Yay! Easter! Chocolate, eggs, feasting, and fat, fuzzy, adorable little bunnies all over the place!
What’s not to love about Easter!?
This posting will look at the history of Easter. Crack open some chocolate eggs, and sink your teeth into its sweet, delicious history. Yes, it may be over. But haven’t you ever just…wondered?
The Origins of Easter
Contemporary sources will tell you that Easter is the religious festival representing the rebirth of Jesus. And that the eggs that everyone seems to love, represent the enormous boulder rolled away from the mouth of the cave which was Jesus’ tomb.
But if that be the case, where did the eggs come from? Why are they coloured? What’s with all the bunnies? And why is it called ‘Easter’ to begin with? Let’s find out together…
What’s in a Name?
The name “Easter”, comes from the ancient Germanic goddess, Eostre. Eostre, or in even older versions, “Austron“, was the Goddess of the Spring, and of Fertility and sunshine. Awwww! She was one of the several pagan gods and goddesses who made up the belief-systems in the lives of pre-Christian Europeans. As such, ‘Easter’ has less to do with resurrection and more to do with new birth, babies, sex, fertility and the new year.
When Christianity spread to Europe, Christians hijacked the Spring celebration of the Goddess Eostre, and changed it to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and “Easter”.
An 1884 engraving of the Pagan goddess “Eostre”, including an “Eostre Bunny”, on the right side of the picture!
This wasn’t a new thing. Christians were famous for it. Before Christmas showed up, it was called “Saturnalia”, and was the main Roman midwinter festival. The Christians changed that, too, and made it the birth of Christ. It was the only way they could convert people without upsetting them – changing pagan holidays into Christian ones.
What’s with the Eggs?
Eggs are the symbol of Easter because they symbolise birth and new life in each coming Spring. Eggs were also symbolic of the Christian period of Lent, when people were expected to give up, or go without certain foodstuffs. Eggs, since they did not keep for very long, were one of the foodstuffs a family would have to eat quickly before they went bad. And they would not be able to eat them again until after Lent. Since Easter and the end of Lent came close together, eggs, once forbidden, were now freely consumed, and became part of the traditions of Easter.
Decorating Easter Eggs has been a long tradition which stretches back centuries, into various cultures, from as far-afield as Russia, Europe, and even the Middle East, where it was popular in countries such as Iran. It’s believed that the Christian tradition of egg-decoration began in Iran, and spread westwards with the spread of Christianity.
Where does the Easter Bunny Come From?
Awww! Sweet, fat, cute, cuddly, fuzzy, bouncy, furry little bunnies! Hopping along delivering eggs and chocolates and toys to kiddies, in their cute little baskets! Ain’t it adorable?
But why do we have Easter Bunnies? Why not Easter Chickens? Chickens lay eggs. Rabbits don’t. So why rabbits?
Rabbits have become a symbol of Easter because Easter came from the traditional European celebrations of the coming of Spring, and the birth of the new year. As Bugs Bunny famously said: “If it’s one thing we rabbits can do, it’s multiply!”
Spring is all about fertility, new birth, babies, and youngsters coming into the world. And few species know more about fertility, or carry out this important activity more prolifically than bunny-rabbits!
Okay, maybe Star Trek tribbles. But I don’t think we’re going to see an Easter Tribble anytime soon.
It’s for this reason that rabbits have become synonymous with spring, and with Easter.
Easter Today
And so there you have it. The Christian notions and beliefs in Easter are only the latest version of this ancient holiday, whose meaning was changed to suit their needs. Historically it has nothing to do with Christianity, or Jesus, but has deeper, pre-Christian, Pagan roots, going back centuries. And the same goes for the eggs, and even the bunnies.
The world is full of traditions. Some nonsensical, some endearing, some fascinating, some laughable, some misunderstood, and some, lost in the mists and oceans of history and time.
The Language of Flowers is one such tradition.
Seriously? Flower Language?
Yeah, seriously. Flower language.
Properly called “Floriography“, the language of flowers was a Victorian-era method of secret, discreet communications. Almost completely forgotten today, it lingers on in a few, tiny pockets of popular culture to this day, over a century later. Why are roses supposed to be the symbol of love? What flowers do you buy when someone dies? What plant is used to symbolise remembrance?
