For Washington Irving, though, Indian removal registered very differently. In 1832 (see 7 June) he returned home from seventeen years living and writing in Europe, where he had established his reputation with books like The Sketch Book (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall (1822) and The Conquest of Granada (1829). In his preface to The Sketch Book Irving had claimed that the American scene, for all the sublimity of its landscape, nevertheless lacked the ‘storied and poetical association’ to be found in the ‘masterpieces of art’, the ‘ancient and local custom’ – even the ‘very ruins’ of Europe.
By now, though, Fenimore Cooper had begun to show that the country offered plenty of history and custom for the novelist to draw on – in the Revolutionary War (on land and at sea), and above all in the romance of the disappearing Native Americans. So when a friend of Irving’s, an Indian Commissioner called Henry Ellsworth, invited him to accompany one of the forced migrations moving west late in 1832, the novelist jumped at the chance. ‘I should have an opportunity of seeing the remnants of those great Indian tribes,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘which are now about to disappear as independent nations’ – and prove he could write about America, he might have added.
The result of his experience, A Tour on the Prairies (1835), is the most exotic account of the American West to be produced by an American writer: ‘tour’ says it all. Sunlight through trees reminded him of gothic cathedrals; the Indians, ‘stately fellows’ with ‘fine Roman countenances’, looked ‘like figures of monumental bronze’ – safely reified into classical artefacts.
‘We send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe,’ Irving comments (now rejecting his own trajectory), when a ‘tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity, and self-dependence most in union with our political institutions.’ So for all his exoticism, he didn’t cut himself off from the history going on around him, but joined the expansionist flow. As the Native Americans vanished from the scene, the West would become an arena in which to test American manhood. The theme would be taken up and magnified by Francis Parkman, Owen Wister and Theodore Roosevelt (see 15 February, 29 June and 4 August), then given the final scholarly imprimatur in Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893).
28 January
Horace Walpole coins the word ‘serendipity’
1754 Son of Robert Walpole, the powerful Whig politician who invented for himself the post of Prime Minister, Horace was the popular writer who invented the gothic novel. The gothic tale often pretended to be a ‘translation’ of a long-lost manuscript relating the hauntings and horrors of a medieval castle, abbey or country house.
Walpole’s prototype of the genre, The Castle of Otranto, came out in 1764, and purported to be Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. When in a preface to the third edition Walpole acknowledged his authorship, he promptly lost much of his critical support and started a debate on whether fiction should be ‘romantic’ – that is, fanciful – or true to life.
As a contribution to thought, however, that was nothing compared to his coining the word ‘serendipity’. Serendipity is the chance discovery of something fortunate when you’re looking for something else. The concept has proved crucial to scientific thought and policy. Roy J. Plunket, for example, discovered Teflon when he was searching for a gas to be used in refrigeration. The British scientist William Ramsay first isolated the element helium, which he named after the Greek god of the sun, because while looking for argon he noticed an unknown gas with a yellow line seen in the spectrum of the sun. Alexander Fleming came across penicillin when he returned from holiday to find that some cultures of bacteria that he had left behind had been killed by penicillium mould that had accidentally got into the Petri dishes. And so on.
Walpole himself described serendipity as ‘accidental sagacity’. As he explained in a letter written on this day, he got the word from ‘a silly tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip” [the old Arabic name for present-day Sri Lanka], who were always making discoveries … of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right’.
Scientists are always coming up with new words for their new discoveries. In fact the enormous vocabulary of English owes a lot to the English-speaking nations’ pre-eminence in science (see 10 June). Hence radar (for radio detection and ranging), laser (light amplification by
stimulated emission of radiation) and X-ray – itself a serendipitous discovery by Wilhelm Roentgen while investigating cathode ray tubes.
Wordsmiths they may be, but authors are less prolific with neologisms. Of course there are exceptions. Shakespeare, who sometimes seems to have given us words for half our imaginings, came up with ‘puke’, ‘gossip’, ‘swagger’, ‘unreal’, ‘critic’ and many more. But a lot of his verbal inventions are really old words in new combinations or grammatical uses, like ‘blood-stained’, or ‘blanket’ as a verb.
Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’ in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is often cited as a treasure house of neologisms. But of the 24 new words there (all patiently glossed to Alice by Humpty Dumpty, who can ‘explain all the poems that were ever invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet’), only ‘chortled’ has survived into common usage.
More recently Martin Amis seemed to be transforming the language of transatlantic public relations in his brilliant Money: A Suicide Note (1984). For a while people really did go around London talking of ‘rug-rethinks’ for haircuts and ‘blastfurters’ for hot dogs. But it didn’t last.
No, it was Horace Walpole who did the business. He invented a word that the philosophy of thought really needed, and that has therefore entered most of the world’s languages more or less unchanged.
