A Victorian Marital Disaster

by Stephanie Williams

In the 1850’s the public breakdown of the marriage of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and his wife Rosina filled the press with a scandal that resounded through the drawing rooms of Mayfair and the back-rooms of Westminster. It’s a case that makes Johnnie Depp and Amber Heard look like a walk in the park.

You only have to look at his portraits to know you are dealing with a rogue. That knowing gaze, the laid-back look, the ringlets and slightly unkempt auburn hair.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton © Henry Lytton Cobbold 

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton – of Knebworth Hall – member of parliament, and for a brief time Secretary of State for the Colonies, has a reputation for being a wit and a dandy. He is also a famous and prolific writer – in his time selling almost as well as his good friend Charles Dickens. To Bulwer-Lytton we must credit such phrases as ‘pursuit of the mighty dollar’, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, ‘the great unwashed’, and ‘it was a dark and stormy night'. The Last Days of Pompeii, published 1834, was a best-seller for decades; his melodrama inspired Wagner.

As a Cambridge student, his virginity is lost to Bryon’s famous lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, in 1824. He is 21, she is nearly 40. When their affair comes to an end, he consoles himself in Paris among the fashionable ladies of le beau monde.

On the day before his 23rd birthday, Edward returns to London. That evening, his mother takes him to what he fears will be a very boring soirée. There he sets eyes on green-eyed, dark haired Rosina Wheeler, a noted and well-educated Irish beauty.

© National Portrait Gallery, London

You could say it was doomed from the start 

 His mother wanted him to marry money. She forbade the marriage, cut off his allowance, refuses to speak to him and forces him to work. Rosina’s mother, Anna – who at this time Rosina finds slightly embarrassing -- is regarded as a dangerous radical: a socialist and one of the nation’s first campaigners for women’s rights. She thinks Edward is a worthless dandy.

In 1827 the couple set up home in an expensive house in Oxfordshire.

Edward, who had won the chancellor’s medal for English verse at Cambridge, has no choice but to write for his living. Once inspired, he is in a state of fierce concentration. When finished, he sinks into depression. In May 1828 Rosina is in the final weeks of her first pregnancy when half-way up a ladder in the library fetching a book for him, she tells him she feels faint. 

‘He stared at me blankly for a moment, and then suddenly sprang to his feet. A look of hideous fury filled his face. He made a vile curse and pushed me to the ground. The next thing he did, was kick me in the side with such savage violence that I fainted from the pain.’

The next day, he is all sweetness – brushing away any reference to what had happened. Rosina cannot believe his behaviour. Meanwhile, he tells the servants she merely had fall. When their daughter Emily is born a month later, she is immediately given to a wet-nurse. From that time Rosina is scarcely permitted to see her. With his literary career flourishing, they move to London. Edward adds politics to his workload. The birth of a son in November 1831 does nothing to rekindle the marriage. By his own admission, Edward, with his tendency to melancholy, has a vicious temper and voracious sexual appetite. And is now flaunting an affair with a society beauty, Mrs Robert Stanhope. 

In an attempt to repair the marriage, Edward and Rosina travel to Italy – to Rosina's surprise, Mrs Stanhope, with her husband in tow, appears on the Channel crossing to accompany them. Terrible scenes erupt in Naples, where Edward, accuses of her of infidelity with a Neapolitan prince. He attacks her again, this time with a knife. 

'I had frightened myself, as well as Rosina… I possessed a temper so constitutionally violent that it amounted to a terrible infirmity. She should, after all our years together have understood that it was inhumane to tamper with so terrible an infirmity as mine. '

Back in England, they agree to separate. Both are just 33. Edward awards Rosina an allowance that is pitiful. She is denied access to her children. Rosina is forced to write. She does not hold back. Her 1839 novel, Cheveley, or the Man of Honour, takes Edward apart revealing such physical abuse that The Age newspaper dubbed him ‘Wifewhack’.

They are now equally obsessed with loathing one another. In 1847, their daughter Emily, who had spent her life consigned to various governesses, died of typhus fever in poor lodgings, aged nineteen. Rosina, who had to force admission to her death bed, accused him of wilful neglect.

Emily, © Henry Lytton Cobbold

Now Rosina pursues him with embarrassing public pronouncements at every opportunity: writing to Prince Albert decrying the Queen’s support for such a scoundrel by giving a royal premiere of his play, Not So Bad as We Seem in 1851, and posting advertisements around Devonshire House for Even Worse than We Seem by 'Sir Liar-Coward Bulwer Lytton, who has translated his poor daughter into Heaven, and nobly leaves his wife to live on public charity.'

In June 1858, Edward canvasses for re-election as Colonial Secretary in Hertford. Rosina plasters the town with flyers denouncing him. She takes to the hustings herself to tell the world what a man he is. In response, he has her committed to a lunatic asylum. 

 The outcry against him – spearheaded by Rosina’s women friends -- will not be silenced. He has a chat with Dickens at his club who warns him this is a scandal he will not survive. Within three weeks, Rosina is released. 

