Facing the future by Fay Bound Alberti

This will be my last History Girls blogpost, at least for now.

I was recently awarded a UK Research and Innovation Fellowship to study the emotional and cultural history of face transplants - not yet a reality in the UK but since 2005 a method of surgically treating severe facial trauma in many countries. You can learn more about that news here.

Although most of the ethical and experimental groundwork had been carried out in the UK, France was the first country to undertake a face transplant - on Isabelle Dinoire, who had been savaged by her own dog. America, Spain, Mexico and China have all contributed to the “face race”, with varying degrees of success. 

From the vantage point of a historian of emotion, what is striking is the lack of coherent, psychological understanding of the global impact of face transplants. We have no long term data on their emotional effects, or the challenge they might post to the idea of the self.

And how much more problematic are questions of identity, appearance and emotional wellbeing in the age of the selfie, when looks seem to be everything?

Which is where my project comes in. I will be working with people living with disfigurement (as a legal term though not a comfortable one), surgeons, nurses, face transplant recipients and donor families. And thinking about what face transplants mean at a cultural level - working with artists, writers (including History Girls' own Louisa Young) - ethicists and philosophers.

This is a transformative opportunity for me, and a chance to make an impact in a complex but critical field. It's also a major time commitment, which is why I have to say farewell for now.

There is always a silver lining: taking my place will be the historian Susan Vincent. Sue was my PhD contemporary at the University of York, and she has written wonderful books on the histories of clothing, hair and fashion. I interviewed her for this blog back in November 2018.

Thanks for everything, fellow History Girls and readers! Keep in touch.

www.fayboundalberti.com 

The Journals of Queen Victoria by Fay Bound Alberti

In today's blog, I want to discuss a historical source unknown to many people: the journals of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), Queen of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Empress of India from 1876.

This online resource was completed in 2012 and is now free to access for residents of the UK. It offers fascinating insights into the life of the longest serving British monarch to date, and some fascinating asides from which to reconstruct nineteenth-century society and culture.

http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do 

Queen Victoria started writing diaries when she was aged just 13 years old, using a book given to her for the purpose by her mother. "This book, Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales in it", she wrote, starting a habit that lasted from 1832 to the monarch's death in 1901. These were not initially the private record we associate with teenager diaries today; her mother inspected the diaries every day, until Victoria became Queen.

The journals detail many aspects of Queen Victoria's life, from her love affair and marriage to Albert (and her devastation when he died) to matters of state, her love for her family, and her relationship with her family, friends and acquaintances.

Thirteen of the volumes in Victoria's own handwriting survive. Many of the remaining volumes were transcribed after her death by her youngest daughter Beatrice, who followed her mother's instructions (and perhaps her own idea of propriety) in removing sections that might prove controversial. Most of the originals from 1840 were then destroyed.

Queen Victoria completing her correspondence with Mohammed Abdul Karim, who served
during the final 14 years of Queen Victoria's reign.

All together there are 131 surviving volumes of Queen Victoria's journals, totalling over 43,000 pages. Until recently this material was only accessible by visiting the Royal Archives. The diary entries appear as scanned copies of Victoria (and Beatrice's) own handwriting, accompanied by typed versions that make reading simple.

Searchable by keyword, the online materials allow detailed study for historians and researchers, and make fascinating reading.

On 28 June 1838, for instance, a young Victoria records her experience of her coronation, a day that was marked by relative economy, just 18 years after the extravagant coronation of George IV. Visitors thronged to London, delivered by the new railway system and around half a million people were said to have gathered to watch proceedings, entertained by a balloon ascent and a firework display in Green Park, and illuminations and a fair in Hyde Park.

The Coronation of Queen Victoria

The event did not go quite as planned - there had been no rehearsals, and the train bearers kept falling over, and there was a lot of uncertainty about who should stand where. The Queen complained that the Bishop of Durham was hopeless and had given her no instructions, nor had the Archbishop 'who (as usual) was so confused and knew nothing' that he put the coronation ring onto the wrong finger.

While the attending crowds were excited by the pomp and ceremony, not all agreed with the money being spent, or the extravagance of the occasion. The writer and economist Harriet Martineau, described the peeresses she saw in Westminster Abbey as 'Old hags, with their dyed or false hair drawn to the top of the head, to allow the putting on of the coronet, had their necks and arms bare and glittering with diamonds, and those necks and arms were so brown and wrinkled as to make one sick'.

Victoria was just 18 years old when crowned Queen and her diaries describe the excitement of the day. She had been woken at 4am by guns in the park and could not sleep because of the 'noise of the people, bands, &c. Got up at 7 feeling strong and well; the Park presented a curious spectacle, crowds of people up to Constitution Hill, soldiers, bands, etc.'