These were all parts of Victorian-era floriography, a quirky little code which has been almost completely forgotten in the 21st century. This is its story.
The Roots of Flower Language
Floriography took root in 16th and 17th centuries. It started in Turkey, and slowly drifted westwards across Europe during the later part of the 1500s. In essence, Floriography proposed that each flower or plant had a special significance, meaning, or conveyed a certain message or emotion, and that combinations or specific varieties of these flowers meant different things.
Why?
You have to remember that back in Early Modern period, few people could read. Even with innovations like the printing-press, education and literacy remained the preserve of kings, nobles, and those lucky enough to hang onto their coat-tails. Creating symbolism for flowers was seen as a way for illiterate people, mostly women, to communicate with each other, through objects, rather than letters. And it was in Turkey that this system originated.
The Spread of the Flowers
Flower language was spread to Europe during the later 1500s and onwards, by European diplomats who visited the Near East. British and French ambassadors who traveled to Constantinople heard of this strange ‘flower language’, and recorded its nuances, before sending these observations back to Europe in the letters they wrote, and the diaries which they kept. By the Stuart era, flower-language had spread to England. It’s briefly mentioned in Shakespeare’s play, “Hamlet“, written in 1600.
Blooming Popularity
For a while, floriography was a bit of a fad. People thought it was cute and romantic and sweet, and of course, symbolic. But as the 1700s gave way to the 1800s, it evolved into something much more practical and meaningful.
The 1700s in Great Britain, the Georgian era (1714-1837) saw great loosening of morals. Whorehouses, gambling, vice, drinking, crime and almost everything else that you could imagine, went sky-high out of control. Georgian London saw such a huge crime-wave that it saw the establishment of the world’s first police-force in 1829. Today, it’s called Scotland Yard.
The result of this was that the Victorian era became infamous for its prudishness. Anything and anything that might be considered shocking, rude, offensive, and undesirable, suggestive or delicate in any way whatsoever, was to be covered up and never mentioned. Everything from piano-legs to trousers, to ladies’ ankles and even the sleeves on your shirt. Not for nothing are the Victorians remembered for being incredibly stuffy and notoriously straitlaced and ‘by-the-book’, on everything on etiquette, appearance, tradition and morality.
Enter into this starched and ironed world of the Victorians, the secret language of flowers.
Discussing certain matters in public, or even among friends and family, was strictly taboo. Especially matters concerning passion, love, sex, and affection.
Imagine if you couldn’t tell a lady, or a gentleman that you loved them? Such things as premarital sex, or even being left alone together without a chaperone, were strictly taboo in Victorian times. So, how were you to tell someone that you really were into them?
You sent them flowers. But not just any flowers. It was using flowers, using the secret language of floriography, that you could write them a love-letter, without uttering a word, leaving a shred of evidence, and without offending anyone.
It was for reasons such as this, that flower-language boomed during the Victorian era.
The Code of the Flowers
So, what are the actual meanings to the flowers? It would be impractical to list them all here, but here are the meanings behind some of the more common flowers…
IVY – Friendship, marriage, endurance. Commonly shared between married couples.
ROSE (red) – True love and affection. The most-commonly remembered remnant of floriography that survives to this day.
LILY – Purity.
ROSEMARY – Remembrance.
DAISY – Innocence, newborns.
During the 1800s, “flower dictionaries” were written, so that men and women could communicate secretly using flowers. However, flower-language was never really standardised, and not all flowers shared the same meanings. This can make researching the meanings of some flowers difficult, even back in the Victorian era!
Floriography eventually died out as the 20th century progressed. Apart from a few scraps and remnants here and there, it’s almost completely forgotten in contemporary society.
Meaning: Rough neighbourhood, usually full of homeless drunks. Origin: 19th Century, America.
Although probably not as commonly used today as it used to be, the term “Skid Row” still refers to a rough, tumble-down suburb, neighbourhood, or even just a street, where transients, drunks and the homeless reside.
