Heathenish Customs

May Day has been celebrated as a springtime holiday for centuries, its origins stretching back to a Roman festival of the flower and fertility goddess Flora. In early modern England, the first of May was traditionally a holiday for laborers commemorated by revelry and dancing centered around a Maypole. The celebration of May Day was outlawed by Puritan authorities during the English interregnum, but after the Restoration in 1660, the festival commenced again in earnest.

The revival of May Day revels was much to the dismay of Thomas Hall, a pastor and the author of a pamphlet titled: Funebria Florae, The Downfall of May-Games: Wherein Is set forth the rudeness, prophaneness, stealing, drinking, fighting, dancing, whoring, mis-rule, mis-spence of precious time, contempt of God, and godly Magistrats, Ministers and People, which oppose the Rascality and rout, in this their open prophaneness, and Heathenish Customs.

The pamphlet's long-winded title speaks for itself.  The title begins in large type but finishes several sizes smaller -- apparently the compositor had difficulty in fitting all of Hall's abundant condemnations onto a single page.

A poem written from the perspective of the Maypole concludes Hall's criticisms:
...
Yea, Hobby-horse doth hither prance,
Maid-marrian, and the Morrice-dance.
My summons fetcheth far and near
All that can dance, and drab, and drink,
The run to mee as to a sink.
These, mee for their Commander take,
And I do them my black-guard make.
…
To reel and spue, to brawl and fight,
To scoff and rail with all their might:
I bid men cast off gravity,
And women eke their modesty:
Old crones that scarce have tooth or eye,
But crooked back, and lamed thigh
Must have a frisk, and shake their heel,
As if no stitch, nor ache they feel.
I bid the servant disobey,
The childe to say his parents nay.
The poorer sort that have no coin,
I can command them to purloin;
All this and more, I warrant good,
For 'tis to maintain neighbourhood.
…

Fielding on the Poor

Henry Fielding is best known for his picaresque novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, but he also dabbled in the social issues his day. The title of this recently acquired treatise by Fielding, A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, for Amending Their Morals, and for Rendering them Useful Members of Society (London: A. Millar, 1753), expresses his view of the poor fairly succinctly. They were morally lacking and not fit members of society. His proposal was little more than a debtor's prison that could accommodate 5,000 paupers and 600 petty criminals. There were cells and a whipping post as well as a chapel.

The proposed structure was never built, but served as a model for the rebuilding of Newgate Prison.  Ironically, our copy has been sumptuously rebound by Riviere and Son complete with gilt edges.

Ask for Rare HV61.F53 1753.

Phishing for Poets

Robert Frost received a lot of mail in his lifetime – we have more than 18 linear feet of it at Rauner – from his family, his friends, and often from complete strangers. One of the oddest letters in our Frost collection falls into this last category.

A man who signs his name "J." writes: "I am in jail sentenced for fraudulent bankruptcy, and I beg you to inform me, if you are willing to help me save the amount of $185,000.00 dls. in bank notes that I possess within a trunk in a Custom House in the United States."

If the letter is starting to sound fishy, that’s because it is. The writer goes on to request (in broken English, of course) that Frost reply to a third party in Mexico City, who will forward him details of how to obtain the “velice that contains a secret hiding” from customs and will ensure that he receives “as a compensation… one third of the said amount.”

Frost appears not to have taken the bait – we don’t have any record of a response to "J." Ask for MS-1178, Box 6, Folder 15 to see the letter for yourself.

Timely Herbals

The Grete Herball

We tend to think of herbals today as handy guide books for identifying the wild flowers growing in our backyards and woods, but herbals were among the first medical texts. Steeped in folk traditions and medical practice, herbals expounded on the "virtues" of various plants with an emphasis on their effects on the human body.

Fuchs' Herbal

We have a large collection of herbals dating from 1526 up to the mid-19th century.  For today, we offer images of the same plant from the first printed herbal in the English language, The Grete Herball (London: Peter Treveris, 1526); the more complete De Historia stirpivm commentarii insignes (Basileae: In officina Isingriniana, 1542) by Leonhart Fuchs; and the most popular English language herbal of the 17th century, John Gerard's The Herball (London: A. Islip).

Gerard's Herbal

To see them ask for QK99.G7 1526, QK41.F7 1542, and QK41.G3 1636

Hailed as a Traitor, a Tory Writes Home

"My Dear Lydia, At last the prospect opens for my return to New Hampshire" writes revolutionary war soldier Samuel Hale in an affectionate letter to his wife. He asks with concern about the health of his family and the education of his son: "How does Jack? Does he read well? I fear you have pushed him forward too fast. Is he healthy? Is he rugged?"

