Giving your Possessions Away to Prove how Wealthy you are (or were)
This content has steered clear of unusual customs and leisure pursuits outside Western culture, lest it expand to something the size of War and Peace. But the Native American custom of Potlatch seems worthy of inclusion, because despite being a magnificently generous, selfless pursuit, it was deemed so dangerous to the new colonial economy that laws were passed to ban it outright.
Potlatch involved giving away and redistributing one’s possessions. Instead of one’s wealth being measured – as it is today – by how many material goods you own, how big your car is or indeed how many windows your house has (see Accusing Pretty Much Every Unusual Woman of being a Witch) the indigenous people of North America believed that it was more to do with how much you gave away, so your standing in society was measured by your generosity. While a beautiful idea, the implications for an economy based on accumulating loads of stuff were profound; it made a mockery of possession, made ideas such as competition completely meaningless – and not only did the white colonials think it was stupid, they saw it as a barrier to the locals becoming civilized, and handed out two-to-six-month jail sentences to dissuade them. Today, we still see over- generosity as a suspicious activity that might be worth reporting to the police, but some groups of Native Americans are trying to revive and preserve Potlatch as a utopian idea for the twnty-first-century.
Playing Absurdly Pointless Parlour Games Such as “Are you there Moriarty?”
If you added up all the time you spent in one year watching bad television, disappointing films, aimlessly browsing the Internet or playing endless games of solitaire on your PC, it would be a statistic capable of inducing a short-lived bout of depression. But all those activities look preferable to an evening of Victorian parlour games, which is what the upper-class Britons of the nineteenth century were forced to turn to when all books had been read, all topics of conversation exhausted, and days began to lapse into extreme tedium.
These were not frenetic diversions, they required little skill and precious little strategy. Many of them required the participants to be blindfolded before they stumbled around the living room attempting to find something or somebody; a classic of the genre was “Are You There Moriarty?”, where you would blindly attempt to hit each other with a rolled-up newspaper before wrenching off the blindfold and weeping bitterly in the corner about the meaninglessness of your existence. Never before or since has the pursuit of fun been so static and slightly self-conscious; today, we only resort to such games as a final act of desperation when the electricity has been cut off.
Hairstyles that didn’t really make much sense
The ability to style our hair is a wonderful gift, allowing us to improve our appearance with nothing more than a pair of scissors and the cost of hiring a trained professional . (That’s partly why it’s so heartbreaking for men when they start going thin on top; there’s only thing you can do with a bald head, and that’s to mournfully gaze at it.) But some of our forebears seized the opportunity presented by a thick, unruly mane of hair, and just, well, made things worse. Sure, there are always going to be hairstyles that we look back on and giggle at with either affection or derision: the 1920s Marcel wave, the Rod Stewart-style feather cut, the much-mocked (but still, for some reason, much-loved by East German men) catastrophe known as the mullet. But these are just styles ebbing in and out of fashion. More interesting are two overlapping strands of misguided hair design: 1) those that require so much preparation that several hours need to be set aside to get ready – hours that might be better spent learning Spanish or building a patio – and 2) those whose construction is so precarious that they’re destined to collapse the moment you leave the building.
The latter group are particularly tragic. We tend to assume that when we arrive somewhere, we’ll look roughly the same as we did the last time we looked in a mirror. But a hairstyle like the 1970s mohican only required some light drizzle to transform its hardcore punk aesthetic into an embarrassing pensioner’s comb-over. Any haircuts that attempt to defy gravity are similarly doomed by physics and chemistry – from the 1960s beehive, to the colossal, layered edifices of the 1980s which, by “getting as much air in there as possible”, tended to resemble gigantic meringues. Both could be demolished by inclement weather, or just one inconsiderate person who decided to reach out and touch it because they wondered what it felt like. Of course, one could attempt to offset the likelihood of hair collapse by applying copious quantities of “product”, and there lies another rich seam of unpleasantness – from the male wet-look achieved in the late nineteenth century by means of various animal fats, to the gels of the 1980s that cemented hair into stiff and incredibly untactile sculptures.
But in terms of putting inappropriate stuff into your hair, the Georgian era came up trumps. A bastardization of the pompadour saw hairstyles in the 1770s and 1780s compete for outrageousness by embedding objects such as birdcages, model boats and shrubbery, in constructions three feet high; popular styles included “the drowned chicken,” “the chest of drawers,” the mad dog” and “sportsman in the bush.” You became a walking exhibit, a talking point that could only be enhanced by hanging snakes from your midriff or strapping a fish tank to your back. Since then, we’ve sensibly toned down the act of accessorizing hair, although hair extensions have recently received the kind of enthusiasm that was never afforded to the wig, while the scrunchy – in essence a glorified, multicoloured elastic band – eventually ended up being denounced in the TV show Sex And The City as an international signifier of no style, sported by people who simply don’t know what to do with their hair.
But while we mock those who fuss unduly over their locks, there’s also absurdity at the other end of the spectrum – particularly those teenagers of the early 1990s who believed that “if you leave your hair for a few weeks, it starts to clean itself.” As many long-suffering partners, friends and relatives will testify, this plan is no more likely to work on your hair than it is in your kitchen. Thankfully, these days, most of us pitch our coiffure somewhere between these two extremes.
