Cabinet of Curiosities – Christmas Family Trees

As most people know, Christmas trees were first introduced into the UK in the nineteenth century, influenced by the habits of the royal family, although using greenery to decorate our houses at winter festivals has been a tradition for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

But, fascinating though a general history of Christmas traditions would be, that’s not why I’ve chosen my Christmas tree as my first entry into the History Girls’ bulging Cabinet of Curiosities. No, I’ve chosen it because, visiting friends and family, seeing all of their trees and putting up my own has reminded me that every home and every family has its own history – and these can often be traced through the branches of its Christmas tree.

So I thought I’d take you on a quick journey around my own family tree, sparkly nuts and all.

Christmas in my parents’ home has always been about our family and our traditions, built up over the years – and still is. That’s why my mum still hangs out the sequin-encrusted stockings that were first my dad and uncle’s, 60 years ago, and were then mine and my brother’s a mere 30 years’ back.

The tree at my mum and dad’s also always has certain things on it, no matter what. This year, my mum’s tree was decorated entirely in red: except, that is, my Yellow Glitter Bell (created age 7ish, maybe?) and My Brother’s Sparkly Nuts (made when he was about 2). I never did understand why the adults sniggered when we cried ‘its Matthew’s nuts!’ as they came out of the box each year...

As an adult, my own tree can’t compete with such precious and time-honoured relics, but I have developed some traditions of my own. There are the baubles two of my closest friends gave as wedding favours from their December marriage, having brought back 160 of them from China; the 7 or 8 freebie ‘fat Robins’ that my local independent garden centre gives away each year when you buy your tree from them rather than the big chain store just down the road; or the cheapo Woollies angel who is a remnant from my first student house.

There are other memories on my Christmas tree, too, of places I have been, with people I love: the wooden reindeer from an amazing holiday in the Arctic Circle; a tiny nativity scene inside a bell, brought back from the moving pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago, or the bauble painted with scenes from the Tuscan countryside, reminding me of wine-tasting and walking with my mum this summer, fulfilling one of her ‘bucket list’ dreams.

To me, that’s what a Christmas tree should be about: not just a sparkly, oversized ornament which drops bits of itself all over your carpet, but a series of reminders of the people, places and things you love, evolving year by year, each new decoration a precious memory as well as a thing of beauty in its own right. 

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas and have a happy, healthy and prosperous new year. But do me a favour: when it comes to take the decorations down, be sure to pack them away carefully. They aren’t just baubles, but celebrations.

Cabinet of Curiosities by Mary Hoffman

We have a "Cabinet of curiosities" post on the 30th of each month that has 31 days, i.e. seven months in every year. Usually one of our number writes about an object she possesses, perhaps something handed down through the family and carrying a host of personal associations. Some of them are objects of obscure historical significance.

Others are simply items seen in a collection of a museum or gallery and just blatantly lusted after.

Today I want to write about the objects I assemble around me when ever I start writing a new book. Of course the main thing is other books - all my research materials kept in a plastic crate under the coffee table in my study, where I can easily reach anything I need. I'm not precious about notebooks - though I do like a beautiful notebook. I am happy to write my research notes on an ordinary reporter's notebook, spiral bound at the top. And especially now I have found Scrivener, I can faff around to my heart's content on the laptop when the real business of writing begins.

No - I'm talking about specific objects. I won't call them "inspirational" as I loathe the very thought. They are more like focus points to stop my attention wandering off to other books I might write, other things I might do.  I can't remember when I acquired this habit - probably with the Stravaganza sequence of novels set in Italian cities in an alternative universe.

The characters were transported to Talia (my parallel world version of Italy) by the possession of talismans and hunting for the right one for each book was important each time - a marbled notebook, a flying horse, a blue perfume bottle, a leather-bound book, a bag of silver mosaic tesserae and a paperknife in the shape of a small sword.

But the talismans, although important for the narrative, were not necessarily my object. For example, I didn't acquire the model of the black winged horse until after City of Stars was published, when a fan found one and gave it to me. While I was writing the book it was this tile, bought in Siena that worked for me.

I bought a tapestry in France to commemorate the writing of The Falconer's Knot, a small wooden trebuchet in John Lewis toy department when I was writing Troubadour and a marble miniature in the Accademia shop in Florence when I was working on David. (The marble base comes from Carrara, like the block Michelangelo turned into David - though I bought it in Pisa).