Samuel Hale was a Tory who served with the British army in defiance of his Patriot relatives. He wrote to his wife from Philadelphia on June 9, 1778, less than two weeks before British forces abandoned their occupation of the city. Hale tries to keep a positive outlook on his circumstances: "If they should carry their point the same princ[iples] that made me a good British Subject will make me a peaceable member of their State and I shall submit...."

Samuel Hale had larger problems, though, than the simple fact of his Loyalist service.  His cousin, Nathan Hale, was hanged by the British army as a spy in September of 1776 and hailed as a martyred hero by the Patriots. Samuel Hale's Loyalist service made him a natural object of suspicion in his cousin’s betrayal to the British, and although no conclusive evidence was ever provided to support his guilt, Samuel Hale was vilified by the press for his suspected treason.

Samuel Hale never mentions Nathan’s death in his letter to Lydia, but he defends his own integrity, asking that his wife: “Make my respects to my old friends and when they decide upon my Honor I hope they will not forget their own.”

Hale's hopes of a swift return to New Hampshire were in vain; he fled to England and died there in 1787, having never been reunited with Lydia and Jack.

Ask for MS 72 to see the entire collection of Hale-Chandler papers.  This letter can be found in Box 4 and a guide to the collection is available in Rauner.

Drama On the Ice

It was extremely difficult resisting the urge to blog about the Titanic this week. Never the less, let's talk about a more local cold and dangerous ice-related event: the filming of D.W. Griffith's classic melodrama, Way Down East, starring Lillian Gish.

In March of 1920, Griffith, his crew and cast were filming on location in White River Junction, including shooting barn dance scenes at the Hotel Coolidge. Mostly, Griffith needed a frozen river and a snow storm to shoot the famous scene when our heroine is cast out into a blizzard, wanders blindly onto the frozen river, collapses and ends up floating down toward the falls on an ice floe.

The ice floe scenes were shot on the Connecticut and White Rivers, and drew crowds of local residents to watch the production. When she was on campus many years later to receive the first Dartmouth Film Award, Ms. Gish recalled that there had been some Dartmouth students who turned up to watch the filming, but they quickly lost interest, partially because the star was way out in the middle of the river, but also because it was just so terribly cold. A program for a September 1920 showing of Way Down East at the Majestic Theater in Boston comments on the expense of the engineering staff and the difficulties of "picturizing the elemental forces in the ice break-up of the river" which ultimately would make it one of Griffith's most expensive films.

The program also tells us that the film was a "simple, plain, old-fashioned story of very plain every-day people." Fortunately, I do not know any every-day people in the Upper Valley who would send their sons' girlfriends out into a blizzard to be washed down the Connecticut River on a piece of ice… but perhaps things were different in 1920.

Ask for the Way Down East photo file and the vertical file on Lillian Gish.

Ada Blackjack

In 1921 Ada Blackjack was hired as seamstress and cook for the ill-fated expedition to Wrangel Island.  The members of the expedition were handpicked by Vilhjalmur Stefansson in an attempt to establish a permanent settlement on the island and thus establish a claim for Canada.  Allan Crawford, Fred Maurer,  and Milton Galle disappeared in January, 1923 while trying to cross the Chukchi Sea to Siberia after the expedition's supplies ran out.  Lorne Knight died on the island - apparently from complications related to scurvy. Finally, after several months alone on Wrangel, Ada Blackjack was rescued in 1923 when another colonization company was landed on the island.  That attempt also failed and the island was eventually claimed by the Soviet Union.

Diary for April 15 - 17, 1923

Starting in March, 1923, Ada kept a diary in which she recorded daily events on Wrangel.  An entry from April 15 reads "I was out the traps they was nothing and storming looking weather today.  And I got my boots soles already and soak them and knight said he feel bad." A later entry from June 22, 1923 reads "I move to the other tent today and I was my dishes and getting some wood."  On the surface a fairly normal entry, this was actually the day Ada found Knight dead in the tent that they had been sharing. A later narrative of the expedition by Ada reveals that Knight "died June 22, 1923, I found him dead the next morning after he saw me crying."

Though she was the lone survivor of the expedition, Ada Blackjack shunned publicity and tried to disappear from public view, emerging only to refute allegations that she had been responsible for Knight's death.  She died in 1983.

Ask for Stefansson Mss 8 to see Ada's diary, photos, and other material. A finding aid is available.  Additional material on the Wrangel expedition can be found in Stefansson's papers (Stefansson Mss 98 and Stefansson Mss 196), the papers of Harold Noice (Stefansson Mss 91) and the papers of Ingles Fletcher (Stefansson Mss 34).