At 9.30am she dressed in her 'House of Lords costume' and soon after got into the State Coach. 'It was a fine day, and the crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen, many as there were, the day I went to the City, it was nothing - nothing to the multitudes, the millions of my loyal subjects who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession... I was alarmed at times for her that the people would be crushed and squeezed on account of the tremendous rush and pressure'.

Once in the Abbey, Queen Victoria took notice of the clothes her attendants were wearing and the faces and expressions of the people who attended her. She seemed giddy and excited and touched by the emotional response of her 'excellent Lord Melbourne [who] stood very close to me throughout the whole ceremony'. He had been 'completely overcome ... and very much affected; he gave me such a kind, and I may say, fatherly look. The shouts which were very great, the drums, the trumpets, the firing of the guns, all at the same instant, rendered the spectacle most imposing'.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne was the British whig statesman who served as Home Secretary (1830-1834) and Prime Minister (1834 and 1835-1841). It has been rumoured that Victoria was in love with Melbourne and even proposed to him, but in the diaries her affection for him was protective and fond, more like that of a daughter for a father.

Celebrations continued well into the evening on the day of the Coronation, and Melbourne asked Victoria whether she was bearing up, concerned she might be over-tired. He complained that the Sword of State that he carried was very heavy and Victoria said that her Crown was also heavy and 'hurt [her] a great deal'. She stayed in the drawing room until 11.20pm that evening, talking to Melbourne and others, then remained on a balcony to watch the fireworks in Green Park until midnight.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

The following morning, Queen Victoria got up at 10.30am and breakfasted at 11.30. Lord Melbourne 'was very far from well... he looked so pale and weak and his poor eyes so suffering.' She expressed concern that the Coronation had been too much for him, as he hadn't gone to bed until 1am. Melbourne assured her that he had prepared himself for a long day with a 'strong dose of brandy and laudanum'.

To find out more about Queen Victoria's relationship with Melbourne, and her experience as monarch, as well as her views on the politics and literature of the day, check out the journals online here. Reading the diaries also allow us access to the language and literary conventions of the day, which are useful to writers of history and fiction alike.

Let me know what you think in the comments. And if you find anything unexpected, do share!


www.fayboundalberti.com

Book Review: Susan Major, Female Railway Workers in World War II - by Fay Bound Alberti

In last month's blog I interviewed Susan Major, the author of the book I am reviewing today: Female Railway Workers in World War II. Readers also had a chance to win that book, by answering what two jobs were banned to women on the railways. The answer was engine drivers and firemen - the latter being responsible for stoking the engine.

Women's exclusion from those roles brings us to the heart of the story of Susan's book: women were required to work traditional men's role during the war, just as in other sectors, but ideas about gender and femininity held sway.

On 9 March 1941, the Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin appealed for 100,000 women to enrol for war work in Britain, in fields, factories and railways - to replace the men who had been sent off to war. In 1940, the railway companies and the National Union of Railwaymen had already agreed to employ women, albeit at 4 shillings less per week for the same jobs. Support for childcare was available, with government contributions to allow women to work outside the home as well as keep the home fires burning; the presumption was that two women would be needed for every one man. By the end of the war the reality was almost reversed.

This wasn't the first time women worked the railways, Susan points out - there were female railway labourers recorded in the 1851 census; others policed turnpike gates. But the roles that women took on during World War I had been mainly public roles: goods and passenger porters, parcel porters, ticket collectors, carriage cleaners and clerks. Cleaning carriages had traditionally been viewed as men's work, even though cleaning was gendered; interestingly another reason women were not employed as carriage cleaners was that the role was usually 'the first step on the ladder to be an engine driver' (p.3), a carefully guarded male role.

Gang of plate layers at Bristol West 1943 (from University of Leicester special collections)

By the time World War I ended, there were nearly 70,000 women in the railway workforce and some came back during World War 2. In 1942 the number of women on the railways was over 80,000.

Susan's book weaves together some wonderful anecdotes about women on the railways - taken from the National Archive of Railway Oral History - with media reports of the time to explore the tensions between perceptions of femininity, economic necessity and war time need. Whether women could carry heavy loads for instance, was discussed in the Nottingham Evening Post (1942), when a local fishmonger complained his kippers were about to be condemned by the government inspector. Though they had been cured in the north of Scotland, transport delays had led to their deterioration - he said it was because women worked as porters yet couldn't manage heavy loads.

In December 1940 the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) reproduced a poem by Robbins Millar that used the term that 'porteress' to marvel, rather patronisingly, at the new phenomenon of women carting suitcases:

The Porteress

She'll be spry as a sparrow

At hurling a barrow

An absolute ace

At yanking a case

You'll never get waxy [bad-tempered]

She'll find you a taxi 

Respond to your yell

Like a dashing gazelle;

And charge no extortions

For chipping large portions 

In lumps and in chunks 

Of your holiday trunks. 