The expression dates from the days when lumberjacks felled enormous trees using nothing but colossal axes, saws, and their own two hands. After a tree had been felled and de-branched, it would have to be transported. In the days before motorised vehicles, this was all done by hand. Because it’s not easy transporting a huge tree across open ground, especially when it’s wet, soggy and muddy, lumberjacks would team up and build a simple boardwalk out of smaller logs, on which they could slide, or ‘skid’ the huge tree-trunk along. Literally a “skid row”.
Lumberjack work was often seasonal and it wasn’t unknown for these men to be unemployed for a good part of the year, when trees couldn’t be felled (such as during winter). Pay was often low, so they didn’t have much of a chance to save up enough money to last them through the off-period. They would gather in rough, cheap-rent parts of town, which were named “Skid Rows” after the cheap, throwaway boardwalks which they constructed to transport trees.
By Hook or By Crook
Meaning: To attain something by any means possible. Origin: Medieval Europe.
Back in the days of feudalism, when peasants and serfs toiled day in, day out, just to survive, working their lordship’s land and living in simple wood and stone huts, a vast array of rules governed their lives. What they could eat, what they could hunt and trap, what and how much of a particular crop they could grow, how much of the harvest was taken as taxation, and what animals they could own and raise.
One of the rules was the one regarding firewood. As essential for life as oxygen, peasants required firewood for cooking, light and heat during the winter. To get firewood, they could either buy it off the landlord, or they would have to go and forage for it.
It was illegal to pick up dead wood off of forest floors. That wood was on the land, and the land belonged to the local landlord. However, peasants were allowed to take whatever wood and branches which they could retrieve from the trees on their lord’s estate. Since firewood was so essential, peasants would use whatever means they had at their disposal, to retrieve firewood…even using their reaper’s hooks or scythes, or their shepherd’s crooks…to reach into treetops and pull down whatever branches they could snag and break off the tree.
Hit the Hay & Make the Bed
Meaning: Go to Sleep. Origin: Medieval Europe.
Before the days of the modern mattress, people slept on crude pillows and cushions, stuffed with hay or straw, which they had to empty and change periodically. These cushions and pillows gave rise to mattresses which were stuffed with crushed hay or straw. Hence the term to ‘hit the hay‘, meaning to go to bed.
‘Making the Bed‘ goes back to medieval times, when the bed would have to be made up each evening before sleeping. This was a lot more than just neatening everything up before getting some shut-eye; it also meant tightening up the webbing (ropes) underneath the mattress, to prevent it from sagging through the wooden bedframe during the night (resulting in uncomfortable sleep). The phrase “Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!” comes from this, as well! To sleep tight literally meant tightening up the webbing, so that your mattress wouldn’t fall through the bed and dump you on the floor in the middle of the night!
Burn the Candle at Both Ends
Meaning: Waste and extravagance, hectic lifestyle or to be extremely busy. Origin: 18th Century England.
These days, to ‘burn the candle at both ends‘, is similar in meaning to the phrase ‘burning midnight oil‘. It suggests long hours, hard work, and staying up late to finish off working by candlelight or by the light of an oil-fired lamp.
While it may be today, it wasn’t, when this phrase was coined back in the 1700s.
Originally, to burn the candle at both ends meant to be wasteful and overly extravagant. This may seem silly to us today, but when a candle was your only source of light, it makes more sense.
It makes even more sense when you consider that every household in England needed candles, and that candles were heavily taxed! To save money, a householder would use only the smallest number of candles possible. To burn a candle at both ends (which could only be done when the candle was horizontal, or on an angle), produced more light, at the expense of wasted wax and candle-longevity. Only someone who could really afford the expense would ever bother to be so wasteful with his only source of light after dark.
In 1862, French writer, Victor Hugo, published one of his most famous novels. Along with “The Hunchback of Notre Dame“, the world-famous “Les Miserables” remains one of the most famous books ever written. It has been made into at least half a dozen films or TV series, a world-famous, globally successful musical theater production, and a musical film, released last year.
The novel’s title, (pronounced “Le’ Miser’abe“), translates into English as “The Miserable“. The book chronicles the seventeen-year struggle of French convict, Jean Valjean, jailed for stealing bread to feed his dying nephew. His original sentence is five years, but his sentence is extended over and over due to repeated attempts to escape, until he eventually spends nineteen years in chains, finally gaining his freedom, of a sorts, in 1815, the year that Napoleon is defeated at Waterloo.
