Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick: The Aristodekos Kouros and Mary Beard's sparkly trainers

I owe one of my A-levels to a naked man with pubic hair shaped into a star. Or at least, to a statue with said unusually-groomed privates.

I mention this in part because (even more than 20 years on) I find it both unlikely and entertaining, but partly because a couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to hear Natalie Haynes and Mary Beard speak about the value of the classics (among many other things) at Damien Barr’s Literary Salon. You can listen to their brilliant interviews via the podcast versions here - https://www.theliterarysalon.co.uk/

Given that I studied ancient & modern history at university and classical civilisation for A-level, this evening was completely up my street – two intelligent, articulate, funny women talking ancient history, culture and books – and yes, Mary Beard’s sparkly trainers were defiantly on show.

Mary Beard's sparkly trainers

(Sorry for the rubbish photo quality! Source, as you might expect, is me)

Now, assuming you’re reading a history blog because you, umm, like history, I probably don’t need to point out ‘the value of the classics’ or ‘the value of history’ to you.

But that evening make me think about my classics A-level. Even at the time I thought it was brilliant, and not only because as a group of 17-year-old girls we got to study statues of naked men for a whole term. It was great because it provided us with a real grounding in a range of areas important to understanding the culture of the Greek world. It wasn’t just about one thing, as our other school subjects tended to be, but roved across a variety of disciplines and ways of looking at things. The naked men were only one element of an introduction to ancient Greek art and architecture; we studied a number of different types of literature (Homer, classical tragedies and comedies, some shorter poetry) and a fair amount of political, social and economic history as well; some archaeology and even a bit of geography while we were at it.

I really enjoyed that rounded experience of learning about a place and time in a variety of different ways. It’s a perspective and way of thinking that I’ve taken with me when looking at other societies, whether studying them for academic reasons, for my more recent forays into historical fiction and when visiting places in real life.

And the naked man? Well, he of the unusual pubes is known as the Aristodekos Kouros, and one of my A-level questions genuinely was a photo of him which I had to identify and discuss. He was easy to spot, for obvious reasons. And even now, should you ever need a Greek male nude dated, I can usually get to within a decade or so.

I’ll leave you to decide which is the more useful useful life skill. But I’d definitely like to have the statue as the centrepiece of my Cabinet of Curiosities!

The Aristodekos Kouros 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Christmas: a Biography by Judith Flanders

Our December guest is Judith Flanders, interviewed here by Charlotte Wightwick.

Judith Flanders was born in London, England, in 1959. She moved to Montreal, Canada, when she was two, and spent her childhood there, apart from a year in Israel in 1972, where she signally failed to master Hebrew.

After university, Judith returned to London and began working as an editor for various publishing houses. After this 17-year misstep, she began to write and in 2001 her first book, A Circle of Sisters, the biography of four Victorian sisters, was published to great acclaim, and nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2003, The Victorian House (2004 in the USA, as Inside the Victorian Home) received widespread praise, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards History Book of the Year. In 2006 Consuming Passions, was published. Her book, The Invention of Murder, was shortlisted for the 2011 CWA Non–Fiction Dagger.  The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London was published in 2012. And now, Christmas: a Biography has been published by Picador.

https://www.judithflanders.co.uk

Welcome, Judith, for agreeing to be our very seasonal guest

Charlotte Wightwick: The book is called Christmas: A Biography. Why 'Biography' rather than 'History’?

Judith Flanders: I wish I had a more profound answer for this, but mostly it was because I wanted to give the subject a bit of ‘life’, not just that it was either dead history, or living kitsch. Oh, that and my publisher liked it.

CW: Its a commonplace that 'the Victorians invented Christmas as we know it.' How far is this true?

JF: Not true at all. This was what I thought when I began. (Annoyingly, this was even what I had written previously.) But the really exciting part of historical research is that you get to change your mind, and within only weeks I realized that this was just wrong, wrong, wrong. One historian had famously written that between 1790 and 1832, the Times newspaper had barely mentioned Christmas most years, and many years had never mentioned it at all. He had done his work before newspaper digitisation, so I had a huge advantage. When I ran a digital search on those dates in the Times, I actually found more than 5,000 mentions…

Christmas has always been a holiday of consumption. For most of history from the earliest mentions, in the 4th century, it was about consuming food and (especially) drink. With the coming of mass production and industrialization, the types of consumption changed, from food and drink to presents (and more food and drink!), which makes us think of the 19th century as being the period when Christmas was ‘invented’, but that really couldn’t be further from the truth.

CW: What's your favourite fact or story about Christmas which you didn't previously know? What surprised you when researching the book?