Going to Watch Freak Shows
It’s a terrible human trait, but we love looking at people who look weird. We can’t help ourselves. In these modern, reasonably enlightened times, we know it’s wrong and we feel guilty, but we’re compelled to stare anyway, marvelling at the appalling hand that nature can sometimes deal, and giving thanks that we emerged from embryogenesis comparatively unscathed. So it was only natural that enterprising individuals with access to two-headed babies, three-legged men and four-bearded ladies would attempt to make money out of this fondness for gawping, and in the nineteenth century we flocked to sideshows and dime museums to see “born freaks” (those whose afflictions were natural) and “made freaks” (who had chosen to tattoo themselves or push a bone through their nose in order to turn a quick buck).
It wasn’t until the twentieth century that disquiet about such dehumanizing spectacles began to be widely voiced, but by that point P T Barnum had made a mint out of exhibiting the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, midget General Tom Thumb, and William Johnson aka Zip the Pinhead, who was a perfectly intelligent man but was nevertheless encouraged to sit in a cage while rattling the bars and screaming. Those exhibited by Barnum didn’t do badly financially, but others ended up in low-grade travelling freak shows and endured endless abuse. You’d like to think that this kind of thing no longer happens, but cable TV channels still delight in presenting “sympathetic” documentaries of elderly twins joined at the spleen or cubic babies, knowing that we’ll grab the opportunity to slip into voyeuristic mode, secure in the knowledge that the subjects can’t stare back.
Believing that Magnetic Fluid Might be Coursing through your Body
Franz Mesmer, as a budding young physician in the mid-eighteenth century, decided to produce his doctoral dissertation on the effect that planets have on human health. With the benefit of hindsight, we could rewrite his di
ssertation using the words “none to speak of”, but Mesmer wasn’t to know that, and his rigorous scientific tests led him to believe that creating a “tide” within the body of a patient – by getting them to swallow an iron solution and attaching magnets to them – would somehow heal them of all diseases.
The patient in question miraculously recovered; Mesmer concluded that the magnets hadn’t caused this (correct!) but erroneously decided that it was magnetism within his own body that was affecting his patients, and that he had the capacity to heal people simply by performing “magnetic passes” across their body with his hands. Of course, this had no effect whatsoever, and despite his burgeoning fame, the failure of his experiments saw him leave Vienna under something of a cloud and relocate to Paris; but they didn’t work there, either, and he left France under a second cloud. His protégés, however, did make a crucial discovery: that the belief in a psychological treatment was crucial to its success, and helped lay the cornerstone of modern psychotherapy. But for some reason, many people still believe in the healing power of magnets, and spend untold sums on bracelets and trinkets that perform no function other than looking a bit shiny.
Selling Dangerous Levels of Addictive Drugs Under Sweet and Innocent-sounding Names
We tend to be wary of side-effects of prescribed medicines. Ideally, we’d like our complaint to be targeted precisely by a drug, such that it clears up with the minimum of associated drowsiness, cramps, shivering, memory loss or death. But in the nineteenth century, it was important for people to feel that the drug was having an immediate effect, and that need was fulfilled by a range of unsophisticated, somewhat bludgeoning syrups and linctuses whose heady combination of strong narcotics were enough to render people capable of little other than smiling and dribbling.
The manufacturers of these products knew that sticking “morphine” on the bottle might not have mothers rushing to give it to their families, so they called it “Children’s Comfort” instead. One ounce of “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup” contained 65mg of pure morphine; “Jayne’s Expectorant” was part opium; “One Day Cough Cure” combined opium with cannabis, while “Dr James’ Soothing Syrup” contained the highly active ingredient known as heroin. As far as we know, codeine was never marketed as “Ronald’s Relaxing Remedy” or chloroform as “Sleepy-Bye Snore Juice”, but it’s not outside the realms of possibility. By the early twentieth century, the American Medical Association led a clampdown on these “habit-forming nostrums”, and we largely stopped dosing ourselves into oblivion.
Hiring a Photographer to take Photos of you and the Corpse of your Recently Deceased Child
In the years since photography was invented, we’ve concluded that taking photographs of dead people is probably best left to pathologists, and that mounting such photographs in frames and popping them on the mantelpiece is likely to upset visitors. In the same way that we’re intrigued by deformity (see Going to Watch Freak Shows) we’re curious to look at images of the dead (you only have to see the popularity of gruesome websites such as rotten.com to realize that) but on the whole we’d rather not be reminded of our own mortality.
However, when photography was first emerging and starting to replace the painted portrait, a photo of the recently deceased was deemed to be an acceptable memento – so much so that the whole family might pose with the corpse; who’d normally be lying with his or her eyes closed, but would occasionally be posed as if still alive. (As if you’d really want to remember someone with a hollow-eyed, lifeless stare and their limbs positioned into a quizzical shrug.) The Victorians were so superstitious about death – they’d cover mirrors in the house of the deceased, unwind the clocks and bar pregnant women from attending funerals – that it’s slightly surprising that they’d stick a photograph of a corpse in their parlour along with a lock of hair. But they did – and in enough numbers for a whole museum in Illinois to be devoted to this single, bizarre branch of the art of photography.