Both make extensive records of their feelings. As time goes by Rosina’s prose gets wilder and wilder. It may be the drink – of which he accuses her – speaking. But by now she has also realised the validity of many of her mother’s ideas on the rights of women. She will go on to publish a further 20 novels exposing the ill treatment of wives, haunting him for the rest of his life.

'The representative of Romance.'

Vanity Fair, Oct 29 1870

Bulwer-Lytton dies in 1873. Lonely and ill, still often mocked, he is covered in honours: a baronetcy and a peerage, knight grand cross of St Michael and St George and is buried with huge pomp in Westminster Abbey.

She lives on, still beautiful, troubled by pain, sorrow and debt. She dies in obscurity in 1882. Her own grave in Upper Sydenham lay unmarked for over one hundred years, until in 1995 when her great-great grandson arranged for a tombstone with the inscription she had requested: 'The Lord will give thee rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve.'

Rosina’s most immediate legacy was passed to her granddaughter Lady Constance Georgina Bulwer-Lytton (1869–1923), who became one of the heroines of the Edwardian women's suffrage movement. 

But that’s another story.

Himiko the Shaman Queen ~ by Lesley Downer

‘Your ambassadors have arrived here with your tribute, four male slaves and six female slaves plus two pieces of cloth with designs, each 20 feet in length. You live very far away across the sea; yet you have sent an embassy with tribute. Your loyalty and filial piety we appreciate exceedingly. We confer upon you therefore the title “Queen of Wa Friendly to Wei,” together with the decoration of the gold seal with purple ribbon. We expect you, O Queen, to rule your people in peace and to endeavour to be devoted and obedient.’

Emperor Cao Rui of the state of Wei, China, to Pimiko, Queen of Wa, 238 AD

Lady of the period with haniwa
terracotta figure showing clothing
 and hairstyle 

All-powerful Himiko

Two thousand years ago the land we now know as Japan was a patchwork of over a hundred small kingdoms, perpetually at war. Armies fought to grab more and better land for farming and to control the water supplies of river and lakes, fighting with bows and arrows and stone and bronze weapons. They lived in fortified communities surrounded by moats and walls with watch towers and gated fences, where the king lived in the inner enclosure.

In 190 AD thirty of these kingdoms decided they’d had enough of warfare. The kings made a truce and formed a federation and, seeing that men had proved unable to maintain the peace, they appointed a woman to rule over them. It was a little more than a hundred years after Boudicca led her ill-fated rebellion against the Romans. But these kings chose not a warrior queen but a woman who had a very different sort of power.

Haniwa - figure of a shamaness

Shamans were the heart of this society. They formed a bridgehead between the human and the divine, interceding with the gods and the ancestors to ensure that the weather was good, crops were abundant, and to protect against disasters like earthquakes and fire. They carried out secret rituals and presided over festivals wearing awe-inspiring bronze mirrors that reflected the sun’s rays. Many of these visionaries and prophets were women and it made sense to appoint one as their ruler.

Out of the mists of time
The kings chose a woman of extraordinary powers called Himiko. She was nineteen or twenty. Hers is the first name in Japanese history to come floating out of the mists of time.

Shaman at an altar, 
Yoshinogari Yayoi village

She set herself up in a palace surrounded by towers and stockades and guarded by a large and formidable army, with a thousand women attendants and one man to serve her food and drink and act as her spokesperson. There she set about conducting the rites and rituals necessary to keep the gods on side and the crops flourishing. To maintain the mystery necessary for communing with the gods, she was seldom seen in public.

She didn’t just deal with religious affairs, she also wielded temporal power. She issued laws and ensured that her country remained at peace and her people were law-abiding and peaceful.

In 238 when she was fifty, she sent a diplomatic mission on the long and enormously dangerous journey by ship, palanquin, ox cart and horseback to Luoyang, the capital of the neighbouring empire of China, with tribute for the emperor, a bit like the ancient Britons sending an envoy to Rome, but a lot further. China was huge and powerful and very advanced and dominated the neighbouring kingdoms. To have the Chinese emperor’s seal of approval was the ultimate accolade.

Warehouse and market area,
Yoshinogari Yayoi Village 

The emperor accepted Himiko’s tribute and recognised her as Queen of Wa, meaning ‘Dwarf Country’, the rather insulting Chinese name for foreign peoples. As well as the gold seal with purple ribbons he sent other gifts including a hundred bronze mirrors, enormously valuable and an essential resource for conducting rituals. He also sent a legation to study the small island kingdom and they produced a series of reports.

  

Emperor Cao Pi of Wei

Chinese envoys in the land of Wa

The Japanese had no writing, whereas the Chinese did, though there were some Japanese scholars who were able to read Chinese. Thus we know about Himiko from Chinese sources, not Japanese.

