The Trouble with Tom
Page 24
But really: do go and buy Conway's autobiography. And do not skip.
Every once in a while one comes across odd little sideways glances at the great figures of American literature; one other pleasant example of this is Herbert Gleason's Through the Year With Thoreau (1917), a book-length photographic essay which revisits the various sites, plants, and animals of Thoreau's writings. Gleason did some wonderful detective work over the years on foot to find the actual coves, clearings, and pastures Thoreau wrote about. And while time had already obliterated some of the vistas Thoreau had seen decades earlier, a surprising number of sights were still to be seen, including the pile of stones that marked the remains of Thoreau's cabin. Gleason also spoke with a number of locals, some of whom still remembered Thoreau and who were not in any awe of him. Meeting an old man who used to drive the butcher's cart from house to house, and thus had known virtually every resident of the area, Gleason asked him if by any chance he'd known Henry David Thoreau:
"Henry Thoreauy—with an expression of undisguised contempt"—I knew Henry Thoreau ever since he was a boy, and I never had much of an opinion of him. And I hain't seen nothing since to change my mind!'
As Gleason dryly concludes, "It is curious to note how little Thoreau was esteemed by most of his fellow villagers."
Comfort for the Ruptured
For anyone curious about E. B. Foote, there is no better place to start than with the books themselves. Not only was Foote a prolific author, he also frequently excerpted and recycled his material under different titles: anyone trying to amass a comprehensive collection of Footesiana would have a lifetime pursuit on their hands. But the three ur-texts are undoubtedly Medical Common Sense (1857), Plain Home Talk (1870), and the Sammy Tubbs series (1874). Thanks to Foote's popularity, it is relatively easy to track old copies of the first two titles. Tubbs was not as popular, but it is now much loved among collectors in the know; consequently, you can easily pay $100 for a single volume from that series. If you know anything of human nature, it will not surprise you to hear that volume 5, Elimination and Reproduction, is the most eagerly sought one of all. It is only in the first printing (quite rare indeed) that illustrator Stephens managed to sneak in the infamous tooting vagina.
Curiously, in addition to a great many British and American editions, Foote's works were widely published in German in both Germany and the United States. Plain Home Talk, for example, was published as Offene Volks-Sprache. Foote himself made a point of advertising that he was available to give private consultations in his Manhattan office in German. This, I think, is a clue for an intrepid scholar. German-Americans appear to have had access to a body of American contraceptive literature written in German. I have never heard of anyone publishing in German getting prosecuted by Comstock and his minions. Fortunately for horny immigrants, meddling religious prudes tend toward anti-intellectualism: they can barely read in their own language, never mind someone else's. So there may well have been a substantial hidden contraceptive sub- culture in America, one that operated under the noses of authorities simply by being in a different language.
The first modern account of Foote was Edward Cirillo's articles in volume 25 (1970) of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science. A great many further details of Foote's life and of the contraceptive business can be found in two excellent books, which I cannot recommend highly enough for students of social history: Janet Farrell Brodie's Contraception and Abortion in 19th Century America (Cornell UP, 1994), and Michael Sappol's A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton UP, 2002). Both Janet and Michael were very kind in responding to my inquiries about some of the more arcane bits of this history.
As a tireless self-promoter, Foote also had much written about him in his own lifetime, primarily and rather conveniently by his own hand. Medical Common Sense and Plain Home Talk both give brief autobiographical accounts, one fleshed out by pamphlets like his Evidences of Dr. Foote's Success (1888). Thaddeus Burr Wake-man's elegy and testimonial collection In Memory of Edward Bliss Foote (1907) is also quite useful.
Unmentioned in this chapter is one of the great pioneers of earth toilets, the English inventor the Reverend Henry Moule, who in 1861 had published a treatise with the doggedly literal title National Health and Wealth, Instead of Disease, Nuisance, Expense, and Waste, Caused by Cesspools and Water Drainage. His Moule Earth Closet never did get much recognition. As our water runs out, his work may prove prophetic yet. And prophesy would not be too strong a word. Moule, being a man of the cloth, viewed the matter in theological terms. He noted the Deuteronomy 23:13 instruction that "With your equipment you will have a trowel, and when you squat outside, you shall scrape a hole with it and then turn and cover your excrement." The Bible has nothing to say, on the other hand, about plungers, S-bends, or chain pulls. To Moule's mind, if water sewage fouled God's creation and wasted perfectly good manure for crops, then surely earth closets treated feces with the respect it deserved.
