History in the News

So I was all set with another post in my 1810 series when I ran across three awesome historical news stories that I just had to share...so instead of the Duke of Cumberland, today you’re getting ancient Egyptian tailoring, Henry VIII's head injuries, and Sir Walter Scott’s sock puppetry. Ready?

The world’s oldest dress:  Archaeologists have carbon-dated this linen dress (yes, it looks like a shirt but the bottom half is missing, based on other younger examples that have been found) with elegant pleated yoke and sleeves and a v-neck found in an Egyptian tomb to somewhere between 5,100 and 5,400 years old, making it the oldest known piece of tailored, sewn clothing. The garment’s story is a fascinating one: originally found in a tomb at the cemetery at Tarkhan, it was sent to the Petrie Museum at the University College of London entwined in a bunch of rags and ignored for decades...until conservators got around to examining it in 1977.  Hmm...now if only there were fashion magazines from ancient Egypt. Ahkenaton’s Repository, anyone?  ☺ (photo Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London)

Henry VIII needed better head gear:  Dr. Arash Salardini and colleagues at Yale’s School of Medicine have speculated in an article in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience that Henry VIII’s famously bad temper and tyrannical behavior in his later years may have been due to repeated traumatic brain injuries in his youth.

Famously fit and athletic as a young man, Henry was an avid jouster among other things, and suffered some spectacular falls and plenty of being thumped about as a result...just like today’s football players. In his later years, Henry went from being the ideal Renaissance prince, cultured and courtly, to a cruel, capricious tyrant, suffering blinding headaches and sudden, unexplained rages. Historians have attributed this change to many things: tertiary syphilis, chronic infection, diabetes, and kidney disease...but this new diagnosis makes bunches more sense.

Oh Sir Walter, you tricksy fellow: It seems that sock puppetry is not a modern phenomenon. Two hundred years ago, a well-known author was engaging in practices that today would have gotten him banned by Amazon.

Sir Walter Scott, whose poems and books helped birth the Highland Revival, was also an important writer and reviewer for the Quarterly Review, an important and widely read journal of the day. His reviews of such books as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage helped launch their popularity. But he also used his position as a respected reviewer to thoroughly (and anonymously) lambaste one of his own books, a short story collection called Tales of My Landlord, which he’d published under the pseudonym Jedediah Cleishbotham.  But he didn’t stop there; after calling the work unoriginal and lame, he speculated about the identity of the author of the Tales, going so far as to suggest not only himself ("the author of Waverley"), but his own brother Thomas.  The result? Huge sales, because everyone wanted to see just how bad the book was and if they could guess who the author was. 

Naughty, naughty! ☺

1810, What a Year It Was, Part 2: The Lady of the Lake and the Hughland Revival

Just in case you think that media having a profound effect on popular culture is a modern phenomenon, I have five words for you: The Lady of the Lake.

In 1810 a Scottish lawyer named Walter Scott who had been slowly building a name for himself as a poet writing about Scottish history and lore published his third narrative poem, called The Lady of the Lake. His previous efforts, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808) had seen moderate popular success. But for some reason, the May release of The Lady of the Lake turned Scott into a household name, selling 25,000 copies that year alone.

The poem’s story is a dramatic one, with three suitors vying for the hand of the fair Ellen Douglas, a disguised king reconciling with an estranged old friend and supporter (who happens to be the father of the aforementioned Ellen), and war between the king and his Lowland Scots versus the Highland Clans led by one of the (also) aforementioned suitors. There are bards and druidic prophets and old feuds affecting the present and one-on-one combat and lots and lots and lots of description of the wild beauties of Scotland...and the origins of the song we now know as “Hail to the Chief”!

So, popular book, sold lots of copies, blah blah blah. But The Lady of the Lake also sparked something known as the Highland Revival, a sort of craze for Scottish history and culture (or at least what people thought was Scottish culture). Don't forget that Scotland had been in eclipse through most of the 18th century, ever since the last Stuart uprising in 1745 had led to the horrible slaughter of the Battle of Culloden, decades of sanctions against the Scots, and widespread emigration to America. Scotland as a topic was ripe for romanticization and exploitation; it had already begun with the publication in 1760 of what purported to be epic poems by an ancient Scottish bard, Ossian, by one James Mcpherson. They were an international sensation: people from Thomas Jefferson to Napoleon counted them as favorites. Alas, it turned out that they were not ancient, but Macpherson's own work. Still, the seed had been planted, fertilized by the passion of the late 18th and early 19th centuries for the wild and picturesque. 

Scott knew a good thing when he saw it; he followed up the success of  with a series of historical novels set in Scotland, and the craze only grew. The Prince Regent was an enthusiastic subscriber; he invited Scott to dinner in 1815 after reading his novel Waverley, published the previous year, and ended up visiting Scotland in 1822, the first reigning monarch to do so since 1650. He also had his portrait painted wearing a kilt to commemorate the visit.  The Highland Revival would eventually find its apotheosis in Queen Victoria’s buying a house in the Scottish Highlands, decorating it from cellar to attic in tartans and deer antlers, and trying to spend as much time there as possible, much to the dismay of her ministers.  And long-time NineteenTeen readers may recall my poking gentle fun at the Scottish craze in an April Fool’s Day  post a while back.

And it all more or less started in 1810. ☺

Things That Go Bump in the Manor House

Happy Halloween!  Will you be dressing up today for work or play?  Perhaps escorting little ones around for treats?  Telling spooky stories or watching horror movies?  Well, as we’ve discussed before, Halloween might not have been a typical celebration in nineteenth century England, but that didn’t mean the lads and lasses back then didn’t enjoy a good scare!

Every town, it seemed, boasted its local ghost or grisly creature.  Black dogs, either evil or kindly, were popular.  Take the story of the Mauthe Doog, from Peel on the Isle of Man.  The large, curly-coated spaniel was said to haunt Peel Castle, to the point that it would come into the guard room each night and settle by the fire.  The tale was immortalized by Sir Walter Scott in Peveril of the Peak in 1823, only he made out the dog to be a large mastiff.  Either way, hundreds of tourists flocked to the castle for a chance to see the fearsome pet.

Most of the great houses had resident specters.  At Arundel Castle, the Blue Man haunts the library, looking for a good book.  (Does it never end?)  Residents of Kenilworth Castle have spotted the ghost of a little boy in the stables as well as ghost horses and, ahem, ghost chickens!

Be careful out there tonight.