 

This was all a very long time ago and there are quite a few mysteries. For a start the name ‘Himiko’ is written ‘Pimiko’ in Chinese but for some reason in Japan she is always known as ‘Himiko’. Her country is known as Wa or Yamatai. It’s not even certain where it was. It may have been in the northern part of the island of Kyushu or, more likely, in central Japan, around where the ancient capital, Nara, was later built.

A Virgin Shaman
The Chinese envoys recorded that Himiko was quite elderly and came from a long line of queens. They called her country Queen Country because there were so many women rulers.

She never married, they wrote, but ‘occupied herself with magic and sorcery, bewitching the people. Thereupon they placed her on the throne.’

Yoshinogari guard house

Yamatai prospered under Himiko’s rule and had more than 70,000 households, well-organised laws and a taxation system and thriving trade. Her people were gentle and peace-loving. They dined on rice and many other sorts of grain, alongside wild boar and deer and plentiful supplies of fish, all of which they served on beautifully burnished pottery dishes and ate with their hands.

They cultivated mulberry leaves to feed silkworms and wore beautifully woven garments of silk, linen, cotton or hemp, depending on their social standing. Men wore headbands and loose kimono-like garments while women looped their hair and wore jackets over long skirts, tied in place with obi-like belts. Some wore garments like ponchos which they slipped over their heads. Men of high status had four or five wives while the lower-ranking had two or three. Women, said these Chinese observers, were faithful and not jealous.

 

Hashihaka grave mound, Sakurai, Nara Pref

This was very much a hierarchical society. When a lower-ranking person met a superior on the road, the lower-ranking person bowed and stepped aside. They added that ‘in their meetings and in their deportment, there is no distinction between father and son or between men and women’, which the Chinese officials, with their strict Confucian notions of hierarchy, found extraordinary. And they had slaves who were catalogued like merchandise when they were sent to the Chinese emperor as part of Himiko’s tribute.

They also tattooed both their faces and bodies, one purpose being to protect themselves from dangerous fish when they went diving. They coloured their faces with pink or scarlet paint. ‘They are much given to strong drink,’ the chroniclers noted. ‘They are a long-lived race, and persons who have reached 100 are very common. There is no robbery or theft and litigation is infrequent.’

Himiko’s grave mound
By 247 trouble was brewing. Himiko sent a message to the new Chinese governor in Korea, complaining of hostilities with one of the other Wa states and asking for Chinese support.

But in 248 she died. She was around 80 and had ruled for 60 years. She was as awe-inspiring in death as she had been in life. She was given a burial appropriate for a queen of such extraordinary power and status.

 

Haniwa warrior, Tokyo National Museum,
National Treasure

‘A great mound was raised over her, more than a hundred paces in diameter, and over a hundred male and female attendants followed her in death,’ say the Chinese records. According to another source she was buried not with a hundred but a thousand slaves. But archaeologists say that there is no evidence of human sacrifice in Japan so perhaps she was buried with terracotta haniwa attendants such as fill later tomb burials.

After Himiko’s death a king took the throne but the people refused to obey him. There were assassinations and murders and more than a thousand people died. Finally they installed a new ruler, a thirteen-year-old girl named Iyo, a relative of Himiko, who was probably also a shamaness. Under this youthful shaman queen order was restored. The Chinese court too recognised her as the ruler.

After Himiko’s death, grave mounds like hers began to spring up around Japan. One of the oldest of these kofun (‘ancient graves’) is the Hashihaka tumulus outside Nara. It’s a heavily-wooded keyhole-shaped hillock with a square front and rounded back, rising steeply out of the paddy fields. Pots from inside have been radiocarbon-dated to 250 AD, around the time of Himiko’s death, leading some scholars to conclude that this may be her tomb. If so, that would mean that Himiko’s land of Yamatai was the Nara region.

Himiko is not mentioned in any of the Japanese written records, which were compiled around 700 AD. For a long time she was forgotten. Then in the Edo period there was a growing interest in the country’s history and she was rediscovered. Over the years there have been many debates as to where Yamatai was and whether Himiko actually existed or whether one of the legendary empresses mentioned in the Japanese annals was Himiko under another name.

Today she is very popular indeed and has attained new life as a character in manga, anime, video games and films.


Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and in particular all things Japanese. Amazingly she has two books coming out this year. The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) came out on September 10th - 16,500 years of Japanese history in 50,000 words, full of stories and colourful characters! Meanwhile Eland is reissuing her first ‘real’ book - On the Narrow Road to the Deep North - on October 5th, under her new pen name to acknowledge her Chinese roots - Lesley Chan Downer. For more see www.lesleydowner.com

Image of lady is mine; all other images courtesy wikimedia commons.

Operation Manna - food from heaven in WW2

 by Deborah Swift

In the last few weeks we have heard a lot on the news about WW2's 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden and Arnhem - the attempt by the Allies to free occupied Holland. It was only partially successful, leaving much of Holland still occupied and cut off from the rest of the Netherlands.

