February 25

1756




When my kids were growing up, because it was a fun way of filling up the emptiness of a long car journey, or a means of making that boring activity a visit to an art gallery or museum a little less boring, we played a game I had invented called "Spot The Derivative". Switch on Radio 3 and whatever happens to be playing is... they were both doing music at school, one learning violin, the other wind instruments, and both a little bit of piano, so the background was there. "Sounds like late Romantic" or "has to be Mozart" might even turn into, "no, I know that, one of my friends did it for her GCSE solo, that's Chopin." Or recognising the use of light in a Rembrandt because we had been to the Caravaggio exhibition the week before. Or my elder daughter, telephoning me one day in Toronto, because she was in Reading with her mum and Jane Austen was the next author on her A level syllabus. "I need something that will get me an A-grade dad, something different from the standard essay everybody's going to write." Which book, I asked her? "Sense and Sensibility".

So we talked about Charlotte Turner Smith and the "School of Sensibility", which gave Wordsworth and Coleridge their "Lyrical Ballads", but also Jane Austen her title (see Oct 28), and mentioned, because it would make a good footnote, that "Pride and Prejudice" was likewise "borrowed", from Dr Lyster in Fanny Burney's "Cecilia" (see June 13); and then I sent her off to do some research into Maria Edgeworth, probably the authoress who had the greatest impact on Jane (see Jan 1).

Three days later she called again, wanting more. So we talked about the play at the heart of "Mansfield Park", which Jane had basically "lifted" from Elizabeth Inchbald's "Lovers' Vows" (see Oct 15), and then about Elizabeth Inchbald, who made her stage-name in a production of the same play, though not in Jane Austen's production (ditto Oct 15).

But that was "Mansfield Park", and she was studying "Sense and Sensibility", and so we talked about Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Fowler her birthname, born somewhere around 1693, and on this page because she died today, in 1756: an actress to begin with - at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin around 1714, then in London from 1717 - but mostly a writer, very much of the hot passion genre in her novels, though intermingled, indeed closely coupled with social and political commentary (Alexander Pope detested her, and it was probably just envy of her skills); there were plays too, articles in periodicals, poetry, translations - she even became a publisher, founding and editing “The Female Spectator” (here and here) - and spot the derivative of that title!

But enough. As one who believes in autodidacticism, the importance of discovering knowledge for oneself, I recommended my daughter to the Jane Austen Society's website, which states unequivocally that

"Austen’s cyclical Eliza narratives in "Sense and Sensibility" owe a debt to the earlier highly patterned amatory plots of her predecessor Haywood, and each of Austen’s novels encodes and gestures towards the sort of seduction narratives that generated Haywood’s initial rise to fame."

Spot the derivative! You can read her full biography, and get the same A-grade that my daughter got, here.

Oh, and while you're pursuing the subject, you might want to look up the other two ladies in the picture at the top: left to right Fanny Burney, Eliza Haywood, Jane Collier, Jane Austen and Sarah Scott. Start here, which is where I found the picture.


 


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June 14

1829


Therese, or probably Theresa Heyne, known by her married name as Therese Huber, born in Göttingen on May 7 1764, daughter of the classical philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne; died in Augsburg on the night of June 14/15 1829. She was one of the so-called Universitätsmamsellen, five daughters of academics at Göttingen University who would probably have got professoress-ships themselves in today’s world, but... the others were Meta Forkel-Liebeskind, Caroline Schelling, Philippine Engelhard and Dorothea Schlözer: more on them here.

She became the first woman editor of a major literary journal - though she did so anonymously for many years, because women in Deutschland at that time were supposed to manage family homes, not newspapers - and wrote many novels in which the women sort of did but really didn't quite conform to the stereotype just described. Her obituary was written by no less a person than Wilhelm von Humboldt, so clearly her intellectual credentials were in tact.

But enough of bio (though if you insist on more, try here); what should matter to posterity is that she was one of the most prolific writers of late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany, publishing more than sixty stories, six novels, almost four thousand letters, and translating several works from French and English into German - all that in addition to her journalism. From 1816 to 1823 she edited the "popular" German newspaper, “Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände” (“Morning Daily for the Cultured Classes”), a paper whose title suggests that it probably wasn’t an equivalent of The Sun, The Mirror or The Mail, so “popular”, not “populist”.

Growing up in such an intellectual home, and with four such educated friends, was obviously an advantage, but getting the husband right can help too. Her first, named Georg, was the son of the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, and had travelled as his dad’s personal assistant on James Cook's second voyage around the world (1772–75) - that’s him on the left, with dad in New Zealand, the portrait viewable at Australia’s National Portrait Gallery, or online with more info about the importance of the work they did, here. Georg’s part-science part-travelogue account of the voyage of The Resolution sold more copies than any of Theresa’s. Apparently Theresa didn’t mind.