“Les Miserables” was written over a century and a half ago, and many of the cultural references are lost to history. This posting will look at the various historical events and persons mentioned in the novel, the films, and the play, so that the overall story of the book can be better understood.
“Toulon, 1815”
The Bagne of Toulon
The story opens in 1815. Jean Valjean, convict #24601, has been imprisoned at Toulon, in France, since his arrest for theft in 1796. But what is Toulon, and where is it?
‘Toulon’ itself, is a city, located in southeastern France, on the Mediterranean coastline. The ‘Toulon’ of the story is actually the Bagne of Toulon.
The Bagne of Toulon (1748-1873) was an enormous, and infamous French prison.
Previously, Frenchmen who had been convicted of crimes had been drafted into the French navy. They were used as rowers to power the enormous French naval galleys. When galleys became obsolete, to be replaced by wind-powered sailing-ships, all the prisoners who were once sent to sea were instead sent to the Bagne of Toulon, where they were sentenced to years of hard labour.
Toulon was also a naval base and harbour during this time. The prisoners sent to the Bagne of Toulon were made to serve their sentences doing hard labour, carrying out tasks such as digging foundations for buildings, splitting stones, building fortifications and other structures, and to operate the machinery and treadmills and wheels which ran the rope-making factory nearby. Prisoners were branded with letters that showed the extent of their imprisonment at Toulon. They were either branded as having to serve hard labour (for a specific number of years), or were branded as having to serve hard labour for life, which of course meant that they would most likely die in prison.
The Yellow Passport
When he’s granted parole, Jean Valjean is forced to carry around his parole-documents, comprised of identification information and a passport, printed on yellow paper. The paper is colour-coded so that anyone who looks at it knows at once that he is a convict on parole, and a dangerous man (even though all he did was steal a loaf of bread for his nephew). The paper makes it impossible for Valjean to find work, food, or even a bed for the night, as he tries to make his way to his parole-officer where his papers are to be checked.
The yellow French passport shouldn’t be confused with the yellow card mentioned in the book “Crime and Punishment”, which serves a different purpose. During the time of imperial Russia, to prove that they had the right to practice their profession, prostitutes had to carry around a yellow I.D. card, to show that they were prostituting themselves legally, and had a license that allowed this.
The Bishop of Digne
Although the good Bishop Myriel is a fictional character, the town of Digne (“Deen”) is not. In the early 21st century, the town enjoys a population of some 17,000-odd people. In the 1820s at the time of ‘Les Miserables‘, its population was a much smaller 3,500 people.
“Montreuil, 1823”
Fantine Sells Her Hair and Teeth
After being kicked out of Valjean’s factory by the foreman, the young woman named Fantine is forced to sell her hair, and even her teeth, to survive, and to send money to the innkeeper who houses her daughter, Cosette.
Selling hair was a common practice among the people who were down on their luck during the 19th century. Hair was used in wigmaking, hair-jewellery (where it would be braided into ropes and bracelets), and even in dollmaking. Hair was laboriously inserted into the heads of dolls using needles and tweezers, a few strands a a time. Excess hair was used to stuff the insides of dolls and fill out their forms!
Although hair might grow back, and its loss would only be temporary, Fantine goes so far as to even sell her teeth! And yes, you could sell your teeth…if you were really desperate.
Dentistry during this time was crude, and people often had their rotten teeth yanked out by the dentist, the barber, the doctor, or even the village blacksmith with a pair of his smithing-tongs!
To replace missing teeth, it was necessary to manufacture replacements. Dentures and such other dental add-ons were variously made of everything from metal (if there was just one or two teeth missing, you might get them replaced with gold!), wood, bone, and ivory! Sometimes, animal teeth were used to manufacture replacement dentures.
During the time of Les Miserables, replacement teeth were even taken from dead bodies! Especially, during those years, from the bodies of dead soldiers! “Waterloo Teeth”, literally from the bodies of dead soldiers killed during the final battle of Waterloo, were especially common. After all…lots of dead, healthy young men with nice, white teeth…and lots of people living, who want them. Why waste them? Surgeons, barbers and anyone else out to make a quick franc, went through the battlefield with a jar and a pair of pliers, yanking teeth out of corpses to sell them to denture-manufacturers!