Women porters loading parcels onto a train, 27 February 1941 (Daily Herald Archive/Science & Society Picture Library)

These observed accounts are set against lengthy extracts from women's own stories in Female Railway Workers, under chapter headings that track the women's own journeys: Getting in; Learning the Job; working with Men; Doing a Man's Job to 'Surviving Air Raids', 'Tricky Situations' and - of course - 'And then the Men came Back'. Nellie Nelson, for instance, a London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) porter at York, told the story of an 'awful parcel foreman:

He was a bit of a nuisance, so we cured him one day. you know, laxative chocolate you can buy in Boots? Well, we bought him some of that. we was all on number nine platform and we asked, 'Give you a bit of chocolate Tommy?' 'Aye' and he got some of this and said, 'You're a nuisance you lot I'm having no more chocolate off you lot'. 

Women talk about their love lives, the lack of toilets, their friendships, the dangers they encountered, and the families they lived with. Women working on the railways were subject to the same hard work as men, alongside juggling life on the domestic front, and challenges specific to their sex and the inequalities of the time: sexual harassment, unequal pay, media sensationalism and precarious employment. There were positive things too: a sense of camaraderie with other women, interesting and diverse work, control - to some extent - over their rhythm of work (at least compared to women in munitions factories) and the acquisition of a wide range of skills.

The idea of the 'railway family' also created a paternalistic sense of belonging, and of commitment and obligation to its fellow members. Many went on to marry railway men, continuing their association with the 'railway family' even after they had left their roles.

There had been local union resistance to the idea of female labour in the early part of the war, with concerns about the role of men and the nature of the hierarchy that was in place. But the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act 1942 laid down that women would be required to give up 'men's jobs' in order to accommodate returning soldiers.

Hard physical labour in 1941 for Southern Railway (Planet Pix Ltd - Planet News/Science & Society Picture Library)

Susan's book brings us the voices of women in an industry previously overlooked by most historians. Women working on the railways challenged myths of femininity and weakness and demonstrated their ability to learn new skills, work together,  undertake hard physical labour and endure difficult, often dangerous conditions.

This book is an important addition to the history of women in wartime and beyond.

Female Railway workers in World War II is available at Waterstones and all good book shops.

Women and the Railways in World War 2: an interview by Fay Bound Alberti

Susan Major, pictured at York Railway Station

For this week’s blog I talked to Dr Susan Major, who has written a fabulous book about women working on the railways during World War 2. This book is important because although we know that women took on many traditional men’s roles during the war, very little has been published on women in the railways. Railways were a reserved occupation, so in theory men continued to work on the railways while their counterparts in other industries were sent off to war. In reality, the men working on the railways were often old and disabled. The issues confronted by women workers were those that existed in other activities:  economic, sexual, social and temporal, their lives being changed by the new habits and relationships brought by the war, as well as its ending. Susan’s book is a welcome addition to our understanding of the lives of working women in the Second World War, as well as its gender politics. 

About Susan Major

Susan Major completed a PhD with the Institute of Railway Studies & Transport History at the University of York in 2012. Drawing upon material from the National Railway Museum and the British Library, she focused on early railway excursions. Her book based on this research, Early Victorian Railway Excursions, was shortlisted for the Railways and Canal Historical Society Book of the Year Awards 2017. Her latest book, Female Railway Workers in World War II, was published by Pen & Sword in 2018. Susan was a programme consultant for the BBC series Railways: the Making of a Nation, taking part in the episode on leisure. She is retired and lives in York.

Fay: “So Susan, what drew you to the subject of women on the railways?” 

Susan: “Well I completed my doctorate, which later became a book, on Victorian railway excursions. Later, when doing some research about railway voices I discovered the National Archive of Railway Oral History at the Railway Museum, which contains many different  interviews with  people working on and associated with the railways. Quite a lot of this material has been digitised and indexed and transcribed. Among all the men recorded, there were some women and I realised that their voices had not really been listened to. And there were enough women talking about the wartime period, and about working in what were commonly perceived as ‘men’s jobs’, to form the basis of a book. And remember that even so-called ‘women’s’ jobs in those days, like working as a clerk, had been men’s jobs when in the railway context. And I wanted to know not only what everyday life was life for those women, but also how they were looked at by other people, by the companies who were employing the women as well as commentators in newspapers of the time.” 

Fay: “ Are there any particular women that stand out for you?Any stories that were especially memorable?” 

Susan: “There was a female porter at York station, when it was bombed in 1942. A train was also bombed on its way into the station, and these were terrible conditions to work in. The social conditions could be difficult too; she tells a story of a parcel foreman that the female workers had problems with and they sorted him out by giving him some chocolate, which happened to be laxative chocolate.”