JF: There were endless surprises, but my favourite fact was one that showed how little change there has been in some things. In 1805, on the Lewis and Clark expedition, a government-sponsored expedition to map out much of the west of America, Lieutenant Lewis recorded in his diary that Captain Clark had given him ‘Fleeshe Hoserey vest draws & Socks’, and another man had given him a ‘pr. Mockerson’. That is, he received fleece hosiery (long underwear), a vest, underpants and socks, as well as a pair of slippers. It was good to know that boring Christmas presents have a long history!

CW: As well as universal traditions, every family/ set of friends has its own particular festive quirks. What's your own favourite personal Christmas tradition?

JF: I have to admit to being a total Christmas fraud in real life, compared to on the page — I’m Jewish, and don’t celebrate Christmas. We had a tree a couple of times when I was a child, but it was never a big thing for my family. And today I do nothing at all: I find the run-up to Christmas so exhausting that I’m always happy just to lie on the sofa through the holidays, reading all the books I didn’t get around to all year.

CW: Santa: is he real? (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

JF: Oh dear. This is going to take a while, isn’t it? I’m sorry, Virginia, but I have to tell you that no, Santa Claus isn’t real. But the various ‘Santas’ that have been suggested include a ‘coster’ (a street-seller of fruit and vegetables) who breathes fire through the keyhole on bad boys and girls, and, my own favourite, a newspaper in 1815 which had a letter signed ‘Santa Claus, Queen and Empress of all handsome girls…Queen and Empress of the Court of Fashions’, followed by a letter of approval from this ‘good, delightful, charming’ woman’s husband, St Nicholas. So there you have it, Santa is really a woman.

(We are very grateful to Judith, Charlotte and the publishers at Picador for responding so swiftly to our request, after a glitch in the system nearly left us guestless in December!)

Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - Murano Glass

This January, I went to Venice for the first time. I have had a fascination with the city since I was a very young child and family friends returned with a Murano glass paperweight for my parents and a small replica Venetian mask for me.

I loved my mask the way that only a small girl can: it seemed to me to be the very epitome of elegance and I could only think that the place it came from must be similarly beautiful. But I found myself fascinated by my parents’ paperweight too, its smooth roundness pleasing in the hand, and the intricate flowers inside a mystery I could not fathom (how had they got there?)

Through school, university and years of novel-writing-research, my love of the Italian Renaissance grew, and with it a desire to see Italy for myself, yet in recent years I have prioritised visits to other cities: Florence, Rome, Milan.

Eventually, I had to take the plunge: would I love Venice as much as I had dreamed as a child?

The answer, you may be glad to know, is yes: like thousands before me, I fell immediately and entirely in love with La Serenissima. The sense of wonder John Julius Norwich describes in the introduction to his History of Venice was very much with me as I explored the city from the canals and bridges, or wandered its tiny, winding streets.

The Grand Canal, Venice 2017

In Venice, more than anywhere else, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. However majestic the churches, however magnificent the palazzi, however dazzling the pictures, the ultimate masterpiece remains Venice itself.

Murano, Janury 2017

Which brings me to this month’s item in the Cabinet of Curiosities. Sadly, the Venetian mask of my childhood is long gone, lost to who-knows-what Marie Kondo-style cull, and I suspect my parents wouldn’t be too keen on my stealing their paperweight. So, I just had to buy my very own piece of Murano glass. This proved surprisingly difficult.

Murano, one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon, has been a world-renowned centre of glass-making for centuries. All of Venice’s glass-blowers were relocated there in the thirteenth century, initially as a protection for the rest of the city against fire, an occupational hazard when dealing with molten sand. When the Murano craftsmen discovered the secret of making first clear glass, and later some of the best quality mirrors available in Europe, this segregation allowed the notoriously controlling Venetian government to maintain a monopoly on both the items and the men, punishing runaway glass-makers severely.

Today, Murano glass remains world-famous, although much of the glass available to tourists is reportedly imported cheaply from China. This, however, was not my biggest problem when it came to buying my very own piece of Venetian history.
 

Murano glassware, photo credit Daniel Ventura

Nor was the problem merely one of price (although I did have to put down the 700-euro wine-glass I was happily waving at my friend and revise my plan of buying six of them…) It was more fundamental than that. Like Jan Morris, I think

that almost everything they make is, at least to my taste, perfectly hideous…

Eventually, I found what I was looking for: a necklace (within my price range!) that would be a memory of a beautiful city, a personal symbol to me of my own past and of my love of history, and a thing of beauty in its own right.

My necklace! I think its pretty....

Sources:

• Jan Morris, Venice, Faber & Faber (1960, revised 1993)
• John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (1977, reissued 2003)
• Il Museo del Vetro (Glass Museum, Murano) http://museovetro.visitmuve.it/

Photo credits:

• Charlotte Wightwick unless otherwise stated

Cabinet of Curiosities - the First Dinosaur Fossils by Charlotte Wightwick

For today’s Cabinet of Curiosities we’re heading to the Natural History Museum in London. There are many, many objects there which I could quite happily add to the Cabinet, but I have chosen two small, unprepossessing brown fossils. Both are still half-embedded in light-coloured stone (‘matrix’); one is slightly curved, the other has defined grooves. They are both pretty obviously, even to the untrained observer, teeth.

