleries particulières à ce peuple (Paris, [1820?]) 12314.df.4.

Both the French and Swedish John Bull refer to the peculiarity of their subject and understandably so given the stories they recount. In ‘En besynnerlig Ursäkt’ (‘A peculiar excuse’) we read a dark tale about a day-labourer who twice tried to drown himself but was twice saved by a peasant. He waits for his moment and on the third occasion hangs himself off a barn door. When the owner of the farm questions the peasant, who had in fact seen the whole thing, the peasant says that, since the labourer had been thoroughly soaked in the first two plunges, he thought he was hanging himself out to dry.

The book shares a chapter with Popular Pastimes on what the English publication calls the practice of ‘Selling a Wife’ and the Swedish more modestly refers to as ‘Åktenskaps-handel’ (‘Marriage trade’). Both condemn the activity, which is said to prevail among the ‘lower classes’ (John Bull) or ‘the illiterate and vulgar’ (Popular Pastimes). Our English historian finds space however to celebrate the songs that have been derived from the practice: ‘this practice, immoral and shameful as it is, has given rise to various pleasant Jeu d’esprits […]’. The examples they give differ, possibly exposing the fact that John Bull was paraphrased from various sources.

Other chapters shared between the two books include ‘Milk Maids’ Garland‘ (‘Mjölkflickans Krans‘), ‘Riding the Stang’ (‘Rida på Stången‘) and ‘St. Valentine’s Day’, which our Swedish observers tell us ‘is quite extraordinary in England. The youth yearn for it [längtar otåligt efter det] every year.’ ‘Rida på Stången’ is more or less a direct translation from its source in Popular Pastimes, which describes a practice of vigilante justice, referred to otherwise as ‘charivari’ or ‘skimmington’. The accused is forced onto a long pole, or stang, and carried through the streets to expose his dishonour. The criminal associated with this treatment was traditionally  ‘a man who had debauched his neighbour’s wife’, but not exclusively so, as ‘the virago who had beaten her husband was also subjected to riding the Stang’ (Popular Pastimes, p. 17). The method was also used in Westmoreland and Cumberland, we read, to deter anyone from conducting any business at all on New Year’s Day. While, Popular Pastimes does not delve deeper, John Bull interrogates this Cumbrian variation:

Man hwart taga dessa böter wägen? Jo, man super upp dem, man fyller sig, wältrar sig i sanden, öfwerlastad af Öl, Rumm, Win och Brännwin. — Det är ett nöjsamt tidsfordrif for Engelska folkshopen. (p. 38)
Where do the fines go? Yes, they guzzle it up, they have their fill, roll about in the mud, full of beer, rum, wine and brandy. It is a pleasurable pastime for the English crowds.

I wonder how different today’s portrait of John Bull and the peculiar English would be…

Pardaad Chamsaz, Curator Germanic Studies