A recent phone conversation with the kniedzw:

Me: “When you come home and find that the gin bottle’s been opened, I just want you to know it’s all in the line of duty.”
Him, knowing I don’t drink: “What????”

Though, as I admitted, for the full period effect I really ought to spike it with turpentine or sulfuric acid.

(By recommendation of fjm.)

I stopped on page 145 for a very good reason: I’m saving the next hundred pages or so for when I start work on the Victorian book.

Winder’s purpose here is to approach immigration into Britain not as a topic to be organized by theme, but as a narrative to be organized chronologically. This makes him absolutely perfect for my use, because I don’t have to spend a lot of effort winnowing out the details that post-date my period; I just stop reading. He begins with the earliest settlements of the island and proceeds from there, addressing waves of immigration as they come, occasionally backtracking a little bit to talk about the pioneers of a particular group before they showed up in larger numbers, but overall taking everything in general order.

He also addresses something I must admit I sometimes fall prey to, despite my awareness of history: the tendency to view “Britishness” (or “Englishness,” and he does track the difference between those concepts) as some kind of natural, native-bred thing, only recently disturbed by foreigners in real numbers. Even though I know about the Flemings and the Huguenots; even though I know there were Africans present at least as early as the sixteenth century; even though I got annoyed at Lisa Goldstein’s The Alchemist’s Door for its assertion that you only ever heard people speaking English on the streets of Elizabethan London . . . all of that slips so easily beneath the surface of my thoughts. Sure, I come from a country peopled largely by recent immigrants and their descendants, but Britain’s different, right? Well, yes — the scale isn’t quite the same. But when Winder points out that thirteen thousand Poor Palatines (German refugees) showed up in the summer of 1709, or that British ships hired Lascars (Indians) in large numbers and then abandoned them upon making port in London, it rapidly becomes apparent that Britain has long been more cosmopolitan than you might think.

And given that one of my goals with the Onyx Court series is to gradually open it up to the presence of the larger world, it’s very useful to know which groups became significant presences at what points in the timeline. I don’t think I’m likely to have scenes terribly far afield — Berkshire and the Channel are probably as far as I’ll go — because this is meant to be a London-based story, but I can talk about the people in London. (Fortunately, that’s precisely where the vast majority of the immigrants ended up, at least for the first couple of generations.)

Since Winder’s trying to cover twenty-five thousand years in 480 pages, his pace is necessarily brisk. (Though by page 29, we’re already up to the Norman Conquest.) This is an overview, not an in-depth exploration of any group or individual. Fortunately, the “Select Bibliography” gives you nine pages of sources to follow up with. And I appreciate Winder’s attempts to put the different groups in context with one another where appropriate; the reception of the Poor Palatines, for example, was strongly shaped by the previous experience of the Huguenots. He also doesn’t stop at characterizing the immigrants by the countries they came from: he touches on the questions of religion, economic class, and other points of demography. From a survey kind of book like this, that’s about all you can ask for.

As with Kit Marlowe and MNC, Isaac Newton is the guy I had to read a lot about in order to decide I’m not going to do as much with him as I thought.

Newton, of course, is already long dead by the time this novel begins. But he, or at least his work, is vitally important to a bunch of the events that lead up to the novel, so I needed to read at least one biography of him to decide how to integrate him. The answer is, not the way I thought I would; his religious views are just waaaaaaay the hell too incompatible with the fae for there to have been any kind of deliberate collusion there. What they got from him, they did in secret.

But anyway, this book. If I was going to read only one biography, this was a good one, within the context of my specific purposes. White’s mission here, aside from writing a biography, is to integrate Newton’s alchemy with his other work; building on Dobbs’ research, he tries to establish that things like the alchemical notion of active principles or the physical appearance of the star regulus of antimony helped him to the epiphanies involved in (say) his theory of gravitation. I don’t think he entirely succeeds at this, but I mean that in more of a narrative sense; it felt like if that were true, then you should be able to spot it more pervasively in Newton’s work. On the other hand, human beings rarely obey the laws of narrative, so.

Since alchemy and the transition to proper science are a major part of what I’m looking at, though, this biography’s focus was useful to me. Its flaw on that front, I think, is that White seems incapable of fully understanding why alchemy was something smart men could spend time on; that failure of empathy is probably linked in with his purpose, when you get down to it, justifying Newton’s alchemy on the basis that it led to Newton’s real science. Aside from that, though, this book was pretty much exactly what I needed: a detailed (yet readable) chronology of the guy’s life, in the context of his personality.

