Review: Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock

 Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey was published the same year as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and is similarly a satire against the heightened emotions of the romantic era and the gothic novel. While both are still in print and read, I can see why the Austen book is the greater read.

Northanger Abbey is a brilliantly done romance that skews gothic tropes and features fully fleshed out characters and a genuinely interesting storyline, Nightmare Abbey is a series of in-jokes played out in scenes that are strung along from each other. If it’s inspired anything, it’s more like the Wodehouse Blandings series, a group of eccentrics hang out in an old building.

Mr Glowry married a woman who wanted him for his money. Having received it, she shrank away from all other sources of pleasure and became a very cruel woman whose death makes him a “very consolate” widower. He retreated into his Lincolnshire hall where he surrounds himself with servants with long faces and miserable names. His son, Scythrop is a self-proclaimed genius (based on Shelley) whose book of deep philosophy was only bought by seven people, who he regards as the people most likely to start a new revolution.

Mr Glowry’s brother-in-law, Mr Hilary, is the only cheerful person in the house. He’s staying there with the hopes he can get his daughter, Celestina to marry Scythrop. She loves to torment her would-be lover, alternately spurning him and luring him on.

Mr Toobad is a guest, a nutty priest who shouts about the devil owning the world, it’s a hobby-horse that he won’t get off of. He wants to wed his daughter Celinda to Scythrop, but she’s gone missing on being told what to do. (It turns out the place she hides is Nightmare Abbey, because she was one of Scythrop’s seven readers and doesn’t know he was the person intended for her…Scythrop flits between these too loves.)

Then there’s Mr Flosky, a visitor based on Coleridge, who loves gloomy things, declaring that the world isn’t as good as it used to be and refuses to have any thoughts or ideas that make sense. He prefers his philosophies to be mysterious and murky and at one point stops talking because, he finds himself “unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense”. That’s the only time he stops talking. There’s also Mr Listless, a man too posh and lazy to do anything, he even uses his servant as many people use AI, to do tasks and remember things he could probably remember himself.

For a brief time there’s a Byron analogue, Mr Cypress and there’s Mr Asterias, my favourite character, a scientist on fish who is obsessed by mer-people and determined to catch one.

These strange characters bumble about and have conversations which reveal their various idiosyncrasies and ridiculousness. There’s a slight plot about Scythrop hiding his loves from each other which has a good comic pay-off at the end.

The main pleasure of the book is the way the characters rub up against Rach other and the way the book is told. It has a prissy, self-satisfied tine with long pseudo-philosophical sentences filled with unusual turns of phrase. I love the “consolate widower”, a character’s “atrabilarian temperament” and some one else who is “jerremitaylorically pathetic”. My spell check hates this review.

Essentially the author is having fun. He’s having fun with poking at people he knows and likes, at exaggerating their fondness for melancholy and mystery and he’s also having fun with words. That fun does come across still, but it is dulled over time as the immediate objects of ridicule are thoughts and people of the (increasingly distant) past. Because the book pokes fun at universal human frailties, such as taking confusing for deep, it is still funny - but because those frailties are expressed in extremely time-specific ways, the fun is blunted. 

It’s not for everybody, and I’m glad it was short but it was an enjoyable little nugget and I shall read some more Thomas Love Peacock at some point.

Review: The Writing in the Stone by Irving Finkel

 

The Writing in the Stone is a wonderfully odd beast. Essentially a gothic novel but set in ancient Assyria and written by Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist who looks exactly as an Assyriologist should look.

It reminded me most of William Beckford’s Vathek. On the surface level, both novels are eastern tales surrounding strange (and often quite gooey) religious practices - though Finkel’s engagement with his setting is far more deeply felt than Beckford’s orientalist fantasy. Both books also share a similarish plot. A stranger enters with a strange, delightful and intriguing object which ends up in the hands of a cruel and powerful psychopath with access to the demonic. These characters are then led by their curiosity, must leave their homes, travel to new places and screw over the people they meet until they find themselves in a hell they fought to get to.