My most recent historical novel, to be published next April, is The Ravenmaster's Boy and it has very satisfactory  flibbertigibbet-controllers: two plush ravens from the Tower of London. I spent some time there with the current Ravenmaster, Chris Skaife, and his birds.

Huginn and Muninn, my plush ravens

Me and my favourite Tower raven

Chris Skaife, Ravenmaster at the Tower of London

I am currently writing a short novel about the model for the Mona Lisa but have not found a focus object. So if you hear of a daring theft from the Louvre ...

What objects do writer friends like to keep about them and are they specific to the work in hand?

Cabinet of Curiosities by Catherine Hokin

My chosen item for the cabinet of curiosities is perhaps not such an usual choice for a writer as it is a book, in this case a 1933 edition of the Arthur Rackham Fairy Book. It probably ranks as my prize possession and the first thing I would grab if we ever got hit by a fire - or more likely a flood given I live in Glasgow.

 Arthur Rackham Fairy Book

Firstly apologies for the photograph: the copy has been well-loved and its once white cover and gold lettering have faded badly; it also bears more than one set of grubby fingerprints. I'm glad of that - it is clearly no museum-piece and I hope it passed through many happy hands before landing, very recently, in mine.

Arthur Rackham was the leading illustrator in what was known as the 'Golden Age' of British book illustration which ran from roughly 1890-1914. He is particularly known for his fairy drawings with his most famous works including Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1908) and the posthumous Wind in the Willows (1940). He began his illustrating career in 1893 and was widely exhibited and bought in his lifetime. After 1918 the market for lavishly-illustrated books collapsed in Britain but Rackham's work is once again in vogue and editions of his work are highly collectible (and frighteningly expensive).

 Titania

I first came across his work when I was an impoverished student taking my over-active imagination and empty purse fantasy shopping in antique book shops. I fell in love with his fairies: they were mischievous, wicked and strong - no soppy Victorian fluff here. I was no artist (I learnt to appreciate his technique, which combined woodcut-style work with advances in colour-printing, much later) but I was entranced by the mix of pen and ink drawings, watercolours and line sketches he sprinkled liberally through the stories. I also loved his women - I once played Mustard Seed (as a silver-clad scouse punk, as you do) in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream and the director took his inspiration for Titania from the Rackham depiction of her striding away, chaos in her wake. It's still one of my favourite pictures and hangs in my study.

 Signature

So why is this edition special? It is hard to get complete original editions of Rackham's work anymore - most of them seem to have been dissected to feed the antique stalls in Portobello Market - so owning a copy of one at all is pretty good. But this is no ordinary edition, it has been signed by the great man  himself. There is something about a signed copy of a book that makes it intensely personal. As a writer, being asked to sign your novel is incredibly flattering - a real rock star moment. To be honest, I'm at the stage where I'll sign them whether people ask me to or not. So to own a book signed by someone whose work I've loved for years is thrilling and, with a book that has clearly been so well-loved, it is hard not to weave  stories round it. There is a pink smudge across the signature which I rather hope belongs to the Pamela Taylor who this edition was presented to in 1935. It looks suspiciously like lipstick and I want to imagine she was so excited, she kissed it. Which, I'm not ashamed to say, was what I did - I was probably meant to kiss the husband who was responsible for the gift, but he didn't seem to mind. 

 Self-portrait

The stories are wonderful, a mixture of traditional English and French fairy tales and the Arabian Nights, but it is the illustrations that make me go back to this book over and over again. They are witty and beautiful with just the right amount of edginess, the perfect Rackham mix and extend even to his 'self-portrait'. I love the work but I am also increasingly intrigued by the man. A little like our own Glasgow artistic hero, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret MacDonald, it seems marriage had quite an influence on Rackham's work. In 1903 he married the portrait painter Edyth Starkie who he apparently regarded as his most stimulating, if severest, critic. I fell in love with her most famous painting (The Spotted Dress) in the Musee D'Orsay without having any clue about their relationship until very recently. When you know the link, it's hard not to see a connection between their work and it's certainly something I hope to explore at some point in far more detail. My cabinet choice continues to feed my curiosity - now I've just got to find a way to pay for what could prove a costly addiction...  