Which, as it turns out, was that of “borderline megalomaniacal jackass.” Okay, that’s a little unfair, but man — I’d heard Newton was a jerk. I didn’t realize how true it was. He had a terrible time acknowledging his debts to other people’s work, or the possibility that they might have had an idea before he did, which possibly arose because of his bizarre semi-conception of himself as a Christ figure. I’m oversimplifying here, but it seems the whole “born on Christmas Day after his father’s death” thing left Newton with a very idiosyncratic notion of God and his relationship to same, linking in with his anti-trinitarianism and so on. Anyway, if you want to know more about that, read The Religion of Isaac Newton by Frank E. Manuel, which I read before I picked up this book (probably a bad idea).

So. Readable biography of Newton plus some discussion of alchemy. If that’s useful to you, have at it.

I noticed recently that I’ve been very remiss in talking about the books going into the stew that is my next novel. I’m going to try to remedy that with some posts over the next couple of days or weeks, though it’s highly unlikely I’ll go through everything I’ve been reading.

***

Dr. Johnson’s Women could so easily have been The Dr. Johnson Show Featuring Dr. Johnson and Some Ladies. Thank God this is not that book. The author uses him as her starting point because he was good friends with a great many intellectual women, and occupied a position near the center of that social network, but he is important to this discussion only inasmuch as he was important to the women that are its real focus. Johnson was one of a number of men who served as advocates, patrons, and fans of women’s writing in the eighteenth century; his assistance, however, as well as that of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and other men, is never presented as a gift bestowed by a benevolent (and patriarchal) god. Instead it’s a commodity sought out, managed, and occasionally rejected by women navigating their way through the literary and intellectual sphere.

I am floored by this book. My knowledge of women English writers prior to Jane Austen consisted of maybe half a dozen names, if that, none of them seeming terribly important to literary history. I had no idea of the existence of, say, Elizabeth Carter, who spoke nine languages (including Arabic) and whose translation of Epictetus remained the standard for more than a century. Or Charlotte Lennox, who wrote hugely popular novels that grappled actively with the paradoxes of contemporary female life, and also a scathing feminist critique of Shakespeare. Or Catherine Macaulay, who produced an epic eight-volume history of England. Or Hester Thrale, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Rowe, Catherine Talbot, or anybody mentioned in the second half of this book, which I haven’t read yet. I only barely knew of Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu, because I knew the Blue Stocking Society was operational during the period of my novel, and I certainly didn’t realize how far the trend went. These women corresponded, networked, encouraged each other in their efforts, argued bitterly over their divergent opinions, and had a whole world that never seems to appear in the histories I’ve read.

This was the book that sparked my previous post, because I can’t help but contrast this period with the Victorian Age. “Bluestocking” wasn’t a pejorative yet; Johnson was not the only man to think an educated woman was a source of pride for her nation and family. Clarke presents this as the happy consequence of the mind/body dichotomy as it was presented at the time: women’s bodies might be weaker and more fallible than those of men, but the mind was sexless, and it could be disciplined to control the body. The argument that women’s minds are also inherently weaker and more fallible doesn’t seem to have the force that it acquired later. A learned woman may not be a common thing, but she isn’t a freak of nature, either, on par with a dancing bear or a parrot that speaks French.

Which makes this sound like a rosy paradise, free of trouble. It wasn’t. Clarke outlines a triad of vanity-coquetry-power that no woman could entirely escape; even those who, like Elizabeth Carter, repudiated it as much as possible didn’t negate its existence. The publicity attendent upon life as a writer or scholar had to be accompanied, in the female instance, by a lot of self-deprecation and disavowals of one’s own importance. Egotism was most definitely not okay, and it was easy to lose one’s reputation while gaining fame. But Elizabeth Carter was supporting herself as a professional writer at the Gentleman’s Magazine when Johnson was a wet-behind-the-ears newcomer to London, and other women made a living through either patronage or the public sphere, and were respected for it.

I had no idea that was going on in the eighteenth century.

The political dimension seems to have been mostly lacking; Carter apparently disapproved of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Still, it’s a remarkable bit of feminism I was almost completely unaware of. And the book is quite readable, so if you’re interested in literature, feminism, or the ideals of the Enlightenment, definitely take a look at this one.