The object in The Writing in the Stone is a stone. A wandering healer dies in a small town and has it in his position. The healer had a dodgy reputation, like most healers he had a skill at summoning demons and pulling them out of sick people but unlike the reputable ones, he was known to let the demons hang around. The local priest immediately sees the value of the stone. It’s full of writing but even he, as the most learned man in the town, can’t read most of them. He decides to take it to King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.  

The King gives it to his head exorcist, who can’t read it either. The exorcist knows he cannot admit this, but also that the rock must be of great power. He fools the king, has a servant kill the priest and takes another servant to find where the rock came from. He is not a nice man. There are memories where he blinded another student, memories of past murders and hopes for murders to come. He does some very icky necromancy on the original dead healer to point him in the right direction and sets off.

His servant is a mute giant with three testicles, who brings attention to himself by being too overt in his rapes and murders - particularly one where the woman’s rigor-mortis sticks herself to him. The exorcist might have to dispose of him eventually. There’s an incidental nature to the violence in this book that make it disturbing.

The note at the end reveals that the stone is a freak geological formation, that the cracks and crystals of a particular geological concoction make wedge shapes that look like cuneiform writing. This is why the stone includes some words along with unknown shapes that look like words - however, the book is not only set in a time and place where magic is believed in, but where it actually exists.

There are demons and ghosts that pop up and, when the exorcist finds the cave, it’s an actual sacred cave where words are stored by the Gods until they are needed. The the exorcist remembers, mortal man is not supposed to be in such places and they tend to have guardians… then he sees something.

This is a grim, nasty little story swimming in atmosphere and presented beautifully with decorated capital letters at the beginning of each chapter. One such letter depicts ‘The Game of Ur’, I have a recreation of it, it’s fun to play.

Review: Hieroglyphic Tales.by Horace Walpole

 Horry Walpole was a peculiar man, wasn’t he? Before I read The Castle of Otranto, or Selected Letters, I read Hieroglyphic Tales, which I bought after a trip to his fake castle, Strawberry Hill. I thought it worth a re-read.

It starts with a preface where he (of course) pretends to be a Grub Street hack who lives up the top of a rented building, because the air up there helps his asthma, naturally. He says he’s printing thousands of copies of these tales so that they will survive the inevitable death of print culture which will go the same way as creating new religions, teaching elephants to walk a slack rope and writing readable epics. In truth, Walpole printed seven copies, though he wrote some of the tales as letters to friends.

The fake Grub Street author claims that the stories in the book pre-date the creation of the world, or were created last week, or whatever. He says the original author may have been Kemanrlegurpikos, son of Quat, but it may not have been. (That joke reminded me of the Nu-Who planet of Raxicoricophallapatorius and it’s sister planet, Clom). We are told these tales contain all the great secrets of history, originally written in hieroglyphics. A claim no dafter than Athanasius Kircher’s attempts. 

While many of Walpole’s activities have a dilettantish quality, these tales are truly just him cutting lose, created extempore, the best ones are daft, camp riffs on fairy-tales, politics and silliness. The lesser ones are a little grating.

The first is about a princess out collecting goat eggs who finds a kingdom on the other side of the mountain. She’s captured and taken to the emperor, who has a new wife every night who tells him tales before being killed in the morning. Our intrepid Scheherazade bores the emperor to death with a history of church politics and becomes empress herself. This is a fun one, from the geographical absurdities at the beginning to the sheer irritation the emperor has with the ridiculousness of church schisms.

The second is about a king with three daughters who wants to marry them off sequentially. The problem is that the first daughter doesn’t exist but this is solved when a prince-suitor arrives because he’s dead. Complications ensue. One particularly silly detail is that the dead man has three legs, so the third daughter (who only has one) pines out of love because she feels he could complete her. The prince is also from a country with a brilliantly vulgar name, Quifferiquimini. One of my favourites.

The third tale is my favourite and starts with another brilliantly silly name. She is the princess Pissimissi, the Lady of the Jordan (a Jordan being nickname for a toilet). Her father dies leaving her a carriage made out of a pistachio shell pulled by an elephant and a ladybird, she whips them both and they perform equal pulling duty. In the course of her travels, they accidentally suffocate a tower full of husbands owned by a witch. She sets demons after them which a dispelled by the elephant’s fart. They collect all sorts of objects before being taken up by a hummingbird to the court of King Solomon the Wise who declares Pissimissi to be his favourite wife, thus upsetting the Queen of Sheba.