But apart from all these avenues of dental delivery, you could still sell your own teeth, if you were brave enough to have them ripped out of your mouth without anesthetics! But you would have to really need the money, and be really desperate to do this!
“Paris, 1832”
By the 1830s, Jean Valjean has fled the town where he held a factory and the office of mayor. He has become Cosette’s guardian and father-figure, and he lives as a wealthy gentleman of means, but with a private life which he does his best to keep from his adopted daughter.
Jean Valjean
Although Valjean is fictional, the author, Victor Hugo, almost certainly based him on the real-life convict Eugene Francois Vidocq. Vidocq (1775-1857) is one of the most famous figures in the history, both of crime, and of criminal investigation.
Vidocq’s childhood was spent during the crumbling days of the French monarchy. As a boy, he was wild and untamed. To get money, he stole the family silverware and sold it. He was arrested and thrown in prison. The arrest was orchestrated by Vidocq’s own father, who had hoped that this spell behind bars might scare his son straight.
As a young man, Vidocq enlisted in the army and fought during the French revolutionary war. Between 1795-1800, Vidocq spent his life in and out of various French prisons, disguising, escaping, running, and being recaptured over and over again. Eventually, he was sent to the infamous Bagne of Toulon, just like his fictional counterpart, Valjean.
In 1800, Vidocq escaped from Toulon and went on the run. He hid at his mother’s house, but before long, the authorities caught up with him once again, and he was arrested…again. And he escaped…again.
Sick of running around, Vidocq attempted to create a new life for himself as a merchant, but his extensive criminal past made this impossible, with everyone knowing who he was, what he had done and his enemies around him everywhere. In 1809, he was arrested…AGAIN.
Finally fed up, Vidocq approached French criminal authorities and offered them a deal. His freedom in exchange for information on other criminals. The police liked the idea, but not enough to let him just run wild. He would be imprisoned again, but this time, he would have more freedom within the prison to spy on inmates and report their goings-on to the guards and police-officials. He proved to be a capable spy, and eventually, Jean Henry, the chief of the Paris Police, agreed to Vidocq’s formal release from prison.
So that it didn’t look like Vidocq was being given favourable treatment, which might tip off other inmates about his spying activities, Henry arranged for the release to look like another one of Vidocq’s famous escapes. Now outside of prison for the last time, Vidocq became a secret agent for the Paris police-force.
Originally, Vidocq was part of the newly-formed “Security Brigade”, of the Paris police-force in 1811. This organisation of detectives and secret-agents was originally just an experiment. Nobody knew if it would really work. But Vidocq’s long life as a criminal meant that he was able to get into minds of the criminal classes and solve crimes in ways that other police officers could not. The brigade was so successful that in 1813, the brigade was formed into its own formal organisation, the French “Surete Nationale“. ‘Surete’ means ‘Surety’, as in ‘assurance’, or ‘security’. Literally, the National Security Force, or in more plain language, the French State Police.
The agents of the Surete Nationale were small in number; even by 1824, the agency had only 28 members. But each agent was trained by Vidocq in criminal detection. How to disguise oneself, how to think ‘outside the box’, and see things from a criminal perspective. The agency also kept a roll of spies and informants who would infiltrate French criminal organisations.
Through the turbulent changes of French history during this time, Vidocq’s roles and his influence on French government officials wavered constantly. Once more, Vidocq spent his life in and out of prison, mostly because he was branded as an enemy of the state for various reasons. But by now, Vidocq’s new position and fame meant that he had powerful friends. Thanks to a little string-pulling, Vidocq never spent more than a few months in prison at any one time.
In 1843, Vidocq was once again thrown in prison. Even though his prominent friends managed to get retrials and shorter sentences for him, when Vidocq was released from prison a year later, his reputation had been destroyed.
Vidocq became something of a recluse, and in 1849, was imprisoned yet again, for eleven months. When he was released, he lived the rest of his life in general seclusion. His career as a detective was not what it once was, although he did occasionally take on cases, to earn himself extra money.
Vidocq died in 1857, at the age of 82, after surviving a bout of cholera.
