Perennial Anna

A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution - including Ronald Hutton (fangirling).

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And on subversive women: Archiving Bengal’s Revolutionary Women:

[M]any women participated in the revolutionary movement, taking on roles that challenged colonial authority and social norms. The militants who joined underground networks, manufactured explosives, and participated in acts of political violence, however, remain largely absent from both public memory and archival records. When they do appear in colonial documents, they are often framed through their relationships to men: as daughters, wives, or associates, rather than as political actors in their own right.

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More on grassroots activism: Travelling activists, Radical Hospitality, and the Intimate History of Socialist Organising in Britain, c. 1880-1914.

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Women in perhaps unexpected occupations (though I knew a little a bit about this since an old mate of mine did some research on the topic back in the 80s): Women in the Private Asylum Business in Nineteenth-Century England.

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This association is already fairly well-known but a nuanced set of arguments about the complexity of how it plays out: Inequality and health: Lost in the mists of time?:

Rather than behaving like a toxin that produces a sudden spike in mortality after a fixed incubation period, inequality is more like a fog that gradually seeps into bodies, relationships, and institutions over time.

What the information in one scroll recording an C18th Chancery suit opened up concerning George Orwell's ancestors (Jamaica connection).

Because when I read this, I had Further Questions.

London pub thief sold £2.2m Fabergé egg and watch set to buy drugs

I am going, hello?

Enzo Conticello, 29, took the Givenchy bag belonging to Rosie Dawson as she stood in the smoking area of the Dog and Duck pub in Soho, London, on 7 November 2024.
Inside the £1,600 bag was an emerald-encrusted Fabergé egg and watch set belonging to Dawson’s employers, the Craft Irish Whiskey Company.

went to the Dog and Duck pub in Soho. She was outside the premises in the designated smoking area, she put her handbag on the ground in between her legs, and a few minutes later she noticed her handbag was no longer there.

Dawson had the Fabergé items because she had taken them for display at a work event earlier that evening.

(Am trying to think of any circumstances in which, in former days, would have been taking precious unique archival and manuscript items out of the building in the first place. When we had them out on display for visiting groups, they got put away pronto.)

I probably read too much crime fiction, but this reads like 'set-up for heist/insurance scam that went pearshaped'.

So dr rdrz will be aware of my recent problems with printer, so I finally bit the bullet and after consulting Which Best Buys and so forth, went for an Epson Eco-Tank from John Lewis.

Which arrived at lunchtime today.

And I had anticipated spending hours if not days whining and stressing and beating my head on the ground and wrestling like until Jacob with the Angel to get the thing talking to my system and actually printing/scanning/copying.

Behold me sat sitting here having achieved getting it connected to the Wifi (the Wizard, though, is crap because it assumes that your password is a word rather than numeric, fortunately there was an alternative route), appearing under printers/scanners in my desktop computer settings, and copying, scanning, and printing.

There was a little hassle with printing which turned out to be due to Advanced Printer Settings turning out to have weird Paper Size as default rather than A4, which given that A4 is supposed to be their standard size, was bizarre.

This is positively uncanny, do admit.

What I read

Finished Never Had It So Good, and while I am less whelmed than I was on first reading it 50 years ago (aaarrgh), and consider that as panoramic social novel of provincial life, does not quite reach the level of South Riding, yet, that is the comparison one thinks of. I also mark up Mr Jones in contrast to The Angry Young Men who were his contemporaries over a whole range of issues.

Finished Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore, which was fascinating, and very readable, but has not somehow inspired me to rush off and do a re-read.

Then thought I should really read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017), for forthcoming in-person book group.

In hopes of a change from that - it's grim - read Marion Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close (Walsh Family, #5) (2012), a recent Kobo deal, which was itself not entirely the most cheerful read.

On the go

Amazon helpfully alerted me to Kindle-only publication of Alexis Hall, Never After, currently in progress, also not really bringing the delicious froth - opium-addicted Victorian rent-boy rescued from homelessness on the streets by clergyman (unexpected and unwanted 3rd son in aristo family, put him into the church) with his own backstory baggage.

Up next

There's a new Literary Review.