29 January
The death of George III elegised and satirised
1819 Few deaths of monarchs have inspired a poem as fine, or a poem as mediocre, as that of George III.
On this day the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, as part of his official duty, commemorated the passing of the king (in truth long gone in age, madness and total incompetence) with an effusion in hexameters – the least British of prosodies – entitled ‘The Vision of Judgement’. It pictured the deceased king welcomed into heaven, by an appropriately deferential angelic host. The implication was that he would reign there, as he had on earth.
The poem took a year to publish and in the preface Southey made the mistake of attacking Byron (without actually naming him) as the leader of the ‘Satanic School’ of poetry. There would be no welcome in heaven for the author of Don Juan, it was implied. The other place awaited.
Byron penned a rapid response, subtly retitled ‘A Vision of Judgment’ (i.e. with an indefinite pronoun and differently spelled ‘Judgment’ – a cataloguer’s nightmare). The poem was written in flowing ottava rima, Byron’s favourite verse form.
In the preface, Byron contemptuously pointed to Southey’s earlier composition of the verse play Wat Tyler, with its celebration of regicide, adding:
If Mr Southey had not rushed in where he had no business, and where he never was before, and never will be again, the following poem would not have been written. It is not impossible that it may be as good as his own, seeing that it cannot, by any species of stupidity, natural or acquired, be worse. The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem by the author of Wat Tyler are something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself – containing the quintessence of his own attributes.
The poem itself is a majestic denunciation of the most useless of England’s kings – a title for which George III’s successor, Byron’s ‘fat friend’ (i.e. the Prince Regent, later George IV), is a cl
ose contender:
… of all
The fools who flocked to swell or see the show,
Who cared about the corpse? The funeral
Made the attraction, and the black the woe,
There throbbed not there a thought which
pierced the pall;
And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low,
It seemed the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.
30 January
King Charles I of England is beheaded. A fortnight later John Milton will risk his life to defend the act in a pamphlet
1649 Better known today to students of English as the author of Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton was also a radical political activist and an opponent of inherited power and privilege – a republican in a monarchical age. He believed that natural law overrode the divine right of kings, and his politics were based on the idea, developed by the Dutch political theorist Hugo Grotius (1583–45), that monarchs ruled according to an implied contract between free individuals and their ruler, in which the people agreed to obey in return for peace and security of person and property under law.
Kings who broke this contract – those, for instance, who governed for themselves alone or for a clique instead of the common good – could be deprived of their power and replaced. That’s exactly what Parliament thought Charles I had done, and they fought and financed six years of bitter civil warfare to prove it. By the beginning of December 1648, the Parliamentary army’s victory was complete and the king was in prison.
But having fought and defeated him – indeed, as Milton argued, tried often enough to kill him in the field – some parliamentarians drew back from the prospect of trying the king for treason, deposing him and executing him if found guilty. Some of these foot-draggers were royalists; the majority belonged to the Presbyterian branch of the Protestant cause.
On 6 December, Colonel Thomas Pride put a brutal end to the debate by leading troops into the House of Commons to eject the temporisers. The rest, who came to be known as the ‘Rump Parliament’, quickly got on with the business of trying the king. A commission they set up found him guilty, deposed him and put him to death on 30 January. Milton almost certainly witnessed the public beheading of the monarch.
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton’s polemic published only a fortnight after the king’s death, targets not the royalists – a lost cause so far as he was concerned – but those backsliding Presbyterians. In this, it might be said, he gives an early sign of the factionalism that would eventually undo Cromwell’s Republic.
What was the point, he argued, of waging war on the king, then refusing the logical outcome of that rebellion? In a sense they had already killed the king, in that they had deprived him of his official status – that second ‘body’ beyond the personal that bestowed monarchical authority.
Milton’s pamphlet attempted to persuade not only by its logic but also by a special kind of rhetoric that one might call ligature syntax. Here’s how it works:
Others, who have been fiercest against their Prince, under the notion of a Tyrant, and no meane indenciaries of the Warre against him, when God out of his providence and high disposal hath delivered him into the hand of their brethren, on a suddaine and in a new garb of Allegiance, which their doings have long since cancell’d, they plead for him, pity him, extol him, protest against those that talk of bringing him to the tryall of Justice, which is the sword of God, superior to all mortall things, in whose hand soever by apparent signs his testified wil is to put it.
If you parse, or diagram, this sentence, the main clause consists of a subject – ‘Others’ – and a predicate of four parallel verbs – ‘plead … pity … extol … protest’. All the rest is syntactically subordinate, serving to modify the main clause in one way or another. The relative clauses ‘who … Prince’ and ‘no meane … him’ are adjectival descriptors of those ‘Others’. ‘When … brethren’ is adverbial, telling when. So is ‘on a suddaine … Allegiance’, telling both when and how. The adjectival clause ‘which … cancell’d’ moves a further step down the ladder of subordination, modifying ‘Allegiance’, which is already serving as a modifier. On that same lower level is the clause ‘That talk … Justice’, which modifies ‘those’ (who would proceed with the trial).