By the winter of 1944-1945, the Netherlands was in the grip of a severe famine, known as the "Hongerwinter" (Hunger Winter). The German occupation forces had cut off food and fuel supplies to the western part of the country, a region that included major cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, which remained under German control. Above - Dutch children being fed soup during the famine.

The destruction of transport infrastructure by bombs and sabotage made it nearly impossible to distribute whatever food was available. By April 1945, millions of Dutch civilians were facing starvation. An estimated 20,000 people had already died. The situation was dire, and the Dutch government in exile, along with the Dutch resistance, appealed to the Allies for help.

Operation Manna was the response to this desperate plea for assistance. Named after the biblical manna that fed the Israelites in the desert, the operation was conceived by the Royal Air Force (RAF) Negotiations were hastily arranged between the Allies and the German forces in the Netherlands. While the Germans were still an occupying force, they were also aware that they were losing and were perhaps motivated by a desire to avoid post-war retribution. Eventually, truce was agreed to allow unarmed bombers to fly low over Dutch territory and drop food supplies without being fired upon.

The first mission of Operation Manna took place on April 29, 1945. Lancaster Bombers were loaded with food parcels instead of bombs. The aircraft flew at low altitudes, around 400 feet, over designated drop zones in the western Netherlands, including areas around Rotterdam and The Hague. The food parcels contained basic but essential supplies: flour, dried eggs, margarine, sugar, and tinned food. These items were packed in sacks and boxes that were designed to minimize the risk of damage when dropped from the planes.

Over the course of ten days, more than 3,000 sorties were flown by the RAF, dropping nearly 7,000 tons of food. The operation was a logistical triumph and a morale booster for both the Allied forces and the starving Dutch population. For many, these food drops were the difference between life and death.

For months, the Dutch people had been surviving on whatever they could find: tulip bulbs, sugar beets, and anything that could be scavenged. See the photo above of Dutch women transporting food. The sudden influx of supplies amazed the population, delivered from the skies by the sort of bombers that had once represented death and destruction.

The food drops did more than just prevent starvation, they also lifted the spirits of the population. Stories from those who lived through the Hunger Winter often recall the sense of relief and joy that accompanied the arrival of the food parcels. In many cases, the Dutch civilians gathered in the drop zones would wave at the Allied planes as they passed overhead.

Operation Manna continued until May 8th 1945, the day the Germans in the Netherlands officially surrendered to the Allies. This marked the end of the occupation and the beginning of the recovery for the Dutch people. The food drops, however, continued to be a crucial lifeline until normal supply routes could be restored.

The legacy of these operations endures to this day. Monuments and memorials in the Netherlands commemorate the food drops, and the operations are taught in Dutch schools as an example of international cooperation and humanitarianism.

For the airmen who participated, the missions were often among the most rewarding of their military careers. In my latest novel Operation Tulip, these food drops form part of the plot towards the end of the book. When researching I was taken by how moving the British airmen found these missions, to be sending aid not bombs, and how they recalled the Dutch waving from the ground. After five years of war, this must have been a heart-warming sight.

Operation Tulip is out now.

Secret Voices by Sarah Gristwood

We at the History Girls are grateful to Sarah Gristwood for this guest post about her latest, fascinating, book.  

It was way back, in my early twenties, that I first developed an interest in the diaries of other women. A lot has changed since then - for me, but also, more significantly, for the field of women’s studies.

At the risk of painting the 1980s as the Dark Ages, the challenge then was to persuade a reader that women had voices distinct from those of men. That they might possibly be worth hearing…Today, we can all assume a ‘yes’ to that.

Today, the questions are more nuanced. Things have moved on. Academia has seen a lot of work on women’s writing, tv has seen the unmissable diaries of Nella Last (Housewife, 49) and the coded records of Anne Lister (Gentleman Jack). And yet, if you look at the anthologies still out there on the shelves, it’s shocking how few women’s voices feature. That’s why, when Batsford offered me the chance to edit Secret Voices: A Year in Women’s Diaries, I frankly jumped at it.

 

Because one thing remains constant, whether you’re reading them in the 1980s or the 2020s - the astonishing variety, excitement , frankness and relevance of these women’s voices. 

There are some simply extraordinary stories, like that of the Inuit woman who found herself sole survivor of an Arctic expedition. Of Anne Morrow Lindbergh -wife to the famous aviator Charles and herself a pioneering flyer - writing about the kidnap and murder of her infant son (the story behind Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express). Of the Victorian wife cast by her husband into the streets…

There’s Lady Bird Johnson describing Kennedy’s assassination and life in the White House, or Barbara Castle and Oona King casting a cool eye on the House of Commons. Voices, you might say, from the powder rooms of power … Queen Victoria recounting the moment she was told of her accession to the throne (to say nothing of her first night with Prince Albert). But I was almost more struck by finding, so often, the unexpected hiding within the ordinary. 