Despite his shaky life, Vidocq is famous today as being the father of modern criminology. He was the first person to use techniques such as undercover agents, plaster-casts and moulds, and even very early ballistics, to solve crimes. He even developed the science of criminology, and early crime-scene investigation to aid in the solving of crimes and the gathering of clues and evidence, techniques that most police-forces wouldn’t use until the late 1800s.
Since 1990, the Vidocq Society, named after him, has been solving cases presented to them by various police forces. The Society is an elite club of criminologists who assist police in solving ‘cold case’ homicides which regular police-forces are unable to solve.
Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the U.S.A., the Vidocq Society is comprised of experts ranging from criminologists, FBI agents, scientists, coroners, psychologists and homicide detectives.
Members can be currently-serving professionals, or former, and retired professionals, but membership of this exclusive crime-solving club is strictly by invitation only, and membership is limited to only 82 members (the number of years in Vidocq’s life) at any one time.
The Society does not go out looking for work. It only solves cases which police-forces bring to them for review, and even then, they’ll only work on the hardest and most challenging of cases which meet a strict set of criteria.
It’s been suggested by articles on the internet that Eugene Vidocq was Hugo’s inspiration, not only of the character of Jean Valjean, but also of Inspector Javert. Vidocq’s troubled youth and repentance is represented by Valjean’s character, whereas Javert represents Vidocq’s later life as a relentless law-enforcement officer who will go to any lengths to see that justice is done.
General LaMarque
During the second half of the play, the members of the student rebellion mention ‘General LaMarque’ as the last living champion of the oppressed and poor people of Paris.
LaMarque was a real person, and his death in 1832, really did spark a rebellion in the streets!
‘General LaMarque’ is Jean Maximillien LaMarque, (1770-1832). A famous revolutionary war army officer, LaMarque was famous for his republican views. He opposed the French monarchy and complained that the royalist government did not see to the needs and wants of ordinary French citizens. It trampled human rights, and did not support political liberty of the people.
LaMarque became ill in 1832, contracting cholera. He died on the 1st of June, 1832. Within a week, riots had erupted in the streets of Paris. The champion of the people was dead!
The June Rebellion, 1832
There really was a June Rebellion in 1832 Paris, although it did not involve an organisation called the Friends of the A.B.C. (which was a fictional group created by Hugo for the story). The Friends of the A.B.C., (in French, “Les Amis de l’ABC“) is actually a pun. In French, ‘A.B.C.’ is a homophone for the French word “Abaisse” (“The Oppressed”), so literally, “The Friends of the Oppressed”.
It’s a joke about the fact that the rebellion was sparked mostly by students and schoolboys, youngsters still learning how to read and write their A.B.C.s, and the fact that they were trying to win rights for the downtrodden citizens of Paris, the abaisse, or ‘oppressed’.
The Rebellion was short-lived. It lasted only three days! It started on the 5th of June, 1832, during the funeral procession for the late, great General LaMarque.
Spurred on by the waving of red and black flags (such as those mentioned in the musical), students began rioting and chanting.
The famous Marquis de Lafayette, the famous French aristocratic army-officer who had helped the Americans win their Revolutionary War back in the 1780s, attempted to calm the riot. He was one of General LaMarque’s many supporters and fans, but even the marquis’ presence and calls for calm did not help. The marquis was an old man by then (over seventy!) and close to death himself, but that didn’t stop him from trying to quell the violence.
The Barricades
Government soldiers moved into Paris, attempting to crush the rebellion, and the students and their supporters fell back to their barricaded strongholds.
The rebellion lasted from the 5th of June, the date of General LaMarque’s funeral, to the 7th of June. During that time, fierce gun-battles raged across Paris, and at several intersections and streets, government soldiers opened fire on the rebels, and the rebels only fired back!
But the rebels were never going to win. Outnumbered literally 10-to-1, before long, they were forced to put down their arms and surrender.
Victor Hugo himself was involved in the rebellion. To be precise, he was caught in the crossfire between government troops and rebellious Parisian citizens, and had to take cover in the street.
I thought France was a Republic?
France has gone through many revolutions and rebellions, and the June Rebellion of 1832 was just one of many, many, MANY such events in French history.
From the 1400s until the 1780s, France was a kingdom. In 1789, the French Revolution (the famous one that everyone knows, with the guillotine and the storming of the Bastille and all that) took place.