Also I had a mad binge on Kobo the other day, mostly Dick Francises which had come down to promotional prices, but I also finally succumbed to the most recent Edward St Aubyn which has been tempting me. The previous one was so much less gruesome than the Melrose sequence that perhaps this will be the change of pace I'm looking for?

Personally I suspect Blake Morrison has either not read terribly deeply in memoirs of the past, because I could probably without too much struggle come up with instances which were not at all about being 'a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers)', but one sees that this is a position he has to take up in order to make his case about Ye Moderne Confeshunal memoiring.

‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing

(Harriette Wilson would like a word, just saying, for starters.) (We can so imagine dear Harriette on social media, no?)

I'm not sure he's really got an argument there rather than some vague blathering about published memoirs vs social media and blogs, especially given the, er, thinness of his historical grounding (though in some cases past memoirists prudently arranged for the work to published posthumously).

And as for people being somewhat lax with the truthiness of their memoirs, how about this chap: The schoolteacher who spawned a Highland literary hoax:

The book’s author and narrator, Donald Cameron, describes his early life in Blarosnich, a remote hill farm in the Western Highlands in the 1930s and early 1940s. The book presents a Brigadoon-like spectacle of an agrarian community seemingly little touched by modernity, populated by pious women, elderly aristocrats and lusty farm lads.
....
Donald Cameron was, in fact, a pseudonym of Robert Harbinson Bryans, an itinerant bisexual schoolteacher turned travel writer who was born in Belfast in 1928 and died in London in 2005. Also known as Robin Bryans, his name is now largely forgotten apart from among students of plots and conspiratorial claims.

It's like the fact that anyone has studied it just gets erased from the record?

24 scientists contribute a preprint on Neuroanatomy of the clitoris:

The clitoris is one of the least studied organs of the human body. The detailed anatomy of the clitoris is challenging to address through a gross dissection, as most of its parts are embedded internally, surrounded by pubic bone and several pelvic organs.

O'Connell does feature in the citations, I see. Along with various other scientists who boldly went where no man....

Because one does rather want to enquire 'Least studied BY WHOM???'

Take it away, Lil Johnson:

I feel that this is sort-of related: Founder of ‘orgasmic meditation’ company gets nine years in prison in forced labor conspiracy" - a bit more on What the Hell is Orgasmic Meditation: What to know about the controversial practice of ‘orgasmic meditation’:

“One rule of thumb when exploring sex-positive spaces might be to ask: ‘Is someone getting rich from this?’” says Dr Anouchka Grose, a writer and psychoanalyst in London. “If the answer is yes, there’s a distinct possibility that money is more important to the organizer than your wellbeing.”

Because she is bringing us old bats into disrepute (we are more or less in the same age cohort), this is exactly the sort of thing that gets us dismissed, and it's quite clearly weaponised incompetence to get her son to run around buying stuff on the internet for her while she does not do due diligence over her headphones.
You be the judge: should my mum stop asking me to buy her new headphones?:

My son Henry is exaggerating terribly. I don’t lose headphones all the time. I simply put them away in different places and occasionally forget which place that was.
This happens to everyone, especially when you live in a house where things move about over time. I live on my own, in a large, eccentric home. I’m not a hoarder but I often forget where I put things. Henry will come over and find the headphones after I have lost them, and while I’m grateful to him for helping me find them and buying new ones, I could do without some of his lectures.
I’m 76; I don’t need to be told to “be more careful”. I just live my life how I want and sometimes I’m a bit scatty.

Mind you, also irksome is that thing when somebody prates on of 'in my day' and I think, not merely that I was there in that day and we had electric light and everything, they are, a little calculation suggests, actually somewhat younger and should not be going on like that.

This was something that flitted past me where someone was being driven bananas by her mother-in-law interfering with the baby and upsetting its routine and doing all those things annoying relatives do because they are not going to be kept up all night by agitated babby.... And there was sense that MiL was 'oh, these new-fangled notions' as if in her day it was Ye Wisdomme of Ye Village Cronez rather than paediatricians advising new mothers.

I will, as a historian of medicine, concede that ideas of How To Bring Up Baby have gone through changes, but suspect that 'if babby has got to sleep, let babby sleep in peace' has always been pretty central.

(I realise that there may yet come a time when in a miasmatic wasteland this crone of the tribe maunders on about the time in her day when they had vaccines and codliver oil....)