by Dixe Wills
The Duchess of Newcastle writes two remarkable addenda
The name of one of the most exceptional Britons of the 17th century is almost unknown nowadays. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, chalked up many accomplishments in her 50-year life that would have been noteworthy even had she been born two centuries later. She was a scientist, philosopher, novelist, poet and playwright, sometimes combining two or more of these rôles in a single work. That she was able to achieve so much, despite the huge disadvantages she encountered in society on account of her sex, is testament to her brilliance and her unwillingness to accept that anything was impossible just because it had not been done before. This is certainly true of her autobiography – the first major secular memoir ever written by a woman. The fact that she also penned one of the very first works of a whole new genre of literature as something of an afterthought speaks volumes about the originality of her mind.
Cavendish was born Margaret Lucas in 1623, near Colchester in Essex, a child of two very wealthy parents. She was also a sister to a pair of fervent royalist brothers, a fact which, in those troubled times, was not necessarily a ticket to an easy life. After a childhood in which she was mainly self-taught (the presence of her tutors being ‘rather for formality than benefit’, as she put it), she became a maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, accompanying her fleeing mistress into exile in France in 1644. There she met and married the much older William Cavendish, then Marquess of Newcastle.
The couple moved to Antwerp, where the new marchioness was introduced to thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. She began taking lessons in natural philosophy (what, nowadays, we would call science), a subject for which she had an exceptional flair. By 1652, she had moved beyond mere Hobbesian or Cartesian worlds and had begun to collate her own thoughts on the subject in a series of books. Four years later she published a prose and verse collection called Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancie’s Pencil to the Life. It spawned the first of her two extraordinary addenda. This was titled A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life – the first non-religious autobiography penned by a woman in the secular realm.
She returned to England with her husband in 1660 at the restoration of the monarchy and continued to write prolifically (she would go on to have 23 books published, including plays and collections of poetry). Although she was an individual given to eccentricities and consequently the butt of many a joke, she became recognised as England’s first female scientist.
In 1666, by which time she had become a duchess, Cavendish published what would become the most well known of her half-dozen works on science, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. This was a broadside aimed at what she saw as the rather fusty and closed-minded natural philosophers of her day. Cavendish railed at the reliance on theories about the motion of atoms to explain the world, believing herself that all atoms were ‘animated with life and knowledge’. However, she was also one of the first natural philosophers to support Thomas Hobbes’ argument that theology had no place in the world of scientific endeavour. It is her casual addendum to Observations that cemented her legacy in the world of literature as well as science, even if she receives little recognition in either field today.
The work she presented as an appendix she titled The Blazing-World. It is arguably the precursor to the whole genre of science fiction. It is also one of the first British novels ever written – it was published 12 years before John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, 22 years before Aphra Behn’s masterpiece Oroonoko, and a full 53 years before Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
It is appropriate that a book with such a title should come out in the year of the Great Fire of London, but its story has nothing to do with that holocaust and has a far wider reach than the mere destruction of a city. In her brief foreword ‘To all Noble and Worthy Ladies’, Cavendish declares that, ‘The First Part is Romancical; the Second, Philosophical; and the Third is meerly Fancy; or (as I may call it) Fantastical.’ She goes on to tell the following story.
A young woman is forced aboard a boat by a merchant who has fallen in love with her. A terrible storm sends the vessel up towards the North Pole and everyone on board freezes to death, except for the heroine. The boat sails onwards to a place where there is another pole close to the North Pole. This proves to be a portal to a separate planet: the eponymous Blazing-World, so called because it is lit by many Blazing-Starrs (sic). The world is populated by anthropomorphic beings such as bear-men, ape-men, fly-men, lice-men, spider-man and jackdaw-men, among numerous others. Each class of being has a specific task: for example, the fish-men are natural philosophers; giants are architects; bird-men are astronomers; and ape-men are chemists. Collectively, they decide to offer the new arrival as a wife to their emperor. He, taking her for some sort of goddess, proposes to worship her, an offer she declines. They marry, and the emperor ‘gave her an absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she pleased. But her subjects, who could hardly be perswaded to believe her mortal, tender’d her all the Veneration and Worship due to a Deity.’
The new empress of Blazing-World embarks on a series of scientific and philosophical debates with the various species, who show off their respective knowledge and skills (the ape-men, for instance, unveil a method, including an egg-and-milk-only diet, that can give even an ‘old decayed man’ the body of a 20-year-old – neatly prefiguring the sort of quack remedies that make up the content of so much spam today). Many of these encounters end with the author demonstrating that nature is superior to the scientific instruments created by humans. That is not to say that the empress is in any way a Luddite, for she engages in speculations on natural philosophy and encourages scientific research.