Then, going even further down the ladder – to rungs three, four, five and (believe it or not) six below the main clause – Milton slips in the dagger. The ‘tryall’ is described as one ‘of Justice’, which in turn is modified by ‘sword’, and that again by ‘of God’, which is finally modified by the parallel clauses ‘superior … things’ and ‘in whose hand … to put it’.
To put it in terms of information, what was the big news that Milton was trying to convey? That it was God’s justice to kill the king. Only he couldn’t presume to say so directly; instead he had to bury the message deep in the bowels of one of the most complex English sentences ever published.
Anyway, it did the business – at least insofar as it got Milton a job in Cromwell’s government. In March of that year they appointed him Secretary for Foreign Tongues – in effect, their propagandist, or (in modern terms) spin doctor. His first job was to answer the highly effective Eikon Basilike (Sacred Image of the King), a miscellany – purporting to be written by the imprisoned Charles himself – of diary entries, pious reflections on the institution of monarchy and prayers for his enemies. Milton’s riposte, Eikonoklastes (The Image Breaker), did little to counter the effect of this masterpiece of royalist propaganda.
More successful – though for obvious reasons hardly a bestseller in his native country – was his answer (in Latin) to Defensio Regia, pro Carlo I, by Salmasius (Claude Saumaise, the French classical scholar). Milton’s Defensio pro populo Anglicano (1651) asked the European proponents of monarchy what business it was of theirs how the English worked out their own political destiny.
Other treatises followed, and defensios to even more absurd continental attacks, but they all wound up on the bonfire after the fall of the republican Commonwealth and the death of Cromwell. In the autumn of 1659 Milton himself was put in prison. His punishment might have been a lengthy stay there – or worse – had it not been for the intervention of his secretary, the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, by now an MP. By 30 May 1660, the Stuarts were back in the driving seat in the form of Charles II, newly ‘restored’ to the throne. Milton, now blind, got on with Paradise Lost.
31 January
Louis Asa-Asa tells how he was captured in Africa and sold there six times before a storm forced his landing in Cornwall
1831 Louis Asa-Asa’s story, or ‘The Negro Boy’s Narrative’ as the title had it, was published on this day as a short addendum to the far more substantial History of Mary Prince, but it added the dimension, normally lacking in slave narratives, of the subject’s treatment within his native country before ever boarding ship for Europe, the West Indies or the United States.
Prince’s story, the first by a woman slave to be published in England, had traced her life from her birth to slave parents in Bermuda, through her sale to four masters, to her arrival and life in England as a servant. There, after a series of disagreements with her master and mistress, she was thrown out of the house. Through her connection with the Moravian Church she met the abolitionist Thomas Pringle, who arranged for her story to be taken down by Susanna Strickland, later to become one of Canada’s literary founding mothers (see 21 August).
Shortly before the History of Mary Prince went to press, Pringle was given Asa-Asa’s narrative, as dictated to a friend and fellow abolitionist, George Stephen. Asa-Asa had fetched up in England when a French slaver on which he was imprisoned lost its bearings in a storm and sought refuge in St Ives, Cornwall. His story was transcribed, according to Pringle, in ‘as nearly as possible the narrator’s words, with only such correction as was necessary to connect the story, and render it grammatical’.
Asa-Asa’s narrative tells how his villag
e in Sierra Leone was terrorised repeatedly by a tribe he calls the Adinyés, who would burn buildings, killing some people and marching others off to be sold as slaves: ‘They took away brothers and sisters and husbands and wives.’ When they caught Louis and about twenty others, they marched them to the sea, forcing them to ‘carry chickens and meat for [their] food’. One man, who was too ill to carry his rations, they ‘ran … through the body with a sword’.
When they got to the sea – another departure from the typical slave’s story – they weren’t put on an ocean-going slaver right away, but taken around in a small boat to be sold and re-sold repeatedly. Louis himself ‘was sold six times over, sometimes for money, sometimes for cloth, and sometimes for a gun’. It was half a year before he saw ‘the white people’ who would chain him side by side with others aboard the slave ship, to endure the foul conditions of the middle passage.
But it was a French slave ship that carried Louis Asa-Asa away. The British had abolished the slave trade in 1807, after two decades of campaigning by William Wilberforce, Charles Fox, Lord Grenville and others. And it was Africans who had done the initial buying and selling of human beings.
1 February
The New York Review of Books is first published
1963 It all began with a newspaper strike that shut down the major New York papers from December 1962 until the end of March of the following year. Among the casualties was the New York Times Book Review, issued every Sunday as a magazine supplement to the mother paper. The Review had been running since 1896, covering between twenty and 30 new books per week in judiciously measured prose.
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