(Pause for laughter!)

Fay: “What can you tell us about the kind of women in these roles, their age or class for instance?”

Susan: “Well it’s a very select sample, dependent on who was chosen to interview. And these women would all have been young at the time, because the older women would have died by the time the stories were recorded. And they described liking the companionship of other women, the responsibility, and, unlike factory, work the variable and different activities involved.”

Fay: “Were the women all unmarried? I’m thinking about other roles of the time, which had very strict union rules”.  

Susan: “Yes. If you got married you had to leave. Most of these women were aged between 16 and 22 and often they met a railway man and got married and that was the last we hear of them. By contrast the newspaper reports were keen to tell readers about those women who might have 12 children and still carried out a role. And there was a sense that a woman wasn’t quite acceptable in publicity unless she had some link to a railway man. Women were not treated as individuals in their own right.” 

Fay: “Were most of these women working class women?”

Susan: “not necessarily. Many were working class though there were also reports of quite posh women working on the railways. The ones that were interviewed were mainly ordinary women, who had a clear sense of their roles and their relationships with other women and you get a real sense of the culture of the workplace through the stories that they tell. Compared to other work, like factory work, the duties could be varied and interesting”.

Fay: “What do these interviews say about how it was to be a woman in a traditionally male environment?”

Susan: “There is some discussion about workplace harassment, much of which was taken for granted. For instance one of the accounts describes the experience of a typistThey had to go down and check their work with one of the men in the office. She said “And there were never enough chairs. So we used to share a chair with a man. And I think the feminists these days would be horrified. They'd probably be having all the men done for harassment. But we used to call it fun”

Fay: “Ah. So these women would have to sit on their boss's lap.” 

Susan: “Yes, or share the chair. And there are a lot of examples of that. And women would talk about how they worked all day while their male supervisors stood around talking about sport. And at the end of the working day the women would get ready to go home and the men would say “overtime now”. And the men got paid more for the overtime, while the women had often families to get home to.There was also this concept of the “railway family”, which other historians have written about. Employees were encouraged to think of the railway as a family, and there were magazines prompting this image. And there was a sense that you could only get a job in the railways if your father put you forward, for instance, and while that wasn’t necessarily so in practice, it was how people thought about the railways as paternalistic employers”. 

Fay: “After the war did these women get sent away from the jobs, as they did in other industries?” 

Susan: “They were dispensed with, yes. Although I’ve focused on women working, the last chapter of my book is called: “and then the men came back”, which draws attention to the way women workers were dismissed. One woman, a guard, was sent a letter thanking her for her service. Only it wasn’t sent to her but to her boss. She had to travel a long way on the train to get to his office after a long shift, where she was shown this piece of paper, which he then kept, before trekking all the way home again”. 

Fay: “Thank you for a fascinating introduction to the book, which one of our lucky readers will win”. 

Prize Question: 

What TWO jobs were women railway workers NOT allowed to undertake during World War Two?

1. Engine drivers 
2. Porters 
3. Switchboard operators
4. Firemen
5. Parcel workers 
6. Signal operators 
7. Manual labourers 

Please answer in the comments below. The lucky winner will be drawn at random. 

***

UPDATE: Competition results 

Thank you to all who entered the competition. 

The answer to the above question is: 1 Engine drivers and 4. Firemen. The winner drawn from a hat was Susan Price, who also happened to be the first person to answer the question. Congratulations, Susan. Please email me with your full name and address at: fay@fayboundalberti.com and I will send the book to you. 

Since Susan was a founding member of the award-winning Clements Hall Local History Group in York, and remains very active in the local community, I couldn’t let her go before asking her about her book on Bishy Road, a bank of independent shops whose success has caught the eye of The Guardian and other national publications. 

Fay: “Before we finish I wonder if you could say something about your work on Bishy Road, which is another subject you have written about?” 

Susan: “When I started looking at the shops for a local history project, I was surprised that nobody had looked at their history. So I started with local directories, census records, and oral history accounts to build up a picture of their development over 150 years. And though the name “Bishy Road” is quite controversial for some people, who think it is disrespectful to the name “Bishopthorpe Road, the local shops, which are still mostly independent, are regarded quite affectionately by the people who live and work there.”

I particularly enjoyed the way Susan records the social history of York through the shops that populated Bishy Road. From Chinese laundries to Teddy Boy tailors, the history of the shops is a history of social, political and economic change of the country as a whole. Which is the best kind of local history!

Bishy Road 2018: A Shopping Street in Time is available at Waterstones

 www.fayboundalberti.com 

The gardens of Castle Howard by Fay Bound Alberti

Castle Howard, North Yorkshire  

Over the festive period, my friends and I visited Castle Howard, a stately home in North Yorkshire. I am not a fan of country estates as a rule; I prefer finding out about the lives of the ordinary men and women who made aristocratic life possible. But it was a beautiful day and we were keen for some fresh air and green spaces.