 And now I do need to return to biography, because, in 1801, she published a best-seller of her own, the first novel in world literature set in an Australian penal settlement. I wonder where she got her information? Entitled “Adventures on a Journey to New Holland”, it tells the story of people who got caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which is also a funny coincidence, because both she and Georg were such ardent supporters of the French Revolution, they had been forced to leave their home in Mainz for Neufchâtel in Switzerland in 1792, when it became clear that they would come under personal threat from Prussian troops advancing to free Mainz from the French army.

“Adventures on a Journey to New Holland” is unsurprisingly vague about Australia, relying as it did on Georg’s brief visit, and not having him him around any longer to add more from memory - he died in 1794. Nevertheless she produced a sequel, “The Lonely Deathbed”, in 1810.

But I have jumped ahead: she and Georg had left for Switzerland in 1792, and Georg, as noted, died two years later. With them had fled a close friend, a Saxon diplomat named Ludwig Ferdinand Huber. The couple married, but he had no source of income save a few savings, and so she needed to earn for the two of them from her writing. The novel “Die Familie Seldorf”, with the French Revolution as its central theme, occupied 1795 and 1796; but Huber died in 1804, and “The Lonely Deathbed” was rather more a matter of financial necessity than the extension of literary investigation. She is remembered today as Germany's first professional woman writer.

 

 

 

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March 7

1274 


The death of Tomás Aquino, mentioned in Canto 20 of Dante's "Purgatorio", where I discover from Longfellow's footnote 288 that:

"Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Schools, died at the convent of Fossa Nuova in the Campagna, being on his way to the Council of Lyons, in 1274. He is supposed to have been poisoned by his physician, at the instigation of Charles of Anjou."


Now that is definitely worth following up on some future occasion.




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March 14

1991


"The Birmingham Six", Hugh Callaghan, Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny,  William Power and John Walker, released from prison today; Chris Mullin, the journalist whose investigation of police corruption led to their release, is in the photo below (and at the link where I found it - click here. The full tale is told at the same link.




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March 20




 Einstein's "Theory of Relativity" published, today in 1916




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March 22

There are days in history which might well not have been, at least for those of us who record history on the universal, or even on the local scale.



The founding of the English Football League in 1888 is not going to gain my interest.

The release of The Beatles' first album "Please Please Me" in 1963 is even less likely.

The first movie screening by the Lumière brothers in 1895 could merit a quick google-surf, but maybe on another occasion.

As to the United States passing the Beer and Wine Revenue Act in 1933, I shall simply post a link to Dave Van Ronk singing Moonshiner (click here).

But apparently World Water Day is thirstily observed on this date in the calendar (but was skipped in 1903 at Niagara Falls, because - hard to imagine it I know, but true for all that - they temporarily ran out of water due to a drought). Click here

And in 1784 the Emerald Buddha was moved with great ceremony to its current location in Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand: moved from where, and why, and why to here, and why is this so important? I have no idea.


Apparently my next-door-neighbour's great-aunt died on this date in, I forget which year she told me, and I know for certain that this was the day, in 1994, when my cousin Jackie gave birth to her first child... so clearly this day does count as historic, at least for some people.






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March 24

Amber page




Southern African Liberation Day, and click here for one of the reasons why.


But it was also the day on which the PFA, the "Party of the African Federation" was established in West Africa, then ruled by the French, in 1959 - the achievement of poet-turned-politician Léopold Sédar Senghor, the same man who became the first head of state when Mali gained independence from France on June 20 1960.


The map shows the political geography of southern Africa in 1812, right at the start of European conquest.





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March 18

1871



The Paris Commune.

Not to be confused with the Paris Commune of 1789-1795, which was the official name of the Revolutionary government after the fall of the Bastille, and the reason why this uprising was named as it was. For the first version see, for example, Reine Audu on Oct 5.

The fall of this Paris Commune can be found, alas, on May 28; Trotsky's thoughts about it are on Aug 20.

Of the other keyplayers, André Léo can be found on June 17, but I am focusing here on three very remarkable women:


Adèle Paulina Mekarska, though she went by the nom de révolution of Paule Mink, or sometimes Minck. Thirty-two when the Franco-Prussian war ended in defeat and embarrassment, and the oppressed and starving workers of the capital decided that assez had become genug (she was born, of Polish descent but in France, on November 9 1839, and died on April 18 1901), she was already well-known as a revolutionary socialist and an even more revolutionary feminist, having joined André Léo's "Société pour la Revendication du Droit des Femmes" in the 1860s; her fame mostly from her published writings, on both themes: she had, for example, spent a year in Algeria, an official tour with an official title: "Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Clerical": so impactful was it on local Algerians, both "pied-noirs" and indigènes, that two Christian missionaries wrote their own book in dismay and consternation: "En zigzag du Maroc à Malte : à travers l'Algérie, la Tunisie et les états barbaresques : souvenirs d'Afrique External".