Hoping to Bask in the Positive Medical Effects of Radioactivity
There are, sadly, still many horrific modern examples of medicines being used on human beings without adequate testing. But when Marie Curie discovered radium in 1898, the excitement surrounding its possible medicinal uses led to a surge in people eager to expose themselves to radioactivity as soon as possible. One of the crucial mistakes was made when scientists noted that many hot springs in health spas were mildly radioactive, and decided that it was probably the radioactivity that was causing the health benefits. So the water was bottled and sold as a miraculous new tonic; fortunately for those who bought it, by the time it reached the markets any radioactivity had dissipated. Unfortunately, the same scientists, realizing this, took steps to ensure that patients had a way of ingesting freshly radioactive water – which was, of course, deadly. One chap by the name of Eben Byers finally died in 1932 after drinking more than three bottles of “radiation water” per day, until his jaw fell off.
Most of the radioactive quack health cures such as uranium blankets and radium pendants were pretty benign, but as the twentieth century wore on and scientists closely involved in work on radioactivity began to drop dead (Marie Curie’s papers are still sealed in a lead box and deemed too radioactive to handle) we started labelling radioactive stuff with a bright yellow trefoil sign, rather than make a nice drink out of it and sip it during dinner.
Drinking Large Amounts of Gin without Being Sure of its Provenance
In the late seventeenth century, the English government hit upon a fantastic idea in order to boost the price of grain and encourage exports: deregulate the production of gin, and slap large duties on all spirits coming into the country. It didn’t take long for the English to develop something of a taste for this local brew, and by 1703 getting legless on copious quantities of gin was already being described as a “fad” – a polite way of saying that a drunken epidemic had seized the country, and one that makes the alcopop era (see Putting on a Velcro Suit and Hurling yourself at a Velcro Wall) look like an annual dinner dance at a local Presbyterian church.
Realizing that gin production was outstripping beer production by nearly six to one and was causing not only headaches and regret but also disease and death, the government attempted to introduce a law in 1736 to reduce the binge drinking, but by that point the English were so devoted to gin that they chose to riot. Of the fifteen thousand drinking shops in London at that time, half of them sold only gin, and by 1743 the country was drinking, on average, ten litres annually per head of population – although most of that was consumed by the poor, who were being palmed off with a cheeky, tangy mixture of gin, turpentine and sulphuric acid. By the time William Hogarth had painted his famous picture Gin Lane which featured a street full of people barely able to stand, the government were bringing in the Sale Of Spirits Act 1750, which finally had the effect of sobering everyone up a bit.
Attempting to Communicate with Someone Across a Crowded Room by Using a Fan
Wafting a fan backwards and forwards has been an effective method of cooling down the face for many centuries – and way easier than strapping an ice pack to your forehead or teleporting to Lapland. During the eighteenth century the design of fans became more ornate, with intricately decorated silk or parchment joined by ivory or tortoiseshell sticks, and were used by upper- class ladies not only to move air, but also as something to peek over coquettishly, to intrigue the kind of men who like the kind of women who hide behind a fan.
Fan manufacturers, imagining a burgeoning market of tongue-tied women keen to lure members of the opposite sex, decided to create the “language of the fan” in order to teach women how to communicate with men without talking to them. A closed fan touching the right eye was supposed to mean “When may I be allowed to see you?”, while threatening movements with a closed fan meant “do not be impatient”, and holding a fan over the left ear meant “I wish to get rid of you”. It was only ever a marketing ploy, however, and women who did attempt to deploy fan language would probably hav
e found themselves repeatedly stabbing their left knee in frustration with a broken fan, which of course meant “I sense that you don’t understand me, because you haven’t read the marketing blurb from the fan manufacturer”. But the myth that fan language was ever widely understood still persists today.
Wearing a Dress that Didn’t Allow you to Sit Down Properly
It’s difficult to sum up all the ways in which the huge crinoline dress was a less than brilliant idea. Not only did it give the wearer trouble when sitting down, doorways were as unnegotiable as if you were sitting on the back of a Shetland pony, or carrying a canoe sideways. While the skirts were unwieldy, the frame supporting them was very light, so a single gust of wind could transform a garment designed to hide one’s modesty into a free-for-all peep show, and while it may have been designed to conceal the bottoms of larger ladies, it did so by making everyone’s bottom look colossal.
This wasn’t a sudden burst of madness on the part of designers; there had been a predecessor of the crinoline called the farthingale, which similarly relied on a supporting structure to keep the shape of the dress – but it wasn’t until the influence of French fashion started to be felt across Europe from around 1810 that the diameter started to increase, peaking at around the six-foot mark. By the mid-nineteenth century, the so-called “rational dress” movement had begun to campaign for simpler attire that wasn’t so cumbersome and wasn’t so likely to drag you feet first into a nearby threshing machine; and by 1864 the crinolette was the new thing – a sober version of the crinoline that accentuated the bottom, but didn’t make you look like a gigantic toilet plunger.
The Next Big Thing Page 7