Castle Howard fit the bill. A short drive from York, it is set in a thousand acres of parkland, with statues, lakes, temples and fountains. There are numerous artworks and world-renowned collections held at Castle Howard, though the house was unfortunately closed for the winter.

A view of John Vanbrugh's project for Castle Howard (1725)

Work began on the stately home in 1699, though it took over a century to complete. The architect was Sir John Vanbrugh (c. 1664 -1726), who was also responsible for Blenheim Palace, as well as a number of Restoration comedies (such as The Provoked Wife, 1697). Castle Howard was Vanbrugh's first foray into architecture, and he was assisted by Nicholas Hawksmoor (c. 1661-1736), a pioneer of the English Baroque style. A Baroque building, Castle Howard has two symmetrical wings that project either side of a North-South axis. The characteristic dome was added to the design at a late stage.

Castle Howard as imagined in Brideshead Revisited (Granada TV)

Castle Howard has been the home of the Carlisle branch of the Howard family for over 300 years. It is perhaps best known for its role in Brideshead Revisited (1981). Castle Howard also featured as the Kremlin in The Spy with a Cold Nose (Galton and Simpson, 1966) and - for inside scenes - in the television series Death Comes to Pemberley (2013). 


Castle Howard was opened to the public  in 1952, reflecting a world where stately home upkeep had become impossible for traditional aristocratic families. Many stately homes were demolished or sold off bit by bit, or redesigned as tourist attractions in the post-war era. Castle Howard is now owned by Castle Howard Estate Ltd and run by Nicholas and Victoria Howard. The grounds were excavated by Channel 4's Time Team in 2003, searching for evidence of a local village that had been demolished so that the estate could be landscaped. You can find the episode on YouTube.

The mausoleum 

In addition to the landscaped gardens to the front of the house, the park grounds contain a forested area and two major buildings: the Temple of the Four Winds and the Mausoleum. Built in 1729, the Mausoleum sits on a hill, and is raised on a terrace encircled with a stone wall. It looks rather like an observatory, and is encircled by Doric column and crowned with a dome. The burial vault lies below, and contains sixty three catacombs. The mausoleum was said to have cost over £10,000 when built, and it influenced their fashionable spread. Such a building, announced the English whig Horace Walpole, 'would tempt one to be buried alive'. More recently, the mausoleum and gardens featured in the Artic Monkeys' video Four out of Five. 

Still from the Artic Monkeys' Four out of Five, showing the mausoleum

The Temple of the Four Winds lies at the eastern end of Temple Terrace. It has four doors and four sets of stairs, each of which faces a cardinal point on the compass. The Temple was designed by Vanbrugh in 1724, and influenced by Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotunda in Vicenza, Italy. Originally named The Temple of Diana, it remained unfinished for ten years after Vanbrugh died in 1726. After it had deteriorated in the 1940s, George Howard restored the Temple in 1955. It was used as a place for refreshment and reading, with a cellar beneath that was used by servants.

The Temple of the Four Winds

We sat on the western side of the Temple to enjoy a packed lunch. From there we had views over the Howardian Hills, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty located between the Yorkshire Wolds, the North York Moors National Park and the Vale of York. The Howardian Hills, as you might expect, take their name from the Howard family.

The walk from the Temple to the house is lined by statues; 18 lead figures can be found throughout the gardens as a whole. Aside from Hercules - who has a rear end that would put Kim Kardashian to shame - our  favourite was Meleager, one of the great heroes of Greek mythology. When his father Oeneus forgot to sacrifice to Artemis, the angry goddess sent a huge wild boar to ravage the country. Meleager gathered a band of heroes to hunt the board, and he finally killed it after a long battle. This lead statue is on the Temple Terrace, with an adoring hound at the hero's feet and a slain boar to the side. We didn't find the statue of the large boar that Meleager defeated, though that is also on the estate.

Meleaguer the hunter with hound, and the head of a newly slain boar.

The spectacular Atlas Fountain and pond crowns the gardens. Dating from 1850, it was exhibited at The Great Exhibition prior to installation at Castle Howard. The Fountain was designed by the English architect and artist, William Andrews Nesfield, and the figures carved in Portland stone by the sculptor John Thomas. who also worked on Buckingham Palace. The figures were transported from London by rail for installation at Castle Howard. 

A large bronze globe dominates the fountain, and is supported on the shoulders of Atlas. In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan condemned to hold up the celestial heavens for eternity. The fountain has four recumbent Tritons blowing water through shells over Atlas, as he kneels in the centre. 