What makes the third tale my favourite, aside from the string of ludicrous incidents, is the level of detail. The witch has 17,000 husbands and releases 2,000 devils. They travel for three months, a day and an evening, are able to travel 500 miles a day, collect 15 dollhouses and 35 sugarplums &c. &c. These plums are also described as “dragging on the floor like the Duchess of Kingston’s breasts.”

The fourth tale is about a five year old girl becoming a queen in Ireland. However, her mother miscarries twins, one being a boy, and it starts a civil war. The civil war ends when a bishop accidentally swallows the pickled foetus, thinking it’s a medicinal plum in brandy. He then becomes pope and has bastard children who become the Fitzpatricks. 

This story was sent to a Fitzpatrick (and so calls him a bastard.. though to be fair, ‘Fitz’ d

oes mean ‘illegitimate son of’. More insensitively, he sent this to the Fitzpatricks (and their five year old daughter) just about the time that Fitzpatrick’s wife had a miscarriage. Was he trying to cheer them up? Seems bad form any which way.

The fifth story is about a Chinese prince whose very impossible and specific fortune is achieved because of the ridiculousness of English gardening, it had a tidy ending but outstayed its welcome. The Sixth irritated me even more, being a pretty bog-standard amatory tale, but with the last line revealing the main characters were dogs.

There’s a bonus story, set in ‘Serendip’ where a woman goes on a dream journey where she’s ogled by a baboon who is also the patriarch Abraham. It has a strange, woozy tone, which is at odds with the rest of the tales.

All in all, I love these camp little monstrosities that show a man writing nonsense just for the fun of it. I should do that more often (though I guess some people would say I already do). 

Review: The Georgian Child by F Gordon Rowe

 

When I picked up F. Gordon Rowe’s The Georgian Child, I was breaking one of my general reading rules, I was reading for a specific purpose, It’s not a rule I can hold to all the time, especially if I’m researching for something I’m writing, but I find that I never meet a book on the best terms when there’s something I specifically want out of it.

That was very much the case with this book. I was hoping for a decent overview of eighteenth-century childhood with a few specific elements I can feed into the novel I’m currently writing, which depicts the life of a child in the 1710s. Not only did I not get that, I don’t think that was the book Rowe wanted to write.

He’d previously written The Victorian Child, a book which drew on a little research and a lot of anecdotes from his older relatives to give the texture of Victorian childhood. He seems to have gone to the same research and anecdotes for this because most of the book was about how his older relatives had remembered such-and-such from their Victorian childhood and that he suspects that it must have held true for the Georgians also. He gets a lot of play from this notion of ‘Georgian’, because it meant most of his example could come from the 1820s - 1790s at a push.

What’s more, when something specifically eighteenth-century was mentioned, it wasn’t particularly related to childhood. There’s a whole bunch of babble about the Hanoverian succession and Jacobites at the beginning, where he reveals himself to be a big fan of the King Over the Water, something which also fed into another babble about tartan in the Victorian era.

He talks a little bit about famous Georgian children, which meant he could fill a few pages retelling the story about Jack Shepherd, though what that could tell us about the average Georgian childhood beyond the notion of apprenticeship and how the poor are up fast, it’s hard to say. There could have been a bit about apprenticeships in general, how they worked, what they did, how long they lasted - but there wasn’t anything. He also talks about William Betty, has a few sniggers about Bettymania but doesn’t really go into how crazy it was, or example, he played Hamlet in an adult cast to packed theatres at the age of 11. 

The two chapters about children’s dress were okay, but they essentially said little more than children under 5 or so wore unisex dresses (so unisex that later portraits of boys were thought to be girls). After that, they wore smaller versions of adult fashions, often hand-me-downs. So then Rowe could talk about adult fashions a little.. as always, seeming happier when he was veering away from the book’s topic of The Georgian Child.