For those eager to learn more about Victorian toilets—I know you're out there—I recommend Adam Hart Davis's The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazakette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (2001)' and his general history Thunder, Flush, and Thomas Crapper (1997). Also see Lawrence Wright's Clean and Decent (1997) and Wallace Reyburn's Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper (1969). Schematics of the Wakefield Earth Toilet are on page 286 of The Manufacturer and Builder magazine for December 1871. Details of the 1867 inspection of Britain's rivers, and the sewage and other pollution problems discovered, can be found in The Life of Frank Buckland, by George C. Bompas (1886).
Finally, details of August Woehler's attempt upon E. B. Foote's life can be found in the New York Times for 1879, on the dates November 2, 7, and 17. As one might have gathered by Woehler's choice of it as a good place to hang himself, Putnam House was not the most happy of boardinghouses. In February 1892, another boarder—this one signing himself in as "J. Davis," and suicidally despondent over racetrack debts—shut himself into his room and tried to blow both himself and the house up with the gas stove. Instead of landing in the Hereafter, though, the gentleman later awoke in the decidedly less tranquil confines of Bellevue Hospital.
The Mornington Crescent Game
Severalyears ago, when I was still living in Portland, I was sitting in the Periodicals Room of the Multnomah Public Library reading the January 25, 1868, issue of Notes and Queries when I came across a letter in it, sent in anonymously by the old customer of John Chennell, and titled 'Tom Paine's Bones." I read it in stunned disbelief. I'd vaguely heard once about Paine's body going missing, but—this? What was he doing in the basement of some corn merchant's shop in Guildford? What on earth . . . ?
It was at that moment that this book began.
The Guildford Museum was very helpful in directing me to Mark Sturley's The Breweries and Public Houses of Guildford (1990) for more information about the Chennell clan. The hair-raising murder and executions in 1818 are described in the anonymous booklet Murder and Paricide!!! (1818) and in the 1841 edition of The New gate Calendar. I also found useful the Guildford Ordnance Survey Map (1895), E. M. Butts's Guildford Shops & Shopping: 1740-1850 (1989), and Shops & Shopping: A History of Buying and Selling in Guildford (2002)-and, of course, John Janaway's splendid Surrey Privies: A Nostalgic Trip Down the Garden Path (1999), which reminds us that "The surviving privies of Surrey need all the help they can get."
In addition to the three accounts of Paine's bones cited for "The Bone Grubbers" chapter (Watson, Conway, and Hunns), and Moncure Conway's Autobiography, further information can be gleaned from Moncure Conway's exhibition catalogue Thomas Paine Exhibition at South Place Institute, Finsbuy (1895), which can be found at the British Library. The catalogue contains the first mention of Louis Breeze's ownership of Paine's brain. Breeze's appeals to Parliament over vaccination can be found in the Times of London for 21 February 1876 and 20 June 1877; his run-ins with the l
aw are noted in the Times for 20 September 1884 and 21 January 1885, and his household members are noted in the United Kingdom Census for 1881.
The British Library has numerous books and pamphlets by Robert Ainslie, including Is There a God? (1840). The Darwin Correspondence Online Database (University of Cambridge) also has letters by son Oliver Ainslie to Charles Darwin inquiring about the possibility of buying Trowmer Lodge, most notably his letter of 23 November 1880. But for those tracing Ainslie's steps who find themselves at Mornington Crescent, remember: it's A Lifetime to Learn, a Minute to Master. Or so proclaim the devotees of the Mornington Crescent Game, and never was a truer word spoken. Details may be found at the Web site for the radio program I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (isihac.co.uk). The closing and reopening of Mornington Crescent station, along with a summary of the game's "rules," can be found in the BBC News story "Mornington Crescent: The Legend Is Reborn" (27 April 1998).