The fountain was empty when we visited, but is beautiful when filled, as you can see by this YouTube clip. The pond alone is vast - 27 metres in diameter. The shell and basin carvings were made by local craftsmen, and the water transported from a stream nearby, and brought up to the estate reservoir by steam engine. The fountain was turned on for the first time in October 1853. 

The Atlas Fountain

You can find out more about Castle Howard from its website, where you can also find videos of the house and gardens. It's definitely worth a visit if you're in the area. We will be going back in the summer when the house is open. 

A belated happy new year to you all!

Homes and homelessness at Christmas by Fay Bound Alberti

This month my blog is a brief one. The reason is simple: I am moving house for the second time since August. I write surrounded by boxes that are yet to be unpacked and glasses without a home. But amidst the debris of the move, I am minded how lucky I am to have a home when so many do not.

We have become accustomed, of late, to think of the lonely at Christmas; those without family or friends, those who are widowed or suddenly alone after a period of togetherness. Media coverage tends to focus on elderly people at Christmas, quite justifiably conscious of the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of social connection and belonging during a season marked by togetherness.

The world's first Christmas card, produced in 1834

Of course, for many people, families bring sadness and discomfort and a gap between the real and the ideal. The Victorian invention of Christmas, with all its trimmings: turkeys and sprouts, long hours spent at leisure, Christmas cards and carols, is just that for many: an invention. I have written about this invention for the Wellcome Collection, which is devoting a series of articles to loneliness during the Christmas week.

There are many kinds of Christmases, many different versions of family. Yet for homeless people and refugees, Christmas brings a particular kind of loneliness. The history of loneliness has received very little attention, though we know it is both an urban, modern problem. Early modern politicians worried about 'masterless men' roaming the countryside, many of whom were soldiers, but homelessness grew exponentially as a result of urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth century.

It is impossible as 2018 draws to a close, not to see the numbers of homeless people increasing.  Since the 1980s, homelessness has been a particularly growing problem in the UK (and the US), but never before has it been so visible on our streets. Tory austerity and benefit cuts have resulted in more people than ever before being homeless at Christmas, as well as all year round. This Christmas, more than 24,000 people will sleep rough in Britain over the festive period. It's a shocking statistic.

As the weather becomes colder and the spirit of Christmas falls upon us, why not spare a thought for those with no place to call home. Organisations that support the homeless at Christmas include Crisis, which not only provides a Christmas meal and companionship, but also crucial medical and physical care. The Salvation Army provides support for homeless families and individuals, while other charities support specific groups, like veterans.

Support for the homeless is needed all year round, not only at Christmas. Charities facing a glut of volunteer in the festive season find themselves chronically understaffed  the rest of the year.  Like loneliness, the emotional effects of homelessness are exacerbated by the symbolism of the season. Not everyone wants to be with other people at Christmas; not everyone celebrates Christmas. But everyone wants a place to feel safe, and somewhere to come home to.

Wishing all readers and fellow History Girls a safe and happy Christmas.

www.fayboundalberti.com

The lifeline of libraries in an age of loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti

On Twitter this week, the writer Neil Gaiman responded to the debate on libraries’ decline. Rejecting claims that libraries were obsolete, he suggested that they are actually “more relevant and useful than they were 30 years ago”. He’s right, and not only because libraries lend books. 

Libraries have political, social, emotional and educational relevance. Their history is long and complex. The earliest libraries, based on cuneiform script on clay tablets, date back to 2600 BCE. They recorded mostly business transactions and inventories of goods. Over 30,000 clay tablets from the 2600 year old Library of Ashurbanipal remind us that the Middle East was, for centuries, a global centre of knowledge and education in medicine, art and culture. 

In the sixth century, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world were Constantinople and Alexandria. Egypt's Library of Alexandria is the most famous library of Classical antiquity. Dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts, the library was patronised by the Ptolemaic dynasty and a global site of scholarship from the 3rd century BC until the Roman Conquest. Filled with papyrus scrolls, the Library is most famous now for having burned down, resulting in a devastating loss of treasures. 

The Library of Alexandria

In the ancient world, libraries were a means to announce power, status, identity and civic pride; the same drive that was behind the expansion of libraries in the Enlightenment West. This so-called golden age of libraries saw many important European libraries being founded. The British Library was established in 1753 and Chetham's Library in Manchester, said to be the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, opened in 1653. The Mazarine Library and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève were also founded in Paris and the Austrian National Library in Vienna. 

An aisle of Chetham's Library, Manchester

The principal of libraries being open to the public was increasingly commonplace, reflecting their educational and civil status. Knowledge mattered; to be seen to be knowledgable arguably mattered more. Where once libraries open to the public had chained their books to the desks, the principle of lending libraries provided a means for people to carry that learning into their own homes, providing they had enough literary, space and leisure time. 