Cabinet of Curiosities by Katherine Webb

My first ever offering to the Cabinet of Curiosities are these very plain, rather dented pewter jugs:

The largest stands at 10cm tall, the smallest at a mere 6cm; or, more importantly, stamped onto the handles are the volumes they hold: 1 deciliter, 1/2 deciliter and 2 centiliter. Any guesses as to what they were for?

I bought these jugs in Italy while I was there researching The Night Falling a few years ago, from an old lady in the town of Gioia del Colle in the far south of the country. I had just been to look around a wonderful private museum called the Museo Della Civilta' Contadina - or Museum of Rural Life. This vast, private collection has been put together and is run by a man called Vito Santoiemma, and fills several huge warehouses in what used to be the family's sawmill in the town. It holds an astonishing array of objects related to every aspect of rural life in that part of Italy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I got lost in it for hours.

Inside the museum. The jars on the floor with the wooden lids are called prisor, and are what most families would have had as their only toilet. It had to be carried out and emptied daily, into a slops barrel which was then dragged out of town and used to fertilise the fields. Disease, unsurprisingly, was rife.

At the end of my visit, I asked if there was any small thing I could buy to take back with me, and was told that an old lady (I never did get her name!) might have something to sell. These jugs appeared, and I was asked how much I was willing to pay for them - always a tricky question when you have absolutely no idea of an item's worth - both materially and to the person selling it! She seemed both delighted and bemused by my offer of Euro20, and so I had a piece of history to bring home with me.

The smallest jug, with 2 centiliter stamped onto the handle.

I've written before about the shocking living conditions experienced by the vast majority of people in Southern Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. A few wealthy, often absent, landlords owned all the land and all the housing, and the peasants - some 80% of the rest of the population - had no means to live but to pay for the rent on tiny, inadequate apartments by selling their labour in the fields for a daily rate. They were exhausted, hungry, angry, and powerless, and when they rose up in 1921 and 1922, in a broadly socialist movement, they were crushed again by the rise of fascism.

The milkman's bicycle in Vito Santoiemma's museum, and other dairy-related items.

My jugs date from the years immediately after this, after Mussolini came to power in 1922. These jugs were given out as part of a new system of rationing intended to alleviate the problem of the poor simply starving to death in years of drought and bad harvest - and also to conserve produce that was desperately scarce all over Italy after the First World War. It seems impossible to imagine Italy being short of olive oil, but that is what the jugs were for - the rationing of olive oil. How many calories does the 2 centiliter jug represent? I estimate maybe about 100. I don't know how many people that was supposed to feed, but I do know that this was a weekly ration, not a daily one. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of women selling their bodies to corrupt officials for an increase in the ration for their family.

So perhaps my piece of portable history is a bit dark in nature, and links directly back to dire times for one particular family. But there is always something so emotive and powerful about actually holding an object from a time that has now passed out of reach, and I kept the jugs on the shelf by my desk as I wrote my novel.

My Cabinet of Curiosities; Henrietta Barnett, John Lennon and the Grey Cat of feeling Blue Catherine Johnson

Dame Henrietta Barnett

Henrietta Barnett was one of those formidable late Victorian/Edwardian dames who set out to change the world. Along with her husband, she set up a 'settlement' in Whitechapel in the East End of London to help and educate the poorest of the poor, it's still there -Toynbee Hall - and Canon Barnett has a primary school named after him nearby.

Henrietta herself was interested in the burgeoning new towns movement. She saw an opportunity to build a model suburb, one where rich and poor would live together in a semi rural idyll with public woods, low density housing and clean air. She was also big - very big - on the education of girls. This would be a place to build a new society, far from the filth of the city, up high on a hill outside London. It was born out of a mixture of the idealism of late Victorian England, Arts and Crafts and back to the land, an idyll of space for all according to their need.

So Hampstead Garden Suburb was born, a place with a central square laid out by architect de jour Lutyens, with education at its heart. There was an adult education Institute (Orwellianly named 'The Institute') and the school, named after the Dame herself. all roads were to be tree lined, and there were to be no church bells rung. She even vetoed the building of the Underground Line, no tube stations here thank you! Also what's noticeable is that even in this brave new world, the houses farthest from the Central Square and the Heath are smaller, meaner. This was a carefully zoned kind of socialism after all.