 

Dilemmas that we view as modern can actually be seen echoing down the centuries. Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry admits how, after a difficult labour, she couldn’t welcome her new baby as she felt she should; socialist Naomi Mitchison discovers the challenge of combining work and family. Nella Last describes how World War II had unexpectedly liberated her from the limiting expectations of her marriage: Edwardian socialite Lady Cynthia Asquith  the difficulties of having what she saw as a disabled child. 

 

In the privacy of the diary format, women in the past wrote more freely about sex and the life of the body than we might expect. Near the turn of the nineteenth century, we have Anne Lister on her lesbianism and Hester Thrale on her menopause. In the first half of the twentieth, Anne Frank on menarche and Joan Wyndham on masturbation. There are the well-known writers who nonetheless, in their diaries, sound an unexpected note. Would we expect to find Virginia Woolf gleefully describing the delights of a car, and the excitement of being shingled; or Beatrix Potter proclaiming the age of knickerbockers? Or Barbara Pym on the pleasures of peach-coloured underwear - ‘disgraceful I know’, but chosen, she confessed, ‘with a view to it being seen!’?

 

Sometimes it’s our knowledge of what lies ahead that renders the words of the unconscious diarist even more extraordinary. Anne Frank in the summer of 1944 rejoices that the war is almost over and she may be back at school by the autumn - when we know the fate that actually awaited her, in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.  Louisa May Alcott describes the decline of her real-life sister Beth, and how the needle with which she used to sew finally grew ‘too heavy’ … What lover of Little Women can read that without remembering the death of Alcott’s fictional Beth?

That question of our knowledge, of well-known women and professional writers does open up a can of worms for the anthologist. One has to accept that, historically, the diaries most likely to have been written - and, crucially, preserved - come largely (though not entirely) from the professional and upper classes. And that, by the same token, this often (though not always) means the diarists will be white. Happily, today a good deal of work  - especially in the States - is being done to remedy that situation, so that we can hear Charlotte Forten, the African American activist, in 1855 wondering ‘that every colored person is not a misanthrope…fearing, with too good reason, to love and trust hardly anyone whose skin is white’.   

It’s just one reason why we need to hear our grandmothers’ voices to understand the big issues - race and rebellion, love and death, pain and identity. And why, where women’s voices are concerned, there has never been a better time to edit an anthology. 

 

Rebecca Alexander will be back next March.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Latin - Lost in translation? By Caroline K. Mackenzie

You may recall from an earlier blog I wrote for the History Girls that Autumn is my favourite time of year. This September is no exception. A further source of joy and optimism this year is the recommencement of my Classics Club after our summer break.

As I prepare for the first class of term, in which we shall continue to read Ovid’s masterpiece, Metamorphoses, I find myself wondering once again whether we can ever do justice to the original Latin when we read the text in translation. As a group, we generally follow the same translation as this makes it easier when we take it turns to read aloud (just as Latin poetry was intended to be read) and I have usually researched and recommended a particular translation that I think the group will enjoy. But to add to the fun and interest, some of the group religiously follow a different translation (perhaps a copy they had at school, or indeed in the case of one member of our group, a German translation passed down to her from her grandfather, complete with scribbled notes in the margin). Others prefer to read the text onscreen (the class is on Zoom so we are all online in any event) and this combination of sources has thrown up some varied and fascinating translations, allowing us all to compare notes on the different versions.

For this blog, therefore, I thought I would show you some examples of how differently a particular passage can be translated depending on the date, style and personal preferences of the translator. I am continually curious as to what extent are they true to Ovid’s original poem, and how much (if any) is lost in translation…

The translation that I chose was by David Raeburn, a wonderful and inspiring Classicist who lived into his 90s and was translating and directing Greek plays even as a nonagenarian. I first met him when I was a shy 16 year old and he encouraged me to take part in one of his Greek plays – no-one else could have persuaded me to get on stage but his enthusiasm, kindness and passion for Greek somehow did the trick! So I probably had a slightly biased view towards using his translation over others as, whenever I read it, I can almost hear his voice on the pages. However, that may partly also be because, as he explains in his introduction to his translation (published by Penguin Classics), he finds it helpful to think of each of the 15 books of the Metamorphoses as a ‘unit of performance’. He even calculated that it would take around 70 minutes to recite each book (‘a reasonable length of time for a reciter to hold an audience’s attention’) and I have no doubt that he will have practised reciting the lines many times to check he was happy with the metre, the language and the general Ovidian flavour of his translation (a bit like a chef constantly tasting as he stirs the pot). 

Further, I was also aware that for the previous texts we had read in Classics Club (including the epic poems by Homer and Virgil) the translations I had recommended happened to be prose and some of the group were keen to read a verse translation which they felt would be truer to the original. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is also an epic poem, written in the same metre as The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid, so I felt justified in going with Raeburn’s verse translation on more than just a personal level.

Before we dive into some extracts from the three main translations we have been discussing in Classics Club, it might be of interest to note the dates of the translations and the ages of the translators at the date of publication. This is because we often recognise in their choice of words either a colloquial phrase or a contemporary expression that ‘gives away’ the language of that translator’s time and generation.