For more bio, and a detailed account of her role in the Paris Commune, click here (English) and-or here (French); a more scholarly-academic appraisal here, if you are able to access it


*


Louise Michel (1830-1905) known as “The Red Virgin”; an ideologue of anarchism (anarchism, not anarchy, those two are very different), she fought for the liberation of many other groups besides French women, including the indigenous Kanak people of New Caledonia (why them? see below) when they raised a revolution in hopes of independence from France, and for the Algerians in their similar cause later on.

The key positive date in her life was obviously today, which is why she is posted here. The key negative date was August 8 1873: imprisoned for twenty months for her part in the Commune, she was loaded onto the ship Virginie to begin a four-month sea-voyage to New Caledonia, where she remained until all those involved in the Commune were amnestied in 1880.

Returned to Paris, she resumed her commitment to a better world for those born without wealth or power, setting up her own newspaper, "La Vengeance Anarchiste", in March 1883, and then leading a demonstration of unemployed workers to demand jobs or at least social benefits. Arrested for doing so, this time she was sentenced to six years, all of it to be in solitary confinement to prevent her passing on her evil and wicked thoughts to others. When they let her out early, in 1886, she found the paper for whom she now wrote banned just weeks later, and herself arrested yet again - sent to an insane asylum this time, which quickly decided that she wasn't, and let her go. To England for five years, where she established a school that was much more about educating than about teaching; and then back to France, to die of pneumonia in Marseille on January 10 1905. And if you think of anarchists as solitaries and go-it-aloners who don't go in for crowds, you might be surprised to learn that her funeral in Paris was attended by more than 100,000 people.

I did once hear a French woman suggesting that the authorities were planning to rename Mont St Michel after her, but I think she was probably being ironic.


Her memoir “The Red Virgin” in translation here; bio here


*

And last, but really she ought to be first, Élisabeth Dmitrieff, principal organiser of the Paris Commune and a close friend of Karl Marx, who she knew in London, and who sent her to Paris as the official envoy of the International. Her birthname, on November 1 1850 in Saint-Petersburg, was Elizaveta Lukinichna Kusheleva; and her goal was rather more a Russian revolution than one anywhere else, but Russia wasn't ready, so she went under her nom-de-guerre to Paris, aged just twenty, and organised the women's involvement in the Paris Commune instead...

and I promise that I will write a full piece about her, but not today. In the meanwhile lots available online, of which I recommend this in particular, this especially, and this one just as much.

She died on February 23 1919 in Moscow.


*


Also in Amber:


Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, born today in 1893





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September 7

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Good Queen Bess, born today in 1533, at what was then Greenwich Palace, but most of it got demolished after the Civil War, and then rebuilt as the Old Royal Naval College, designed by Christopher Wren, around 1690; you can still see some of the Tudor remains in the cellars.


Brazil declared independence from Portugal, today in 1822


The first world heavyweight championship under Queensberry Rules took place today in 1892; apparently Gentleman Jim Corbett defeated John L Sullivan, though whether on points or by knock-out I have not taken the trouble to find out


The Peace of Peking, or Bei-Jing as we are now told to pronounce it, signed in 1901, bringing to an end that other heavyweight bout, the Boxer uprising


The "blitz" started, today in 1940

 

And finally, and this really will require further investigation, though it is unlikely to be verifiable: according to a calendar note in the BBC History magazine, “3466 bc: End of the Great Flood - according to the 19th century Leipzig philologist Gustav Seyffarth.”

Everything you could possibly be totally disinterested in about Seyffarth can be found here; for our subject, take him to be part of the same school that alma matered Gesenius and the Bible Critics.

But the subject here is the precise precision of that date, and you cannot deduce it in the solar calendar because it is computed biblically in the lunar, and times of that period are famously magnified.

Genesis 7:24 tells us “the waters prevailed upon the earth 150 days”, but gives no starting date. Archaeologists of Hittite Ararat, and mythological speculators like Robert Graves, have tried to demonstrate that the Flood story was simply a Creation myth, a means of explaining the laws of science before Physics, Chemistry and Biology had been invented; the flood analogising the breaking of the waters when a woman gives birth, the tale pseudo-historicising a full solar year from God first calling Noah to build the Ark until the setting of the rainbow in the sky. This would make a date around September logical, because the Jewish New Year falls at this time. But how does Seyffarth compute the 7th of September specifically? Perhaps Rosh ha-Shana fell on that date in the year that he made his calculations, and he did not realise that lunar dates perambulate across the solar calendar? And as to the year itself (I am ignoring the BBC's usage of "bc" instead of BCE) - 3446. This is achieved, I guess, by counting the ages of known men backwards from the date of Christ, a method equally as preposterous as the Jewish one of counting forwards from the date of Adam (which itself would anyway put the New Year five days out!)