I don't know what the Dame would make of it today. The Institute has moved out of The Suburb (that's what it's called, The Suburb, as if there isn't any other) and only the very very (very) rich live there these days. It's cut in two by the North Circular road, so I doubt the air is as clean as it was a hundred years ago...

What has this got to do with John Lennon? I am getting to this....

Close your eyes. Let the years fall away.

Henrietta Barnett School

It is now 1973, December. Inside the parquet floored hall of the Henrietta Barnett School the Year Sevens (we were called Lower Fourths to mimic our betters in public schools) are putting on a performance for the parents at the end of their first term. Singing, music and dance. All of us. We are in leotards (and show me any prepubescent girl who doesn't hate a leotard) being snowflakes to John Lennon's recent Number One hit. This song is a dirge and a half. It goes on forever. Just when you think it has finished there is another reprise of the chorus. And another. And another.

Oh. And another.

This was a mirror to my school life in which everything went downhill very slowly fading out like John and Yoko. My school, I was sure, was the most boring, most turgid,  and the most uninspiring place in the whole universe.

It was designed to offer free education to girls who at 11 managed to jump through the hoops of the 11 plus. It never had the glamour or sass of it's near neighbour Camden Girls. HBS girls were  always well behaved and useful members of society; Opticians, Estate Agents, Dentists and Doctors*.  It might be a school parents fight to get their girls into - it's free! it's socially exclusive! it has great exam results! There is no scope for lunchtime excitement as the school is miles from ANYWHERE! (Dame H banning the tube station totally worked).


So the Grey Cat? Well this year isn't easy at the best of times, everyone posting happy Christmas pics when for a lot of us it hasn't been. People making brave and bold resolutions and brave and bold new years.

I have been lucky never to have been visited by the Black Dog of depression, but many around me have. All of us know what it's like to feel empty with pain or to feel so sad and terrified of life that you can't eat or breathe.

One thing I wish I could have told myself as I lay on my back on the parquet in my navy leotard is that it gets better - as well as worse.

I think children are sold a pup. Life isn't the mirror to school, progressing up one class after another, come what may.  That's completely unnatural. Things go up and down. There will be bright spots and utter lows. Both are a kind of illusion. Keep going. The Grey Cat - unlike the dog which needs proper help - will pad past on silent paws.

I am a fan of contentment. Of the middle road. Of the just about alright. Of the 'it could always be worse'.

But of course I would be lying if I didn't harbour secret hope - why on earth write otherwise?

Here's hoping for all of us that the year brings contentment and good health.

Happy New Year!!


The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo is out now, published by Corgi.

Cabinet of Curiosities: Taxidermy by Sarah Gristwood

Other people have friends who take up tennis or tatting. I have friends who take up taxidermy. (Also skull collection: ‘Can I call you back? I’m beheading a badger’, has to be one of the best can’t-talk-now lines in history.) Drop in on Jane for coffee, and you find the emptied skin of a magpie draped over the kitchen tap to dry, the way a tea towel might be. An open taxidermy supply catalogue advertises plastic eyes and false tongues, each modelled for the species, precisely.

Sarah's stuffed jay

Not that I have a problem with that - on the contrary, the stuffed jay she gave me is one of my favourite possessions. The first thing any taxidermist today is keen to tell you is that they are using creatures which died naturally. Roadkill, birds brought in wounded to the local vet. Or, in the case of some professionals, beloved pets whose owners can’t quite bear to say goodbye.

Of course it wasn’t always that way, as the heads on the wall of any country house can testify. But then the form has gone through a lot of changes, since some stuffed rarity was first part of any collector’s cabinet of curiosities. The oldest piece of taxidermy in existence is said to be the crocodile suspended from the roof of a church in Lombardy, and documented as having been taken down (later found stored in the roof) in 1534. The horse of Sweden’s king Gustav Adolphus, shot from under him in the Thirty Years War, and skinned and mounted as a trophy by his German enemies, can still be seen today.

The first big boost for European taxidermy came from the explorations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the pressure was on to find a way of proving to those back home just how strange far flung nature could be, (Or trying to prove - when the skin and a sketch of a duck billed platypus was sent back from Australia in 1798, it was dismissed as a hoax.) Specimens could be sent home preserved in alcohol, to be skinned, cleaned, and filled with some kind of aromatic packing - herbs, hops, tobacco; later much improved with an arsenic soap - meant to keep the insects away.