Raeburn’s Penguin Classic translation was first published in 2004 when he was about 77 years’ old. (Retirement did nothing to damper his love of Classics.)

The other edition I always have on my desk when discussing the text is my Loeb. The Loeb Library is an iconic collection of Classical texts, with Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English translation on the other. Most Classicists love to have a selection of these on their bookcases; the Latin ones are in red dust jackets, the Greek in green, and together they look fabulous! The Loeb edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was first published in 1916 and the translator was Frank Justus Miller, Professor in the University of Chicago. As with many Loebs, the date of publication probably explains the frequency throughout of words and phrases such as, “ ‘tis”, “naught”, and “thou mayst”.

An excellent translation that was brought to my attention by a member of the group accessing it online is that of A.S. Kline, a poet, author and translator. Coincidentally his translation was published the same year as Raeburn’s, 2004. Kline was born in 1947. His translation (along with many other of his works) is freely available online but I have enjoyed listening to it so much in class that I ordered a hard copy of the book. I still can’t resist the feel, the smell, and the sight of the printed word. The hardback has a dashing black, white and red dust jacket so it will look lovely next to my Loebs…

Without further ado, here are some examples from these three translations. I am also including the Latin in case you would like to have a go at your own translation. Even if you don’t speak Latin, I am sure you will recognise some of the words thanks to the many English derivatives we have from Latin.

Metamorphoses 5.132-3
First, a quote from a fight scene in the story of Perseus:

Ovid:
huius in obliquo missum stetit inguine ferrum:
letifer ille locus.

Raeburn:
Rich as he was, he was struck by a javelin thrown from the side
in the groin, that sensitive place…

Loeb:
Into his groin a spear hurled from the side struck;
that place is fatal.
(Note – no comment on the victim’s wealth here. Raeburn has added that into his translation above as if making a proverbial comment).

Metamorphoses 2.151-4
Next is an extract from the story of Phaëthon, the teenage boy who recklessly begs his father to lend him his chariot for a day. His father is the Sun god and the disastrous consequences which follow after he reluctantly agrees to his son’s request are full of pathos and drama.

Ovid:
statque super manibusque datas contingere habenas
gaudet et invito grates agit inde parenti.
Interea volucres Pyrois et Eous et Aethon,
Solis equi, quartusque Phlegon hinnitibus auras
flammiferis inplent

Raeburn:
Standing aloft, he excitedly seized the featherweight reins,
and shouted his thanks from the car to his worried and anxious father.
Meanwhile the sun god’s team of winged horses – Fiery, Dawnsteed,
Scorcher and Blaze – were impatiently filling the air with their whinnies

Loeb:
standing proudly, he [‘the lad’] takes the reins with joy into his hands, and thanks his unwilling father for the gift. Meanwhile the sun’s swift horses, Pyroïs, Eoüs, Aethon, and the fourth, Phlegon, fill all the air with their fiery whinnying

I love Raeburn’s anachronistic use of ‘car’ as it immediately brings to mind the modern teenager rushing off with the keys to their parents’ sports car. I still remember the look of concern on Dad’s face when he first loaned me the keys to his car not long after I had passed my driving test. I was 17. Mind you, it was a Morris Minor and I don’t recall it went much faster than 30mph even if I had wanted it to – I had to ‘double de-clutch’ which felt like an antiquarian move even back then. I don’t recall any of my peers having to learn that manoeuvre.

Notice also that Raeburn has translated the Greek names of the Sun god’s horses. A brilliant touch. The Greek names have been retained in the Loeb. By comparing the two, you can probably spot some Greek derivatives here!

Metamorphoses 5.281-2
Third, a quote from the story of Minerva and the Muses:

Ovid:
‘nec dubitate, precor, tecto grave sidus et imbrem’
(imber erat)

Raeburn:
“You mustn’t refuse to shelter under my roof in this shocking
downpour” (the weather was dreadful);

Loeb:
'do not hesitate to take shelter beneath my roof against the lowering sky and rain’ – for rain was falling - …

Kline:
'don’t be afraid, I beg you, to seek shelter from the rain and the lowering skies' (it was raining);

Kline has been truest to the simple statement in Latin, ‘it was raining’. Raeburn has got a little carried away here but perhaps that is just his love of drama showing through.

Metamorphoses 5.451-2
Fourth, from Calliope’s Song:

Ovid:
duri puer oris et audax
constitit ante deam risitque avidamque vocavit

If you read the Latin aloud, the second line will resonate with hard ‘c’ and ‘qu’ sounds – rather like a cackle or coarse laugh. The ‘dental’ sounds of the repeated ‘t’ in that line add to the effect.

Raeburn:
an insolent, coarse-looking boy strolled up in front of the goddess,
burst into laughter and jeered, “What a greedy female you are!”

Note Raeburn’s invention of direct speech when there is none in the Latin. Again, his love of theatre and vivid delivery of lines may have played a part here.

Loeb:
a coarse, saucy boy stood watching her, and mocked her and called her greedy.