In 1791, the monarchy was restored as a constitutional monarchy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this monarchy was not popular. It only lasted a couple of years.
From 1792 until 1804, France was a republic. For a decade between 1805-1815, France entered the period of the “First Empire”, which centered around the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. It ended with Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the 1810s.
With the defeat of Napoleon, the House of Bourbon, which had ruled France up until the 1780s, returned to power in the Bourbon Restoration. This lasts from 1815 until 1830.
In 1830, yet another revolution changes everything, and we have the July Monarchy (so-called because it was established in July of 1830), a constitutional monarchy, much like the one of the 1790s. The king on the throne of France is Louis-Philippe I, cousin to the abdicated King Charles X.
It is Louis-Philippe who is the king of France in the 1832, when the June Rebellion mentioned in Les Miserables takes place. But even this monarchy wouldn’t last. It would be overthrown in 1848, to be replaced by the Second Republic, which would be replaced by the Second Empire, which would be replaced by the THIRD Republic, which would last until the Fall of France during the Second World War.
Right now, France is on Republic #5.
And there you have it. A little glimpse at just some of the historical realities behind one of the most famous novels, plays, musicals and films in the history of western literature.
Today, people with severe vision-loss are able to read the texts of popular novels, famous classics, fascinating educational books and great songs, purely by running their fingers over sheets of paper filled with lines of embossed dots or bumps.
This system, called ‘Braille’, has existed for nearly two hundred years. Although it’s taken for granted today, the story of its creation is one of perseverance ingenuity, skill and bravery against incredible odds. Its story is the story of its creator, the young boy who helped the blind to read: Louis Braille.
This posting will examine how Braille created his system of writing for the blind, and all the struggles that he encountered along the way.
The World Before Braille
Losing one’s eyesight, or to be born without it, is one of mankind’s greatest fears. So much of our world relies on vision. In the world before Braille existed, blind people were ostricised by their communities. It was very difficult finding work for blind people.
They could only do things with their hands, and even then, only limited things. Making shoes, making baskets, weaving and brush-making, all, admittedly, rather low-paying jobs. And because blind people could not read or write, they could not communicate as effectively with other people. These restrictions made life for the blind extremely difficult. To say nothing about the lack of support-services. Charity was little, and specialist institutions nonexistent. The blind were left literally groping around in the dark with nobody to guide them.
Who Was Louis Braille?
The tragedy and innovation, the skill and determination of Louis Braille is one of the most famous and touching stories in the history of the world. It involved battling against incredible odds and the acceptance of limitations. This is the story of Louis Braille and his writing-system.
Louis Braille was born in the small village of Coupvrey (pronounced “Koop-vrey”), a few miles east of Paris, France, on the 4th of January, 1809. He was the youngest of four children born to Simon-Rene, and Monique Braille. His three older siblings included two sisters (Monique Catherine, and Marie Celine, born 1793 and 1797 respectively), and one older brother, Louis-Simon, born 1795. Young Louis was his father’s favourite child.
Louis Braille’s family was not particularly rich, but they weren’t poor, either. Monsieur Braille made a living as a saddler, a manufacturer of leathergoods for horses (specifically saddles, belts and harnesses). He made a tidy living and provided comfortably for his family.
Louis Braille had the habit of following his father into his workshop. Leather-working was dangerous stuff. Sharp knives and needles were required to cut, sew and puncture leather to make it into the products which Louis’s father sold around town. In a classic case of workplace negligence, Mr. Braille left his son working on a belt. Now all belts need belt-holes for the buckle to slip through. Young Louis picked up an awl (a long, sharp spike) to punch a hole into the leather strap of the belt. The spike slipped across the smooth surface of the belt, piercing Louis’s right eye.
The local physician was called for at once, and the wound was bandaged, but the infection could not be treated. Within weeks, Louis had become infected in both eyes, and by the age of five, had become completely blind, despite his parents taking him to every doctor, surgeon and specialist that they could think of!
Despite his disability, Louis’s parents raised their blind son no differently than any of their other children, although they did have to make a few changes. Mr. Braille carved out staffs and canes for Louis to use, so that he could tap his way around town, much like how a modern white cane is used. The boy was found to be singularly intelligent, and many of the village elders believed that despite his blindness, young Louis showed promise of being a scholar.