There’s a little about toys and games, but most of that chapter was about how Georgian children played games Victorian children would have found babyish. There’s also a lot of digs at Georgian adults and how they seemed to play babyish games also. There’s a little about schools, about the depiction of cruel, whipping headmasters and how Sunday schools were a Victorian thing. I learnt that an older name for a see-saw was a swing-swang. I learnt the name of a game called ‘tip-cat’ but I had to use the internet to find out how to play it. 

While my lack of enjoyment for this book may have principally come from it not fulfilling my needs from it, I do feel that just as I didn’t get much from reading it, F Gordon Rowe didn’t get much from writing it. 

Review: 100 Chinese Myths and Fantasies by Ding Wangdao

While I was reading The Tale of Genji, I couldn't carry it around with me, so I carried this dual language book of Chinese myths around as well. Consider this review a little bonus episode to the Genji.

The preface talks about how there are relatively few such myths and asks questions about why that might be, especially given the long (though interrupted) span of Chinese cultural history. It concludes that with the emergence of centralised structures, the bureaucracy and organisation of the various provinces and states, China spent less time in the sort of atomised, primitive social conditions that give rise to such stories. To be honest, I don’t know enough to say whether that is an accurate appraisal or not, but there was something in the stories themselves that supported it. Many of them are recounted as historical oddities rather than full myth, they are often grounded in a year, featuring a historical figure and often end in a strangely bathetic tone.

I loved this odd tone, with most stories ending in banal anticlimax. The figures of the story often meet something strange or supernatural, have an out-of-the-way experience and then go on with the mundane rest of their lives. There are no great heroes or heroines in this stories, just a run of minor officials, craftsmen and scholars who happen upon a ghost, god or fox, navigate the strangeness and get on with life.

The preface also talked about how Chinese writing favours the small and concise. That the nature of the writing system means much can be conveyed with little and each symbol can represent a range of nuances in themselves. This means that in translation, many of the stories read like simple records in official documents, such-and-such a thing happened, and that’s it. This added to the peculiar commonplace and bathetic tone, which I found really charming.

Some of the stories featured elements I’d heard of before; I’ve seen images of the bridge of birds that brought lovers together, there was a story where someone looked back and turned into a mulberry tree that reminded me of Orpheus, most of Apollo’s lovers and of Lot’s wife. There was a story about a tiger-wife which followed the pattern of many selkie stories (and a love a selkie story). 

Many stories of gods felt like the older, stranger stories of fairies. The gods have their own rules, society and powers and if a character is unfortunate enough to find themselves noticed by one, they have to play things carefully if they want a happy outcome. Knowing the British fairy stories, it seemed ridiculous when the man charged by a river god to fix up his temple, went and destroyed it instead. Yet the god’s revenge was just to make his career go off the rails - which was presented as dire revenge indeed.
I also enjoyed how matter-of-fact the ghosts were. My favourite was about a man who finds that he has a ghost as a travelling companion and so has to pretend to be one. He has to make up excuses to the ghost about why he can’t go through walls or is so heavy footed as he walks, claiming that as a new ghost, he hasn’t developed such skills.

One chunk of the book stood out from the others. The book is arranged chronologically and they come towards the end of the selection, written by a man called Pu Songling in a collection called Strange Stories from Happiness Studio. These stories were longer, more complex and, unlike many other stories in the book, were told. There was a distinct style to the telling and a greater emphasis on the tone and structure of it. I’d like to get some translations of these at some point but my cursory googling tells me there hasn’t been many decent English translations yet.

I really enjoyed this stories, both for the differences from fairy and folk tales I’ve read before, but also their similarities. 

Review: The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

 The Tale of Genji isn’t my first Heian rodeo. I’d already experienced the shock of finding something so old but feeling so new when I read The Lady Ochikubo and I’d already thrilled at the weird tension between a completely alien culture but utterly relatable emotions when reading The Pillow Book. The thing about Genji is that it’s very long and that you can see the book developing in complexity and confidence as it progresses.

Most write-ups of Genji say that it’s in two parts; the first, charting Genji’s life until his death and then the second, the Ujii chapters about Genji’s (not actual) son and (actual) grandson. I’d argue that it’s in three, and that each is vastly more developed than the one before.