I love the choice of ‘saucy’!!

Kline:
a rash, foul-mouthed boy stood watching, and taunted her, and called her greedy.

Proverbs
Latin and Greek epic poets sometimes include phrases which sound like proverbs (and indeed on some of the original manuscripts we occasionally have notes made by the ancient commentators confirming the common use of such proverbs).

Here are some proverbial style snippets from the Metamorphoses:

Ovid: 2.447
heu! quam difficile est crimen non prodere vultu!

Raeburn:
How difficult not to betray our guilt in our facial expression!

Loeb:
Alas, how hard it is not to betray a guilty conscience in the face!

Kline:
Alas! How hard it is not to show one’s guilt in one’s face!

Note Raeburn has omitted the ‘heu’ = ‘alas’. Does it sound too old-fashioned perhaps? How else could we translate ‘heu’?

Ovid: 2.416
sed nulla potentia longa est

Raeburn:
no one’s favour is lasting

Loeb:
no favour is of long duration

Kline:
no favor lasts for long

This could apply to so many contemporary situations, political and otherwise.

So I wonder what you think? How do the translations compare? Do you prefer one particular style over the other, or is each example different? As you can imagine, we have lively discussions in Classics Club over which is the best. Do any of them live up to the Latin? Translations are, of course, for many readers the only way to access the text and Ovid himself, I feel, would approve of this. Perhaps each translation of his epic poem could appropriately be regarded as simply yet another metamorphosis. After all, his closing lines in the poem are (as translated by Raeburn):

‘the people shall read and recite my words. Throughout all ages,
if poets have vision to prophesy truth, I shall live in my fame.’

We shall be reading and reciting Ovid’s Metamorphoses this coming Monday at 10.30am, and again at 3pm and every Monday thereafter during term time, until Spring 2025. All translations welcome!

Classics Club runs on Zoom every Monday during term-time (morning group 10.30-midday, afternoon group 3pm-4.30pm). For more details, contact Caroline through her website.

Being Curious about the Past, by Gillian Polack

 

I’m not at my desk. This is rare for me. I’ve been unwell for a number of years and one of the results is that I almost live at my desk. Except now. I am travelling. I’m meeting with other History Girls when we’re close enough to each other, and I’m so looking forward to this. It’s not the main reason for my voyages. I have research to do. I may or may not be well enough to do it with any sort of comfort, so this is a vast test. It will basically let me know what kind of life is ahead for me. I want to do extraordinarily well, and I want to be able to dance again when I get home. I’ve not been able to folkdance for over a decade, but I still have many friends who do, and … I miss it and them. This is also not why I’m travelling!

I’m researching a bunch of different things, but they all fit together and create one project. Some of it is fiction and some non-fiction. I’m also giving some workshops and seminars in worldbuilding using Medieval history, in Australian Gothic (the fiction, not the architecture) and even how to write fight scenes using the model of Old French epic legends. This later is an oldie but a goodie. I once was an expert on these battle scenes and soon I teach German translators how to write them. It’s mainly so that we can talk about translation. I will be working with MA students at Heinrich Heine University, and I’m very excited. I am addressing my own past in teaching students about Australian fiction and about Old French epics. My convict ancestry is not actually English. Lemon, my ancestor who was convicted in the Old Bailey (unjustly, I suspect, given what happened later) was born in Leipzig, not London. He married a Londoner, and having German ancestry is something I’ve been wanting to address for years, but never had the courage. Since I’m not a tourist, but a research fellow, I will not be alone, and that matters. It especially matters now, when I can’t take a break from exploring impossible pasts and take refuge in the present. In fact, now is the perfect time to confront Jewish history in Germany, and that’s one of the core things I’m doing while away.

The research side of my travels is all about things past, in fact. I’m trying to learn more about how we see our past and what layers our history with meaning. I will explore Reading (and have afternoon tea with Leslie Wilson while I’m there) to discover how a single town presents the Middle Ages for tourists. I will create a photo-essay for this, and could be persuaded to give it as a slide show (with added bad jokes) for anyone who is curious. I’m also exploring Cambridgeshire, and spending time with Rosemary Hayes. Every moment with a History Girl is a good moment and those few days would be worth travelling to the other side of the world for in and of themselves.

The rest of my research concerns German Jews. Not my ancestors, to be honest. Jews from a quite different part of Germany. I will be comparing the cultures of the German Middle Ages to those of the Early Modern. Jews in the various German states had interesting differences in culture and traditions and… I want to know what has been lost, but also, just as Reading presents its Middle Ages to visitors, some towns in Germany present their Jewish history to visitors. I will explore both sides of the coin: the memories of once-neighbours and how those once-neighbours lived.

Next year is the earliest I can finish my projects. I have other things that need to be done first. At the end of it, there will be a novel: set in our far future, in the same universe as Poison and Light (where, on a distant planet, a society takes refuge in the 18^th century, which for some is salons, for others is politics, and for yet others it’s revolution) though not at all on the same planet. There will also be a non-fiction book, discussing all of these curious pasts.