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September 3

1752, 1658



Actually, there is no September 3 1752, not in British history anyway. "The Calendar (New Style) Act" of 1750 received royal approval in May 1751, and came into effect on Wednesday September 2 1752... but in order for the new calendar, the Gregorian, to concur with all the other countries of the world that had already adopted it – as with the Euro and so much else, the whole continent had made the switch a century ago, but Britain clung to the anachronism of its sovereign autonomy, until eventually it was obliged to give it up - it was necessary to reduce the year by eleven days, and so the day following September 2 was... September 14.

Until that time, and despite the efforts of Fra Roger Bacon both to explain the errors and to demonstrate their solution as long ago as the 13th century, the Christian world had stuck religiously to the Julian calendar, attributed to Julius Caesar but actually borrowed by him from the "New Egyptian" system: a 365 day year with a quadrennial leap year (see Feb 29). What Fra Bacon demonstrated ("Opus Majus", 1266) was that this depended on Earth rotating fully every 365 days and 6 hours; but it doesn't; it rotates every 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds, adding disparity by the tick and implication by the tock - more than 11 minutes every year, a whole day approximately every hundred years.

And in the Christian world, this mattered, because the Council of Nicea in 325 had fixed the date of Easter at the spring equinox; but by the late Middle Ages the rebirth of fertility at Oester (they spelled it that way back then, from the Greek oestrus, "egg") was slipping back into no-buds-yet still-winter, making something of a mockery of the Resurrection. Bacon's mathematics were accepted, but his suggestion that the calendar be adjusted by a single day every 125 years was rejected, because that still didn't solve the problem; nonetheless it provided a starting-point for the work of others (you can read the full tale in my novel "The Persian Fire - click here), and a new calendar was adopted during the papacy of Gregory XIII in 1582 - the reason for its eponym - achieved through the immediate loss of ten days in order to correct the slippage, and the introduction of an additional new leap day for centenary years, divisible by 400. The eleventh day in Britain reflected the further slippage over the 190 years before it finally stepped into line, and this despite eurosceptic mobs - poor souls deprived of that year's birthday party, or whose heroics might now not be commemorated - who flocked the streets, demanding “give us back our eleven days” (click here).




This blog is trying, desperately sometimes, to record the positives of history; but sometimes the negatives are of such significance that they cannot be ignored or overlooked. So, today, is Oliver Cromwell's day – and threefold: the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, of Worcester in 1651, of his death in 1658. Oliver Cromwell, that nauseating stinkpot of mediaeval political correctness, the founding patron of the New Model Army which still barricades our culture with its intellectual fascism, still pickets our brains, and still demands that the most narrow-minded of bigotry be declared an inalienable human right. The spiritual father of "Woke" and "Cancel". If you are looking for Oliver Cromwell on the Index to this blog, you won't find him; he is listed among the GERs.


Worse even than Henry Tudor's ransack of the monasteries, the zeal with which Cromwell's devotees gouged out the eyes of gargoyles and reduced the life of the spirit of Man to mere sackcloth and ashes. Cromwell who suppressed the Levellers, who shut down the theatres and the art workshops, who subdued Eireland, who prorogued the elected Parliament in favour of the Barebones Parliament, and when it failed to achieve its grandiose and vainglorious ambition – to establish World Puritanism, to build the Kingdom of the God of Uncreation, bible-black, morbid and morose, life-hating, a universal deity with his headquarters in Westminster – he threw out even the Barebones, and set himself up as the One and Only Ruler in their place. Lord Protector! Lovely euphemism that. Napoléon Buonaparte did the same to the French Revolution. Several African and South American dictators come to mind who regard themselves in the same light. 

There is – but only just – an argument in favour of Cromwell. That he did good things during his dictatorship. And so did Mao, Franco, Caucescu, Milosevich, Mussolini, and no doubt, if one looked hard enough, Stalin and Hitler too. It is not a defence however; only, at best, a mitigation; and even then only partial. That he reorganised, for example, the Church of England – except that he excluded Papists, Prelatists, and Anti-Trinitarians. That he established the United Kingdom – a boon for Englishmen, but a form of servitude for Gaels and Celts. That he enhanced the universities – with men of his own kind at the helm. And no doubt Jack the Ripper once helped an old lady across the street, and the Boston Strangler was notoriously kind to dogs.

As with all tyrants, his death nourished anarchy, because he left behind no other structure of government than edicts and sycophancy. And as to his legacy; what he destroyed is unrestorable. What he failed to destroy his disciples are still working at, the Ironsides of Political Correctness, the worshippers of his second epiphany, who has come in several would-be forms, the most recent obvious examples being Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump. In the bowels of Christ, let them recognise how far they are mistaken!

That's his funeral escutcheon, below





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1718




1976: Viking 2 (US) softlanded on Mars.
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