The first part (chapters 1-28) are focussed on telling the story of Genji. He’s born into the imperial family as the son of a low-ranking consort. The consort is scandalously the Emperor’s favourite and actually dies as a result of all the negative attention and backbiting from the senior wives. Because of this Genji is given a surname (Minamoto or Genji) and so is made a commoner, where his life chances are better because he can enter the imperial service and work his way up the ranks. 

As a young man, he overhears a conversation about different women and the pros and cons of different ranks and personality types. This conversation them structures the bulk of the first section as Genji falls into various love scrapes and twists, trying out examples of all these different women. Despite being clever, accomplished and impossibly handsome, he makes mistakes in many of these relationships because he’s young and naive. In many ways, this first section plays out a lot like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones - a thoroughly decent young man needs to learn emotional (and sexual) responsibility to become the whole good man he has the potential to be.

It’s also nothing like Tom Jones as the tone is not at all funny or ironic but very earnest and wistful.  If anything, the tone of the book veers closer to the later eighteenth century’s cult of sensibility as all the characters in the book have a deep pull towards the beautiful, especially anything that is beautiful in a fragile or wistful way. Genji encounters women who reject him, women who accept him but probably shouldn’t, women who lead him on, and one who is killed by the disembodied spirit of a jealous ex. However, like Tom Jones, his amorous encounters get him in trouble and he finds himself banished from his previous paradise. 

In theory, it’s on this exile that he cleans himself up, but he actually just goes with another woman. It’s actually on his return and reinstatement in the city that he sets out to do right by all the women  in his life and behave responsibly. The great love of his life is probably the one a modern reader would have most difficulty with. Early in the book he comes across a ten-year old girl who reminds him of a lady he loves who reminds him of his mother. He bullies the girl’s family into letting him have her and then trains her up to be the perfect wife. (This is actually similar to what Thomas Day did in eighteenth century Britain, but Genji was more successful, his wife liked him). This woman is called Murasaki, and she’s held up as a paragon of female virtue throughout (and to be fair, she is eternally patient and even enjoys raising his children by other women). The ideal set-up he creates is one that wouldn’t be possible in society today, essentially a campus with different women in different sections with special gardens dedicated to them. It works for them though.

This leads to, what I would define as the second section of the book (chapters 29-30). Where the first section stuck with Genji, this one gains in complexity by following Genji, his growing family and the family of his friend and rival, To No Chujo. If the first is an early eighteenth century novel like Tom Jones or Roderick Random, this is like a nineteenth century social novel like Middlemarch. Where the characters all previously existed in their relationship to Genji, they now have their own stories which play out and interweave with his.

The cast list expands exponentially at this point, which can be a difficulty, especially with the Heian custom of not using anyone’s actual name. None of the characters so far have used their names and the monickers used are actually their position (meaning the ‘name’ changes as they get promoted) or a called after a significant motif in one of their chapters. Genji’s top wife, Murasaki is named after a wisteria plant that occurs in a poem in one of her chapters, even the author’s name of Murasaki probably comes from her identification as the author of this book. It’s been a struggle to maintain all the family/relationship dynamics so far, but it becomes a real challenge in this section.

Despite having settled down in this portion of the book, it is here that Genji does (what I think) is his most despicable thing. He finds one of To No Chujo’s scattered daughters, one that To No Chujo is not aware of, and sets himself up as her guardian and her protector. However, she’s so beautiful that he cant’ help also trying to force himself on the young woman, even as he’s the only protection she has. What’s interesting, is that even Genji knows this is unconscionable but can’t help himself. Given the author’s general support of Genji and his actions, there’s the implication that this strength of feeling is somewhat sexy.

The whole sexual relationship aspect of the book is really interesting, particularly in light of the book’s female author. It would seem that there is a whole ‘game’ of seduction that both parties generally accept, and Genji is praised for being a role-model at this game. Women were to keep themselves unseen, there are instances in the book of brothers never having seen their sister’s face, so any glimpse of a woman is instantly erotic. It might be the shadow in a screen, a sleeve poking from a curtain, or (most explosively) a glimpse of the hair. Even (and especially) a woman’s handwriting is erotic - and hearing her voice, rather than a go-between is a definite come-on.