It is at this point that Cavendish herself enters the fray as a soul or a spirit summoned up from the empress’s home planet. Just in case the reader should be under any illusion about the identity of this spirit, she names her as the Duchess of Newcastle, someone who ‘is not one of the most learned, eloquent, witty and ingenious, yet she is a plain and rational Writer’. The empress chooses her as her personal scribe and the two form a close platonic bond. This relationship is complicated somewhat when the empress forms a deep intellectual bond with the Duke of Newcastle. The duchess, briefly jealous, gets over it (thus assuring readers that they are engaging with a work of fiction).
The scene then moves to Welbeck Abbey, the duke and duchess’s home in Sherwood Forest. A trial is held in the ducal seat in which the abstract notion of Fortune is set against Honesty and Prudence. Towards the end, Fortune storms off before Truth can deliver a verdict.
Trouble brews, for back in the world from which she had come, war breaks out. Most of the world’s nations have formed an alliance and are attacking Esfi, the kingdom where the empress was born. She forms a navy/air force composed of fish-men, who can tow submarines using golden chains, and bird-men, who can fly up from the submarines to bomb the enemy with fire stones. Thus armed she returns to her own planet through a portal to fight against Esfi’s enemies. As a result of her intervention, the king of Esfi is crowned ruler of the planet. The empress, her work done, returns to the Blazing-World to live a life of order and peace. The novel ends with the spirit of the duchess returning to her body back in Nottinghamshire where she regales her husband the duke with tales of the empress and her world.
It’s quite clear that in The Blazing-World, Margaret Cavendish is imagining a world as she would like it, a world in which she is in control. Of course, such a state of affairs was simply not possible in the patriarchal society in which the author found herself, even though she had a certain amount of status by virtue of being a duchess. ‘By this Poetical Description,’ she told her readers, ‘…my ambition is not onely (sic) to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World.’ If she lacked power in the real world, she could at least take full control over the one she had imagined, ‘That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Marga
ret the First.’
Her work might therefore also be considered the first feminist novel (albeit it’s a man who eventually gets to rule the whole of the empress’s home planet), beating Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to the punch by nearly two centuries.
The two addenda Cavendish wrote – True Relation and The Blazing-World – helped open up whole new vistas in literature. In the first, she established the notion that a woman might write her life story, even if she didn’t find herself on the path to sainthood. In the second, she introduced many of the themes that form the bedrock of science fiction today, including the concept of portals into other worlds.
Never before or since have two literary B-sides made such an impact on the written word.
Four young Germans make a two-minute appearance on a television show about cutting-edge technology
‘Television is called a medium,’ so the quip goes, ‘because it is neither rare nor well done.’
It’s a joke often wrongly attributed to the late Patrick McGoohan, an actor now best remembered for his starring rôle as ‘Number 6’ in The Prisoner, a television series he devised himself and which quickly became a cult classic. His meditation on the nature of freedom and the limits of free will aired in the late 1960s and remains highly influential. It was an exceptional programme that perhaps proves the witticism’s rule.
The Prisoner ran for 17 episodes, totalling over 13 hours of airtime. However, in 1975 it was a much shorter piece of footage – just 147 seconds – that was to show how television, for all its faults, could have a major impact on culture. In this case, it was the British music scene that was to be shaken up. The clip of four soberly dressed men from Düsseldorf wasn’t broadcast on a music-based show, as one might expect, but on Tomorrow’s World, the sensible-jumper-wearing, future-watching BBC series that ran from 1965 to 2003.
The four musicians were band co-founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, alongside Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos. Collectively they were Kraftwerk (‘Power Station’ in English) and very few of the British television-viewing public that night had heard their like before. The band are shown performing the first couple of minutes of ‘Autobahn’, their 22-minute homage to German motorways. The song starts with a cassette being loaded into a tape machine, which plays the sound of a car starting up and moving off. Half the band stands stiffly, picking at synthesisers, while the other half are seen ‘apparently playing camping stoves with wired-up knitting needles’ as journalist Andrew Harrison was to put it. The words to the song are all but whispered in a monotone between simple recurring synthesiser riffs. The whole is served up over complex repeated treble-heavy drumming patterns.
The meaning of the song would doubtless have been lost on most viewers, since the lyrics were in German:
‘Wir fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn
Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band
Weisse Streifen, grüner Rand’
[‘We’re driving driving driving on the Autobahn
The roadway is a grey track
White stripes, green edge’]
After a minute of this, Raymond Baxter’s reassuring matter-of-fact narration comes in to explain to viewers what it is that they’re witnessing:
Kraftwerk have a name for this: it’s Machine Music. The sounds are created at their laboratory in Düsseldorf, programmed, then recreated on stage with the minimum of fuss. This is ‘Autobahn’ – based, say the group, on the rhythm of trucks, cars and passing bridges heard while driving through Germany. Last year they removed the last recognisable instrument, a violin, and built these synthetic drums. Each disc gives a different sound – rolls, bongos, snares – just by completing the contact with the spring-steel batons. Next year Kraftwerk hope to eliminate the keyboards altogether and build jackets with electronic lapels which could be played by touch.