This is why I’ve been largely quiet. I’ve been trying to finish my current big project so that I can move to the next. Everything went awry and now I’m taking a pause in the current big project so that I can go to Europe and do some of the groundwork for the next. When I’m back and the doctor and I have worked out the effects of this trip, then I shall return to looking at writing techniques used to present culture in novels, especially in fairy tale retellings.

This post got away from me! I just wanted to tell you that I’m an historian again and working on a novel that uses much history. I don’t have time to tell you the fun stuff. I’m posting this twelve hours before I catch my first plane.

If you want my next post to be about some of the history I discovered, let me know! I may even have pictures...

'How to Fake a Dragon' by Karen Maitland

A Jenny Haniver
Photo: M.Violante

It is so important to take children to museums, I mean proper museums with real objects in glass cases, not ones simply filled with interactive computer screens.

I vividly remember a childhood trip to a museum where I became enthralled by a dry, brown creature in a case that looked exactly like a mummified imp with bat-like wings, spiky tail, and a demonic, human-like face. I felt I was staring at a grotesque that had come to life and flown down from the roof of a gothic Cathedral. The label stated that the dried imp was a 'Jenny Haniver', a fake, but it looked as real as any of those two-headed chicks, shark pups or goat embryos preserved in jars, which lined our biology lab at school.

And the sight of that creature fascinated me so much as a child that, decades later, the image would wriggle to the surface of my mind and become a clue to an assassination plot in my Jacobean thriller ‘Rivers of Treason.’

'Little Dragon' form of Jenny Haniver
(Made from a stingray in 18th Century)
Photo: Didier Descovens
Museum de Toulouse

The term Jenny Haniver is used to refer to the corpse of any real animal that is fashioned to resemble a mythological creature such as a demon or dragon. Jenny Hanivers started to be made in great numbers in 16th and 17th centuries, the centuries of exploration, when travellers and sailors were returning to Europe with tales of the wonderous animals they had encountered. Jenny Hanivers were usually fashioned from the carcass of a ray, skate or devil fish that had been tied into a monstrous shape and dried, resulting in a mummified specimen. Since these flat fish have eyes and mouths that resemble human or mammalian faces, the features could be moulded into grotesque expressions. They also have barbed tails and so was possible to make them look like demons or small dragons by cutting and shaping the body to create wings or limbs before drying the carcass. 

Face of a Ray fish
Photo: JoshBerglund19

These fakes were manufactured in great numbers in the ports of Belgium and Holland, where they were sold as curios to mariners and travellers to take back home, to show the monsters they’d encountered on their voyages. It has been suggested that one possible explanation of the origin of the name may be the French phrase jeune d’Anvers – Anvers being the French name for Antwerp– which English sailors corrupted into Jenny Haniver. 

Jenny Hanivers were crafted to look like imps, baby basilisks, newly hatched dragons, wyverns and even the legendary ‘sea monks’ and ‘sea-bishops’ which were believed to conjure storms at sea. 

Sea Monk & Sea Bishop
Illustrations from 1669
Taken from a woodcut of 1558
Carver: Conrad Gesner (1516-1565)

An illustration of a Jenny Haniver appeared in Konrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium in 1558, where Gesner firmly states that these are simply dried rays, and that people shouldn’t be tricked into believing they are dragons or monsters. However, the tales of the creatures encountered by European sailors visiting tropical islands, as well as the skins and often badly stuffed specimens brought back by those exploring the Americas, only served to convince a public who had never seen such animals before that these fakes might also be real.

Later, in the 19th century, people in Europe paid to view dried mermaids brought back by merchants and sailors from Japan. Japanese fishmen had learned to supplement their income by creating grotesque little mermaids from monkeys and fish. The fishermen would claim they had found a mermaid alive in their nets, who before she died, had warned of a terrible plague about to sweep the land from which people could only be saved if they wore a mermaid charm. Naturally the fishmen ensured that they just happen to have these charms for sale.

Mummified mermaid
Archivio fotografico 
Museo Civico di Modena

And it seems we are still just as willing to believe in strange creatures from distant realms as our forebears did. In 2023, two small mummified ‘alien’ corpses from Peru were subject to months of scientific investigation and journalistic speculation about whether these diminutive, three-fingered beings could possibly be real ‘aliens’ from outer space or an elaborate hoax. The consensus of most scientists in the end was they were composites of pre-Columbian human remains and animal bones coved in plaster or glue. But the question remained, were they created as part of an ancient Peruvian burial rite or mocked-up in our own century by someone out to make money, just like those creative Jenny Haniver makers of Antwerp? Human nature doesn’t change!

A Jenny Haniver
Photo: Vassil
Museum d'Histoire Naturelle de Geneve, 
Geneva

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Rivers of Treason, set in 1607, is the 3rd book in the Daniel Pursglove thriller quartet by KJ Maitland. Book 4, Plague of Serpents, is out now.