Then the man edges closer and closer to the curtains, aiming to talk with her without intermediary. Then he begs to be let inside to sleep with her, teasing he with poems which she responds to. Her responses need to ideally be rejections with hints of acceptance. The woman has to say no but no definitely doesn’t mean no. (Some of the greater tragedies in this book occur when the woman’s no does mean no but there’s no cultural acceptance of this and the man takes it as a no-yes). The man then needs to make himself pathetic, crying that he can’t live without her and generally makes himself pitiable. Then the woman takes pity and he leaps forward, grabs her, takes her somewhere and has sex even as she protests. Before dawn he sneaks off, sending a flirty poem. She, dazzled by the night before then sends a flirty poem back - but not too flirty. It’s a game with lots of nuance, more than I could decipher, and lots of room for misunderstanding, which drives most of the conflict in the book.

Between the second section and the third, there is a chapter title but no chapter. This is presumably where Genji dies and it’s reminiscent of the black page of Tristram Shandy.

This third section (31-42) deals with two children of the generation after Genji’s (the next generation were dealt with in section two). It’s mostly about two men, Kaoru and Niou, and their dealing with three sisters connected with a village called Ujii, and so are often called the Ujii chapters. This section is vastly more complex than the previous two, following a number of characters as they negotiate the social intricacies of their situation, use of time jumps and flashbacks to twist the reader’s perspective and even the use of a fake-out death (followed by feigned amnesia).

It’s amazing how the first part was a straight-forward linear narrative following one character, the second a linear narrative following multiple characters but the third is like Pulp Fiction, controlling the reader’s perspective with clarity and control. It’s such a shame the book ends before this third section was completed because I want to know how it ends and how the characters escape their impossible situation. 

There are so many other fascinating elements to the book, the importance poetry plays in every aspect of the character’s lives, the completely different expectations of masculinity for the men in the Heian court to a contemporary Anglo-Saxon or Viking one, the fact that the book is about important figures in government and no actual governing is ever done - one main character is head of the army, yet spends his whole time stalking women and developing his own particular incenses. It’s a fascinating book and a fascinating world. 

The Tale of Genji is a very long book that charts the growth, development and ageing of, first, one particular character and then a whole society of them. It pays particular focus on change, the fragility of the world and the impossibility of holding onto past times. In many ways it is reminiscent of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, except I don’t frequently want to choke-slam the narrator. Forget how Proust can change your life, Murasaki can do it better. 

Review: Old London Cries by Andrew Tuer (and bonus, Why Not Eat Insects? by Vincent M Holt)

 My copy of Old London Cries is a facsimile of a book that was published in 1885 by Andrew Tuer. He was a publisher with an interest in the antiquarian and the fading. He produced books in a chapbook style, mine is small, wrapped in marbled paper and ties together with strings. He also filled it with many old prints and a few newer woodblock prints produced at the time but in a retro-style.

Cries themselves have not completely died out in London, visit a street market and the people there will still be reeling out their “five pounds a pound” or extolling the virtues of their fish or meat. The most memorable one I heard was when I was eight and a man was selling toy spiders by yelling, “biiiig ‘airy Sp-I-ders” in a very distinctive way. When I was little, Evening Standard hawkers still had a very distinctive cry (that sounded nothing like the words ‘Evening Standard’). There’s a man in Camden Market who calls his “bhang bhang chicken” in a way that once heard can never be forgotten. It’s not a dead art, but it’s a much diminished one.

Old London Cries reads rather like my paragraph above, it’s not an academic work, it’s a collection on remembrances, anecdotes, notes & queries. The cries are not organised thematically, chronologically, geographically or at all - it’s a jumble of these memories (as well as written and drawn accounts) spanning the fifteenth century to the time the book was produced.

There’s the ‘jovial fellow’ in Fleet Street who proudly cries how stinking his fish are, the jack-in-the-box seller who makes a noise as the clown pops up that buyers are disappointed to find do not come with the product.  One famous seller was the ‘Tiddy-Dol-man’ who features in Hogarth’s picture of the hanging of the idle apprentice. He was a gingerbread seller dressed in second-hand finery who made up little nonsense rhymes ending “tiddy-dol-dol-dol” to advertise his food. He also rather undersold the gingerbread, saying it would “melt in the mouth like a red hot brickbat”.