What was at first the preserve of the scientific and the wealthy soon became a museum staple: Bullock’s Museum in London at the start of the nineteenth century advertised ‘the Lofty Giraffe, the Lion, the Elephant . . . as ranging in their native wilds’. When taxidermist John Gould put up twenty four cases of humming birds as rival attraction to the Great Exhibition he got 75,000 visitors. But by then taxidermy was moving on in several different ways.

New techniques - such as the creation of moulds onto which the skin could be arranged, in whatever pose - allowed more naturalistic museum display. This, in the hands of great taxidermists like Rowland Ward, was the start of the dioramas on which many of us grew up (and in England places like the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent, the Natural History Museum at Tring still show their collections with pride; while the National Museum of Scotland is rare in still having a working department of taxidermy). In America Carl Akeley created ‘Jumbo’ and ‘the Feejee mermaid’ for the great showman P.T. Barnard before moving on to the American Museum of Natural History.

Hares in a bookshop in Stamford

Naturalism, however, was never the goal of a whole other strand of Victorian taxidermy. A young and impressionable Walter Potter had seen Hermann Ploucquet’s anthropomorphic displays at the Great Exhibition and was struck all of a heap. Potter’s most famous tableau showed the death of Cock Robin. Guinea pigs playing cricket, kittens at a tea party - nothing was too bizarre for his imagination, and children were still revelling in his creations long after his death in 1918.

Much about the Victorian sensibility - and the Victorian fetishism of death - seems strange to us today. But perhaps it was yet another strand of Victorian and early twentieth century taxidermy that did most to dismiss the form from fashion by the latter part of the last century. That was the huge number of heads collected by ‘big game hunters’; shot without qualm and displayed without artistry. Taxidermy begun itself to look like a relic of the past; while the spread of the motion picture camera meant a Western public could see those same exotic beasts, not framed in a case, but running free.

(That said, of course, fashion never changes completely - or not in my home town anyway. When I was a child in Dover, the pride of the town museum was a stuffed polar bear, donated by the relatives of an Arctic explorer as recently as 1960. It stood in the entrance, just where mothers used to park the pram, sometimes with the baby still inside it. So the child awoke and looked up into the snarling jaws of this rearing monster, claws outstretched . . . Explains a lot about those of us from Dover, actually.)

But in the last years, there has been a widespread resurgence in the popularity of taxidermy - and in the creativity with which it is used. The original shock value of the stuffed birds swirling around above the model’s head, in a fantastical piece of Alexander McQueen millinery from 2001, has dwindled until a dusty decades old bison’s head seems to leer down at you from the wall of every fashionable bar, every house interior in a magazine spread.

At the Hayward Gallery in 2012, artist David Shrigley’s taxidermied Jack Russell held up a placard reading ‘I’m Dead’. Damien Hirst, anybody? As the art critic Brian Sewell said, ‘there may well be more art in a stuffed pike than a dead sheep’; while artist and animal activist Angela Singer makes a point with her use of vintage taxidermy.

A recent TV documentary, All Creatures Great and Stuffed, went straight for the shock horror stories - the man who spreadeagled the corpses of cats, and tried to make them fly. But the work of someone like artist Polly Morgan seems both beautiful and significant to me. A handful of taxidermy quail chicks bursting out of a telephone receiver, obviously in mid-squawk. A taxidermy fox with a silicone octopus bursting out from its belly, Alien-style; the octopus itself being ‘pollinated’ by stuffed wrens. Yes, in a way it’s sinister; but so is nature, actually; Morgan was first inspired by the decaying corpses she saw on a trip to the Serengeti. She like others argues against any idea of disrespect to the animal. ‘It’s a form of recycling as far as I can see.’

I think it’s the respect that for me is the key - the reason it seems strange to me to shrink from taxidermy, while eating meat and wearing leather shoes. The reason I’d be repulsed by an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s foot, while still cherishing my jay . . . All right, so it’s a sliding scale - those anthropomorphising pieces of Walter Potter’s do seem strange to me. But when taxidermy is done right, it is a gesture of rage against the dying of the light, isn’t it, really?

Stuffed crocodile belonging to History Girl Clare Mulley

Cabinet of Curiosities: Are you Sitting Comfortably? By Elizabeth Chadwick

Into this month’s Cabinet of Curiosities, I want to put my chair (of uncertain date but most likley Elizabethan) because it is a curiosity in itself with a past steeped in mystery.