The Public Libraries Act of 1850 gave local boroughs the power to establish lending libraries, while the Education Act of 1870 expanded literacy. These two moments connected the desire for civic pride to the equally strong desire to educate the working classes, and to encourage their leisure time to be both clean and moral. Libraries represented civility and the pursuit of knowledge for social advance, and for its own sake.

What has changed? Why are libraries no longer seen as crucial to the social fabric, and therefore not worthy of investment? Why have there been such massive cuts to library budgets since 2010? 

Leaving aside the social indifference of successive Tory governments, and the wholesale impoverishment of institutions and structures that represent collective interest (the NHS, state schools, care homes), there is no longer any definitive sense of what kind of knowledge matters. In the age of Trump there has been a movement away from intellectual reason towards primitive impulse; we might argue that this precondition allowed Trump's rise, rather than being a direct result of his presidency. 

But there are other reasons too, including a lack of financial investment and support. Part of the reason why libraries are supposedly in decline is the growth of digitisation. More resources online, it is argued, provides better access than outdated buildings, with limited books; it also eliminates the problems of access: geographical, economic, physical. But not everyone has access to reliable internet resources. Books and papers and physical objects are critically needed in countries with dodgy internet connections and limited electricity. 

Besides, libraries are not just spaces to hold books. They are filled with insightful librarians and curators, who can link you to the source that you need (and even borrow it from other libraries); perhaps not as quickly as Google, but certainly with more humanity.

As a girl growing up in rural Wales, the weekly visit across the border to Shropshire town of Oswestry and its library, gave me hope. Searching the shelves, feeling limitless as my gaze drifted from Mills and Boon to Shakespeare, from Dryden’s poetry to local history, there were options available to me. Potential and places that reached beyond the narrowness of the shelves and the chlorine smell of the nearby municipal pool.

Oswestry Library

As a lonely child with a difficult family life, I treasured those moments of escape. I loved everything about the routine: the piling up of six books - SIX! - with their tattered and grubby plastic covers, cherry-picked from a dozen different shelves; queuing for the librarian; smiling as she expressed interest (or sometimes shock) in what I was choosing; watching as she flicked through the pages to find the sweet spot and oh the muffled clunk of the date stamp, those were physical moments of bliss. 

Carrying that stack home, holding it on my lap as a shield that protected me from the inevitable arguments of the car that backfired, squirrelling it up in my room where I could smell the pages and look at all the different people who had borrowed each book before me - or the joy of being the one single stamp of newness - was a special kind of bliss. I belonged to a community of readers who stretched beyond the narrow, sad confines of my bedroom. 

And for me that is the point. Libraries are far more than buildings to hold books. They are pivots of connections between individuals and the world outside; not only in the date stamps that nestle aside one another, but also in a more literal, physical way. Libraries are spaces where anyone can go, to browse, to sit, to read the newspapers they can't afford to buy, to keep warm, to think, to meet other people. And in an age of loneliness this collective, free-to-use space is crucially important, and critically endangered. 

Books bring people together, literally, figuratively, physically. When we imagine that libraries aren’t needed, and we allow governments to shut them down on the basis they aren’t viable, or God forbid necessary, we toe a line of individualism that weakens society as a whole. 

I don’t use libraries like I did when I was a child, though half the adult population do. I did try, when my own children were younger, and the weekly run to the library to perform those rituals of choosing, carrying, stamping (and inevitably mislaying) are treasured moments of motherhood for me. The moments of drawn out time are a distant memory for me - and no doubt for many, caught up in our technologically driven, imperative age where every second counts, and Amazon Prime has a same day delivery option. 

The depressing thing about libraries closing down is that lack of use becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; an ideological sleight of hand by which cut backs appear justified. Deprive public libraries of millions of pounds to buy resources, to fund decent opening hours and enough staff, and people inevitably spend less time there. Create a narrative of decline and obsolescence and libraries become - especially the local, public libraries that sustained me as a child, redefined as an unnecessary and unsustainable expense. 

Communities need libraries. Like they need hospitals and schools and roads and utilities. Libraries are spaces of learning and information, yes, but they are also spaces of acceptance and belonging and engagement in ways that are neglected in the 21st century. Many libraries are changing to adapt to the needs of their users; some have knitting circles and board game groups, tea mornings and yoga alongside Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice. And adaptation may be key to this survival. But don't let people say libraries don't matter. They have never mattered more. 

My new book, A Biography of Loneliness will be published in Spring 2019 by Oxford University Press. 

You can follow my blog and website for updates: 

www.fayboundalberti.com

Why the (Western) World loves an Extrovert, by Fay Bound Alberti

On New Year's Eve my friend and I sat in a busy venue, gently grumbling at all the bonhomie involved in the celebrations: strangers hugging, singing and optimistically making predictions for 2017. We were the obligatory introverts - the spectres at the feast, commenting on the party that was erupting around us, rather like Statler and Waldorf, those grumpy old men from the Muppets. 