I was rather charmed by the man selling ‘young lambs’, a children’s toy made of lambskin with a pink bow on them. His cry was reported as;

“Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell

Two for a penny, young lambs to sell

If I’d have as much money as I can tell

I wouldn’t cry young lambs to sell

Dolly and Molly, Richard and Nell

Buy my young lambs and I’ll use you well.”

The accompanying print shows the lamb seller as having a hook for a hand, possibly an old sailor or soldier on hard times.

The eighteenth century was a boom time in recording London Cries and many of them are culled from this popular e genre. Paul Sandby did one, Cruickshank has a few, some entered children’s books, chap books and nursery rhymes. Many of them are pretty plain, a simple call to buy whatever the person was selling. However, like the cries in the market today, it was often how they said it. Some products had recognisable rhythms and tunes to the cry, an idea that was incorporated in the ‘Who Will Buy?’ scene in Oliver!

Some of the cries represent old fads, fashions and jobs that no longer exist. Nobody walks about the street with bundles of canes calling to fix your chairs, nor does anybody wheel a knife-grinder around to fix up your old knives and scissors. (Though there is still a scrap metal man up my way who has a slow horse pulling a carriage, calling out “scrap metal” and people come out to put it on the cart - I was amazed to see that in 2025).

The cries also reflect food and drink no longer as popular. There was a man crying “Saloop”, which was a sassafras drink that men drank to gain energy for a night on the town - I imagine a sort of Dr Pepper. Then there’s Hokey Pokey - a cheap form of ice cream sold in blocks in different coloured and flavoured layers, I imagine like a Neapolitan. However, it was firmer than ice cream and slower to melt and, it was suspected made from mashed up turnip rather than cream. Ice creams themselves were served in penny-licks, a special bowl a customer would buy to lick the ice cream out of before giving it back to the vendor to use for a new customer. I suppose the tune of a modern day ice cream van is rather like an old street cry.

This is a charming book, pleasingly told by Andrew Tuer, though it can get a little repetitive with some of the cries. I’m not sure how many times in this small book I read the words ‘sweet lavender’ or ‘ripe strawberries’.

The back of the book included other works published by Tuer, and one in particular caught my attention.

Why Not Eat Insects? was published in 1885 by Field and Tuer and written by Vincent M Holt. As far as some cursory googling tells me, it was his only work.

It’s not a joke, but a genuine little polemical pamphlet encouraging more people to eat our creepy crawly friends. He was a few reasons for this, which he repeats a number of times:

1 - many insects are very clean animals, especially the vegetarian ones and are much cleaner than  pigs or lobsters, which are very popular food items.

2 - They are plentiful, nutritious and free, which should endear them to the poor.

3 - Eating insects will stop them eating and ruining our plants.

4 - People of the past ate insects with relish.

5 - People in other countries eat them with relish.

6 - Many highly prized foodstuffs, like oysters, aren’t much different to insects anyway.

7 - They taste good and it’s only cultural prejudice keeping them off the table.

He talks about Romans and Greeks enjoying them, natives of West Africa and Australia, even the French and their snails. He talks about Erasmus Darwin trying some and enjoying them, and of his own culinary experiments. He talks about a very fashionable event where people tried a Chinese meal, which didn’t have insects but did have Bird’s Nest soup - and insects have to be nicer than twigs and bird spit (not to mention the Chinese do have insect and chrysalis meals).

He says woodlice taste like prawns, some caterpillars taste delicious and it’s a mistake that only some snails are edible, they all are and so are slugs.

The best part of the book is where he creates two insectivorous menus. One starts with slug soup, braised beef and caterpillars and ending in gooseberry cream - with sawflies. The second includes curried cockchafers, wireworm sauce, caterpillars as garnish and ends in moths on toast - though whether spread or laid, I don’t know. To make these dishes seem more classy, he gives the same two menus with French names. I can’t say he swayed me (though I have had crickets and they were fine).

This book is one of those joyously bizarre things you come across sometimes and I am putting it in the bedside table of my spare room alongside How to Speak Wookie and Knitting with Dog Hair.