Speaking of splendid hoaxes, Tom Paine's appearance among banjo-strumming con men is recounted in The Scotsman for 16 November 1876. George Reynolds and his battles with the staged photos and claims of Dr. Barnardo can be found in Gillian Wagner's history Barnardo (1979), as well as in two booklets at the British Library, Reynolds's Dr. Barnardo's Homes: Containing Startling Revelations, Etc. (1877) and The Charity Organization and the Reynolds-Barnardo Arbitration (1878).
The possible fate of Paine's skull can be glimpsed in Richard W. Holloway's eyewitness account of the use of human bones by British chemical manure manufacturers, which he recounted in an April 1917 letter in the Cairns Post (compiled online at www.holloways-beach.com by Ian Johnson of Holloways Beach, Australia), as well as in the weirdly compelling October 1871 article 'The Art of Utilizing" in Manufacturer and Builder magazine, which includes among its many revelations that "fishes' eyes are used for buds in artificial flowers."
Gordon Alexander's account of meeting the Muggletonians can be found in Ancient and Modern Muggktonians (1870) at the British Library; more recently, see Ted Underwood's The Acts of the Witnesses: The Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and Other Early Muggletonian Writings (1999). They survived well into the twentieth century and the last surviving Muggletonian—Philip Noakes, of Matfield, Kent—passed away in 1979. He left behind a trove of early and previously unknown Muggletonian documents to the British Library; he had, in effect, been the last guardian of the sect's legacy.
Laurence Hutton's complaint about not being able to find old landmarks is even truer today than when he first wrote it in Literary Landmarks of London (1885). Still, we at least have better maps to work with now. A recent poll of Time Out London readers for the "best London book" found their choice to be the London A-Z street atlas (1936), which beat out any novelist or historian. This was taken as a rather overly literal answer to the poll's question, but perhaps there's something to that judgment. I trudged around London equipped with a Dickens's Dictionary of London (1884), and Karl Baedeker's Baedeker's London and Its Environs (1885). If you want to know exactly what a person would see when they walked down a stree—what businesses they would patronize, what things cost, what cons and arcane laws they had to watch out for—then old Baedekers and the like are just extraordinary. These were also the last generation of guides to show the dynamic of city life before automobiles overran it.
Forgetting
An account of the Tivoli discovery can be found in the New York Times for July 19 ("Paine Tombstone Uncovered Upstate Revives Mystery About Pamphleteer"), and July 20, 1976 ('Thomas Paine Mystery at Tivoli, N.Y., Solved"), both written by James Feron. Feron had previously been a Middle East correspondent for the Times; one can only wonder what he made of being dispatched to, as he informed readers, "an object of curiosity and mystery for Jack and Josephine McNeil and their children, as well as for neighbors who live in trailers, frame houses and modest contemporary homes."
The Times of London accounet—peter Strafford's 'Tombstone Is Said to Be Paine's," which ran July 20—was, though filed the same day as the latter Feron story, seemingly unaware of the explanation of the obelisk's origin. Given how often stories from both Times are picked up in the foreign media, I imagine the Paine story made its way into other countries and continents; in a conversation with Josephine McNeil, she mentioned to me that back in 1976 she was receiving calls and letters from as far away as Australia.
There was a brief attempt at gathering up Paine's bones in 2001—a "Citizen Paine Restoration Initiative," was profiled in the March 30, 2001, New York Times. It seems to have fallen quite silent since then. Among those cited was Hazel Burgess, the Australian owner of the alleged Paine skull bought from a dealer in Sydney. She was trying to raise money for DNA tests on the skull, but has not been heard from publicly since; when I contacted her, she politely declined to give further details on any findings.
Perhaps her story will become rather like that of the McNeils. Cultural forgetfulness is not the same as the individual loss of memory, but the former seems to me largely an accumulation of the latter. When we no longer find something useful, we—individually and collectively—tend to forget it. After all, the too-strong persistence of memory winds up interfering with one's ability to perceive the present moment. The hippocampus and amygdala are constantly throwing away memories-whether by destroying or sealing them off is not clear-though this function notably goes awry in the traumatic memories associated with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The best academic introduction to this field of memory studies is Daniel Schecter and Larry Squire's Neuropsychology of Memory (3rd ed., 2002) and in Schacter and Elaine Scarry's Memory Brain, and Belief(2002). One promising new area is the use of memory-related drugs, notably in the work of Bryan Strange, Larry Cahill, and Roger Pitman. These are not the old panaceas that promise to improve your memory: quite the opposite. They help you forget.