I thought a lot about introversion and extroversion over the festive period, and its social history. The overwhelming narrative of the season is the good humour and geniality of friends and family, and yes, strangers, in the spirit of man's humanity to man - though it always seems to be women who are landed with the practicalities. Those who are not swept up in the spirit are the Scrooges and the Grinches of the world, preferring their own company to that of others. The pressure on all of us to grab the hands of strangers for a rousing rendition of Auld Lang Syne is considerable. 

So where does it come from, this association of introversion with hostility and unfriendliness? What got me thinking about this is the history of loneliness, a subject that I am researching for a forthcoming book. Today, loneliness seems to be an ever growing concern, variously linked to adolescent depression, middle-age suicide and elderly dementia. To be separated from society, the story goes, is to fail to function in it. Loneliness has become shorthand for a pathological isolation from the outside world, made all the more challenging by the rise of social media. Sites like FaceBook are said to encourage isolation at the same time as they make us more 'social' - lurking on social media websites and seeing everyone else leading apparently 'perfect' lives, leads to introspection and depression. 

It is introverts who most commonly report, or are more willing to report being lonely, but the term introvert is itself a modern one,coined by the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung (pictured below) in 1921. At the time of Jung's research, many of our current working ideas about the self and society, emotions, the mind and the role of the individual were being formulated with the rise of the mind sciences. Scientific explanations for human personality and behaviour were being discussed, especially in relation to the structuring and working of the brain. 



In the new mind sciences, extroversion was characteristic of talkative, outward-facing personalities who were energetic and enlivened by being around other people. By contrast, introversion was associated with isolation and reserve, and by the need to spend time alone. Most personality models in history since Jung have worked with this basic understanding of differences between extroverts and introverts. In 1962 Myers-Briggs created a workable model of Jung's theories (the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI) which is still in common usage. Curious? There is even a free online test, adapted from Myers-Briggs that you can take at home. 

The MBTI 'personality inventory' uses Extroversion and Introversion as one of its main categories of analysis. Despite changing models of psychology since the 1960s, concepts of introversion and extroversion continue to dominate, and have acquired a moral loading. Extroverts are generally seen to be open and agreeable, and introverts thoughtful as well as neurotic. The basic idea of personality (or temperament) types is not new; it has been around since the classical period. Following Galen, men and women were divided into melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric or sanguine individuals, depending on how much of a particular humour they possessed within their bodies. These differences are represented rather nicely below by the seventeenth-century painter Charles Le Brun's allegorical depiction of different personality types. 

Today, there is more moral loading about different personalities, and the value of introversion and extroversion. In the Western world we place higher stock on being extroverted, as identified by Susan Cain in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking  Many organisations and institutions (I have worked for at least one) celebrate noise and activity over quietness and consideration. Introversion, despite its necessity in many of the creative arts, has acquired something of a pathology; shyness a failing. Why is this? 

Part of this association (extroversion = good and introversion = bad) can be rooted in the social context of the psychological models that emerged after Jung. In the early twentieth century, European and American models of the self valued self-help, self-reliance, hard work and the rise of the individual. Being able to stand out, being willing to be vocal and outward-facing, being able to demonstrably lead others was a measure of success in presenting the self, as in business. On 21st century social media, vloggers like Zoella sell not only books and make up but a particularly modern form of aspirational extroversion that would have been unthinkable in an earlier time. 

Above: Zoe Sugg (Zoella) speaking at the 2014 VidCon, 28 June 2014. Credit: Gage Skidmore.

There are global differences in the desirability of extroversion. While it is taken as the norm in the UK and US, it has been argued, extroversion is less acceptable in traditionally social-orientated traditions of Japan and Buddhist cultures. Of course these are stereotypes, and differences are often surface, rather than core. But part of the reason for introversion in Buddhist cultures is the emphasis on looking inwards, in stillness and mindfulness, characteristics that arguably retain a different value in the West.  

In the real world, of course, we need introverts just as much as extroverts. And most of us are neither entirely one thing or the other. It is common for each of us to feel introverted or extroverted at different times depending on our mood, company and environment. Extroversion is just one of the 'big five' that psychologists now use to measure personality and aptitudes. In addition to extroversion, the characteristics that matter are neuroticism (emotional stability); conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. The vast majority of people fit somewhere in the middle on most of these rankings. There are always exceptions. In a recent study, The Atlantic magazine found that Donald Trump, America's new President, scored extremely low on agreeableness and unusually high on extroversion: a 'combustible' combination whose effects have yet to be seen. 

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