When I was a little girl I used to visit an elderly great-aunt about four times a year. She lived in the mill town of Radcliffe, Lancashire in a terraced house halfway up a steep hill. It was an end terrace, separated from its neighbour by a narrow alleyway that used to resonate with echoes when I stamped on the flagstones and shouted. Entering through the front door into the hallway I always remember the varnished wood electric meter box, and standing beside it a darkly gleaming old oak chair that just fitted into the space at the bottom of the stairs. Great aunt Elizabeth was meticulous about waxing and polishing the chair, and I was always fascinated by its intricate carving. However, as a little girl I never thought any more about it, it was just auntie’s old chair, and another piece of furniture. My lust at that time was all for the cuckoo clock in her sitting room.

However, as I became an older teenager and entered my 20s, my interest in all things historical had begun to spark and I became curious about the chair. I think we struck up a conversation about it after Auntie grumbled about having to keep polishing it. She was much older now and her arthritis made it difficult to bend and her eyesight had deteriorated,  hence her hinting about preparing to pass it on. 

Auntie (born in 1901) told me that the family story went that her great-grandfather had rescued it from a church during a period of refurbishment. The chair had been thrown out because it was badly broken. Said ancestor being of a waste not want not mentality brought it home and repaired it - rather crudely it has to be said. Round the back of the chair are some screwed in iron plates that show his fixings. The same with the seat which is screwed on firmly but rather brutally. The top of the chair shows holes for either finials or a decorative top but these are long gone.

Victorian ancestor's crude cobblings to hold the chair together. Now a part of its history too!

The chair is beautifully carved, and where my great, great-great-grandfather’s early Victorian vandalism hasn’t run, one can make out screws made out of wood. We’ve never had the chair looked at by an expert, but from trawling online and some domestic researches, it would seem that what we have is a chair of the Elizabethan period or just perhaps early Jacobean. When my ancestor came to rescue it in the 19^th century, it was of an age where it wasn’t particularly treasured antique, but rather a piece of junk. So, rough and ready repairs or not, my great, great-grandfather Sykes rescued the chair for posterity.

I have tried to work out which church it came from. Sadly my great-aunt has passed away and also my grandmother her sister. My father in his 80s, knows only as much as I do. We think that the chair may have come from the church of St Mary and St Bartholomew parish church of Radcliffe, because the other churches within walking distance of my aunt’s house are 19^th-century and without the history to have housed such an item of furniture. Who sat in it? For what purpose was it used?  I don’t know, but it’s endlessly fascinating to imagine.  In my turn I shall pass it on to my eldest son and  it will go to his children after that.  In the meantime, I intend to find out more about the chair if I can and add knowledge to curiosity!

Thoughts on monstrosity - Michelle Lovric

I’ve written before about the Natural History Museum in Venice, quite recently reopened after decades of restoration. I’ve recorded how, among all the state-of-the-art graphics, tools and devices, the visitor can find the dusty remnants of a vast collection of hunters’ trophies from the days when ‘men were men’ and not ashamed to murder helpless animals in the name of sport.

Walking swiftly past the espaliered gorilla and the dozens of mounted heads, I always make my way into a little circular room where the museum keeps its curiosities. The room is styled like that of the famous Neapolitan collector Ferrante Imperato (1550-1625). The image below shows his cabinet of curiosities in the Palazzo Gravina in Naples. In this picture, it is thought that Imperato’s son, Francesco, is showing off the collection to a pair of visitors. Meanwhile, his father looks on with what seems to me to be a rather affected nonchalance, legs casually crossed.

Imperato, who trained as an apothecary, collected and classified flora and fauna. He was also interested in fossil, ores and gems. He recording his findings and inventoried his collection of about 35,000 specimens in his 800-page Dell’ historia naturale published in Naples in 1599. This title page, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, is from the copy at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. This book was a rarity in its time, being written in Italian, rather than in the more traditional Latin.

In the first picture above, Francesco Imperato uses a long stick to point to one of the exhibits. One writer has suggested that the crocodile is above so as not to distract visitors from the less spectacular ores and minerals. But the baton seems to me to point at a bird. Is it the remains of a chicken? Perhaps.