What makes these teeth special is the fact that they were among the very first fossils to be identified as belonging to a previously-unknown race of large, land-dwelling reptiles: the creatures we now know as dinosaurs.

The iguanodon teeth found by Mary-Ann and/or Gideon Mantell. 

Now in the Natural History Museum, London. (Photo: Charlotte 

Wightwick)

Like many children, I was enthralled by the idea of a race of gigantic monsters inhabiting the earth millions of years before humans existed. But I never really thought much about how we originally found out about the dinosaurs.

My curiosity as an adult was piqued when I moved to Crystal Palace in south-east London. Walking in the local park one freezing-cold January day 12 years ago, I came across a small lake with an island at its centre, and on the island were various statues of prehistoric creatures, looming out of the wintry gloom. I was at once fascinated. Many of the models were clearly meant to be dinosaurs, but they looked nothing like the reconstructions I had been brought up with, even less like the newer depictions of the feathered, bird-like lizards we’re all starting to get our heads around.

How had they come to be there? Why did they look as they did? Above all, who were the people, what were the stories, which lay behind them?

Three of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, seen from Dino Island, 

Nov 2016 (photo: Charlotte Wightwick). The differing colours

of the statues are a result of modern restoration work; the

Grade I listed statues are currently being repaired (e.g. you can 

see the damaged tail of the not-yet restored dinosaur in the 

foreground in comparison with the bright green and white 

of ‘Iggy’ the iguanodon at the back.)

These questions led me to the Natural History Museum and to the two small brown fossils with which I started this post.

The dinosaurs by the lake were created as part of the overall complex – some might say early ‘theme park’ – of the south London Crystal Palace. They were sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse in the early 1850s, but their scientific accuracy (for they were extremely accurate, reflecting cutting-edge discoveries, no matter how odd they look to us now) was overseen by Professor Richard Owen. Today, Owen is largely unknown to the public imagination, but he was one of the leading scientific figures of his day. When he is remembered, it is chiefly for three things: for coining the term ‘dinosaur’, for disagreeing with Darwin (although for more complex reasons than is often assumed: he was no purely religious sceptic) and as the first head of the Natural History Museum. So he is one thread which takes us to South Kensington.

The statue of Richard Owen in the Natural 

History Museum (photo: Charlotte Wightwick)

But there is another thing which links the Crystal Palace dinosaurs to the iguanodon teeth. Owen, despite his undoubted expertise, was not the first choice for the job of superintending the creation of the Crystal Palace models.

Instead that honour went to an obscure GP, originally from Sussex, now living in near-poverty in Pimlico. Gideon Mantell had been fascinated by geology and fossil-collecting from childhood. Like Owen, he too had studied medicine in the capital as a young man but, failing to find a position there, returned to Lewes to take up a job as a GP, where he continued to work on his passion in his spare time.

In the early 1820s Gideon, (or more likely his wife Mary-Ann; there are conflicting accounts) found two small brown fossils.

Gideon realised that the teeth were something unusual and believed they were those of a large, unknown herbivorous reptile. He determined that the teeth most closely resembled those of a modern iguana and as such decided to call his new lizard ‘Iguanodon’ (literally ‘iguana-toothed’). Mantell spent several years trying to persuade the scientific community that he had discovered something new. Initially, he was met with widespread scepticism but his tenacity eventually paid off. Gideon went on to discover several more species of dinosaur and was recognised as one of the leading experts in this new and exciting field.

But Mantell’s life work came with a price. His obsession with fossils led to the disintegration of his marriage and financial ruin; a carriage accident followed by years of acrimonious dispute with a certain Professor Richard Owen took their toll on his health. As such he was too ill to oversee the creation of the Crystal Palace models. He died shortly before they – including his very own Iguanodon – were completed.

Portraits of Gideon and Mary-Ann Mantell reflected in the case 

of another of Gideon’s discoveries (the ‘Mantellisaurus’) at the 

Natural History Museum London. (Photo: Charlotte Wightwick)

Some years before his death, Mantell was forced through poverty to sell his extensive collection of fossils to the British Museum. When, more than forty years later, Richard Owen succeeded in splitting off the Natural History Museum, Mantell’s collection, including the teeth, went with him. There they remain on display still – two tiny, unremarkable-seeming fossils.

These iguanodon teeth are anything but insignificant, however. They are the objects which originally sparked our collective fascination with the dinosaurs and symbols of a world which had been lost and now could be uncovered by science. As importantly for me, they stand also for two complex and difficult men, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, who made it possible for me, and you, and all of us to wonder, in museums and in parks, about that long-lost world.