To put the song into context, this was the year when number ones in the British charts included ‘If ’ by Telly Savalas, ‘Bye Bye Baby’ by the Bay City Rollers, and ‘Whispering Grass’ by television stars Windsor Davies and Don Estell (though, to be fair, 1975 did also throw up David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’).
The revolution did not occur overnight. The short clip did not cause every musician in Britain to swap their guitars and drums for synthesisers and electronic percussion, or eschew sentimental romantic ballads in favour of minimalistic lyricism about the stark realities of the industrial world – the following year saw Showaddywaddy, Brotherhood of Man and The Wurzels all topping the charts. However, the footage suddenly brought the band to the attention of a huge new audience and showed them that another way was possible. The Guardian newspaper, in its enduring wisdom, has since given its verdict on the Tomorrow’s World appearance, calling it ‘the germinating moment for British dance music’.
The first stirrings of change could be detected in Britain with the emergence of synthpop artists in the late ’70s and early ’80s, including The Human League, Gary Numan, Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Soft Cell. Other genres of music followed, all of which owed their roots to Kraftwerk: hip-hop, house, electro, drum and bass, techno, and more or less any other style that involved a synthesiser in some way. Musicians from David Bowie to Joy Division and Franz Ferdinand to Daft Punk have acknowledged Kraftwerk’s influence on their output. As Martin Gore of Depeche Mode was keen to point out in an interview with journalist Neil McCormick, ‘For anyone of our generation involved in electronic music, Kraftwerk were the godfathers… Radio-Activity in 1975, Trans-Europe Express in 1977, The Man-Machine in 1978: they still sound modern today. The electronic scene blew up after those pivotal albums.’
A three-minute version of ‘Autobahn’ reached number 11 in the charts in 1975 following the band’s Tomorrow’s World appearance. In 1981, Kraftwerk had a number-one hit in the UK with ‘The Model’. This single went gold, selling over 500,000 copies. It had taken six years from their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance on British television for their sound to move from the extreme margins of popular taste to the mainstream. The band made a return to Tomorrow’s World in 1991, only on that occasion they were represented by four robots (moving in sync to their chart hit, ‘The Robots’). It was the logical extension of Kraftwerk’s ‘machine music’ ethos.
Of the four members who made the historic appearance on Tomorrow’s World back in 1975, only Ralf Hütter remains in the line-up today. As for the ‘jackets with electronic lapels which could be played by touch’, that’s a technological leap that still remains to be taken.
A publisher cannot find anything interesting to read for his train journey home
Whisper it, but there was a time, before the internet and the smart phone and 4G networks, when it was possible to find oneself on a train and not have anything with which to amuse oneself besides the ever-changing scenery beyond the carriage window. For some people, staring out at the landscape and thinking deep thoughts is pleasure enough. However, for Allen Lane, in his early thirties but already a managing director of a publishing company, the want of a book to read caused him no end of irritation. And when one day he happened to be at Exeter St David’s station with nothing to read and the prospect of a long journey back to London ahead of him, this event would change the face of publishing forever.
The incident is related on a page towards the back of a selection of Penguin paperbacks. Under the headline, ‘He just wanted a book to read…’ the tale is told in a single paragraph:
‘Not too much to ask, is it?’ It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, managing director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.
Oddly, the date is wrong – Lane actually had his epiphany in 1934. The first Penguin paperbacks were launched in July 1935, which perhaps accounts for the error. He had just spent the weekend with the crime-fiction writer Agatha Christie, his favourite among the Bodley Head authors. On the train back to London he set his mind to devising a way of publishing good-quality titles in paperback for a mass market – the sort of books that could, perhaps, be sold on railway stations to bored travellers.
At the time, paperbacks were seen as trashy and, indeed, tended to live down to that reputation. The books that were published in paperback were overwhelmingly of the pulp-fiction variety, wrapped in lurid or crudely sexist covers. Only by buying a hardback book did the reader have any hope of encountering something of merit, and most people could not afford to indulge in such a luxury all that often. Lane’s revolutionary idea was to make such books available for the knockdown price of 6d – the price of a packet of ten cigarettes. Having just spent the week in her company, no doubt Lane could already foresee paperback versions of Christie’s books on sale up and down the country. He envisaged them being sold not just in shops but from vending machines as well (a dream that became reality when the first ‘Penguincubator’ was installed on the Charing Cross Road).
It is fair to say that his proposal did not go down at all well with his fellow directors at Bodley Head, who shared the commonly held view regarding the general undesirability of paperbacks and did not want to sully their company’s products by offering them in that form. Only very reluctantly did they give Lane permission to try out his new venture, and even then they insisted that none of the work on it be done on company time.
It is possible that there was also some residual resentment towards Lane, since he was a cousin of the founder of Bodley Head, John Lane, and had been groomed from the age of 16 to rise through the ranks of the publishing company. On John Lane’s death in 1925, Allen Lane became a director, and went on to chair the company five years later, a 20-something surrounded by men very much his senior in age and a great deal more conservative in their ways of doing business.