Certainly in the Ferrante Imperato ‘tribute’ room in Venice’s Natural History Museum, a chicken occupies pride of place. And it was there that I found 'The Monstrous Chicken'.

When talking to the curator Margherita Fusco, I discovered that this chicken had a history all of her own. As we History Girls are taking a beastly turn this month (see the blogs of Mary Hoffman and Louisa Young), I thought I would write the biography of this chicken.

 

In most ways, she was a chicken like any other. Like any other chicken of the mainland Veneto, that is. Her development in the egg would have followed the destiny engraved in a book, closely contemporary to Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’ historia naturale: Hieronymous Fabricius’s De formatione ovi et pulli, 1621, as shown above.

 

 Except this chicken did some extra growing.

 Two extra legs, to be precise.

Despite popular superstitions against ‘freaks’, her farmer let her live, as did the other chickens in her coop. She grew to maturity. Apart from the legs, she probably looked rather like this illustration of hen from Charles Darwin’s 1872 work, The Expression of the emotions in Man and Animals.

The four-legged chicken of the Veneto eventually found herself for sale at Treviso market, probably sold by someone looking rather like this poultry-dealing  'contadino' in an engraving, also closely contemporary to Ferrante Imperato, being from the book, Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo / Di Cesare Vecellio. Di nuouo accresciuti di molte figure. Vestitus antiquorum, recentiorúmque totius orbis, 1598.

One can only hope that she was not carried upside down like this contadino's chicken.

At the Treviso market she was seen by Emilio Ninni, the curator of the Natural History Museum in Venice. He bought her straightaway, and took her home. She became both a pet and living case-study for him.

Here is the skeleton of a normal hen, rather charmingly rendered in Jean Germani’s 1625 tract, Breve e substantiale trattato intorno alle figure anathomiche.

And here is Ninni's cross section of the skeleton of the chicken from Treviso. She had two pairs of limbs like this.

 

Apart from the extra set of limbs, the scientist observed, this chicken was not much different in stature from others of her species. ‘Perhaps a little taller,’ he observed. She ate rather well and walked without any visible impediment. However, he never saw her run and he never heard her sing. She submitted patiently to his examinations.

 

Sadly one day, Ninni found her drowned in her water bowl. Possibly, it was on account of her extra legs that she fell into this peril, unlike ‘her other companions in slavery’.

 

Ninni examined the skeleton of his former pet, and published a short academic paper on ‘Lo scheletro di un uccello mostruoso’.  The skeleton of the freak or monstrous bird.

 

 

Ninni’s four-legged chicken found her way into a display cabinet in his museum, in which you can also see a ‘baby mermaid’ made of a monkey head and shoulders stuffed into a fish, a basilisk confected of a parrot and some sharkskin, and my favourite exhibit of all, the cat of Doge Francesco Morosini, who esteemed his pet so much that on her death he had her mummified with a large rat between her paws.

 

And all of these creatures played their parts in my children novel, The Fate in the Box, as did the espaliered gorilla, the giant’s skeleton and the billiard table with four rhinoceros legs, which was, of course, begging to come to life and walk carefully down the stairs.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what constitutes and constituted a ‘freak’, especially in the 19^th century, the setting for my novel, The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters. A minor character in my novel, which deals with the Victorian obsession with hair, is the famous Mexican Gorilla Woman, Julia Pastrana, about whom I have blogged previously in this parish.

Julia (pictured right) had hair where hair should not be. This chicken had extra legs where legs should not be. Freaks tend to have extra or fewer limbs, larger or smaller features or appendages than ‘normal’. But what is normal? What kind of physiological status anxiety has given us such narrow parameters of normality?  In Victoria times, it has been theorized, Darwin's explanation of our simian origins created such a need to 'monsterize' those who are a slightly different. But what is our excuse today?

And what of the animals in Venice's museum, killed and contorted into bizarre furniture and light fittings on the whim of a trophy hunter?

Who is really the freak in this scenario?

Among all those stuffed and mounted creatures at Venice’s Natural History Museum, there are many other stories to be written. The Curiosity Room is full of creatures that were regarded as freaks. All died before their time. Writing about them is one way, I console myself, of bringing these unfortunate creatures back to life.

Until we find a better one, it will have to do.

 

www.michellelovric.com

Natural History Museum of Venice

In 2012, the museum published a new illustrated guide in English and Italian.