Eternity in a Box
Accounts of the Thirteen Club, an idea surely due for a revival, can be found in abundance in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the late 1890s; this particular celebration is described in articles that ran on February 6 and 14, 1898.
For more on the fate of phrenology and Orson Fowler, see the histories cited in "The Talking Heads" chapter; the growing disenchantment of both Foote Senior and Junior with it can be found in speeches reported by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for May 11 and 23, 1896. Phrenology really was something of an intellectual tragedy. In retrospect, its basic set of propositions was surprisingly accurate: that different cognitive functions are localized to specific parts of the brain; that the brain has a plasticity that allows it to develop or atrophy at any age, but disproportionately and critically so in one's youth; and that cognition itself is a physical phenomenon. These are now the most fundamental assumptions of neurology. The observation of localized brain function underlies MRI scan research; neural plasticity is the raison detre of Head Start, special education, and stroke therapies alike; and the chemical basis of cognition has built a multibillion-dollar industry of antidepressants to pull you up, antipsychotics to hold you down, and sedatives to knock you sideways. Phrenology's error was believing these effects could be observed at the level of gross anatomy. Without a serious commitment to scientific methodology, this error grew until phrenology truly became the sham its opponents always said it was.
One of the only newspaper accounts of the 1905 ceremony with Thomas Paine's brain is in the New York Times for October 15, 1905. A number of details about Thomas Paine's memorial can also be found in the News Letter of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, and the commemorative booklet Rededication of the Paine Monument (1909). Rededication contains the 1905 ceremony's speeches by Foote and other locals, some of whom were rather less eloquent than others; one Minuteman reenactor began his remarks with "I find myself somewhat in the position of an old darkey down in Virginia . . ."
Photographs of the preserved cottage, as well as a timeline of the Paine monument, can be found in the Souvenir Program: Thomas Paine Centennial Celebration (1909) and the Memori
al Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of Thomas Paine (1909); both were published by E. B. Foote Jr. and the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, and can be found at the New York Public Library. Accounts of the cottage's near-destruction are in Leslie's Illustrated Weekly for January 2, 1908, and the New York Times for May 31, 1908, as well as the TPHA booklet Thomas Paine and New Rochelle, NY (1951) and the Huguenot and Historical Association of New Rochelle's booklet Thomas Paine Cottage and Grounds (1931).
Aside from Paine's body, his grave itself became something of a missing relic. In September 1909, South Place Magazine ran 'Thomas Paine's Gravestone," which traces a large fragment of the shattered headstone with Cobbett to Liverpool. A reminiscence by William Lowes Rushton, son of the 1820s Liverpool radical Edward Rushton, includes this interesting detail about what else was in Cobbett's luggage: "I understand the gravestone was broken into fragments soon after it was laid down, and long before Cobbett visited America. I do not know how this fragment came into Cobbett's possession, but according to my remembrance of what my father said on the subject, Cobbett brought it to Liverpool with Tom Paine's bones, which he had disinterred, and gave it to my father. This fragment I remember seeing in my father's library when I was a child, and it is now in my possession."
In addition to the sources mentioned in the "Personal Effects" chapter, information on Moncure Conway's final days in Paris can be found in Edward Walker's A Sketch and An Appreciation of Moncure Daniel Conway, Freethinker and Humanitarian (1908) and John Robertson's The Life Pilgrimage of Moncure Daniel Conway (1914). But perhaps the most charming eulogy on the man came right after his death from his old friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who by now was famous as Emily Dickinson's "preceptor." Recalling trips to the theater with Conway, he wrote: "He always chose seats by preference in the very highest gallery, where rough men sat with their hats on, eating sandwiches, among their wives and daughters, and affording, as he always maintained, the best source of appreciation for good acting."