Louis’s parents were unsure about how to fulfill these wishes. The village schoolmasters and priests had told them that their son could flourish under proper tutelage, which they, unfortunately, could not provide. But there was hope, in the shape of a new institution in operation in Paris.
The National Institute for Blind Youth was established in Paris just a few decades before, in 1784. To be honest, it wasn’t much of an institute. There wasn’t much money, and the facilities were rather basic, but it was, nonetheless, a specialist school for the blind – the first ever to exist in the history of the world. And for a humble family such as the Brailles, most importantly…it was free!
The National Institute for Blind Youth
By the age of 10, it was decided that Louis could no longer remain in his hometown of Coupvrey. The educational facilities there simply weren’t suited to a child who couldn’t see to read, or write, or to do much else. So Louis’s parents arranged for him to attend the institute in Paris.
The Institute was operated by a man named Valentin Hauy. Hauy came from a prominent French family. He was a philanthropist, and his brother was a pioneering mineralogist, that is, a geologist who devotes his time to the study of minerals.
Hauy himself was not blind, but he felt moved to set up the institute to provide assistance to the blind. Here, blind students could mix and mingle with their own kind, they could feel safe, supported and loved. Most people didn’t know how to handle things like this, and so mostly, blind people were left to fend for themselves. But Hauy was determined to try. He even developed a method for blind people to read!
The Hauy Method of blind reading involved embossing letters from the alphabet onto thick paper, so that blind students could run their fingers across them and feel out the letters, and read the words printed in front of them. This was revolutionary, but extremely ineffective.
To begin with, you needed very thick paper, so that the copper wires doing the embossing wouldn’t rip it to pieces.
Secondly, the letters had to be supersized, so that the students could feel them with their hands. This made the books extremely large, and heavy.
And thirdly, the method used to make these books and documents was tricky. And they couldn’t be manufactured easily. In fact, they were so difficult to produce that when the school opened in 1784, there were only THREE books in the entire institute!
Apart from the lack of books, and despite the teachers’ best efforts, there were few other ways for the students to learn. Going outside into the streets of Paris for excursions was done only occasionally, with the schoolboys all holding onto a length of rope held by one of the schoolmasters. They became known as the “rope gang” because of it.
Despite all of Hauy’s good intentions, several of his students disliked the books. They were difficult to buy, difficult to read, difficult to carry around and there just weren’t enough of them! Louis Braille was one of the students who complained about their significant and several drawbacks, and pointed out that the books were designed to let blind students read the text of the sighted. What Louis decided they needed was blind text, written by blind people, which blind people could understand!
The Development of the Braille System
At the age of just 12, Braille was already forming his new method of blind writing. The story goes that he was inspired by a story in a newspaper which was read to him by a friend.
The story focused on an invention created by French army-captain, Charles Barbier le Sarre. Realising the importance for codes in transporting vital, but secret information, Barbier created a system of communications that didn’t rely on letters at all, but rather, on embossed dots and dashes, arranged on a sheet of paper. Because this type of code could be felt by the fingers and read perfectly easily, even in the dark, he called his invention “Night Writing”.
Realising the potential for his invention to help the blind, Barbier arranged a visit to the Institute for Blind Youth to tell them about his idea.
Braille was fascinated by this development, but the only problem was that Barbier’s system of writing was far too complicated! It would take ages to reproduce and just wasn’t practical. To begin with, it worked on phonetics, not on the alphabet. The bumps and ridges didn’t represent letters, they represented sounds! This made it difficult for students to read the texts, because it took so many more bumps to create a sound than it did to create a single letter.
Young Louie Braille was sure that this system of “night writing” could be of use to the blind, but it had to be improved and simplified before it could work!
By cutting out all the unnecessary bumps, ridges and dots in Barbier’s system, Braille was able to produce a “prototype” alphabet as early as 1824, when he was just fifteen! Using the same, thick paper that Barbier used, Braille punched out the dots in the paper using a leather-worker’s awl, the very same tool which had blinded him over a decade before!
Barbier, an aristocratic army-officer, was insulted that a mere child should think that his MARVELLOUS INVENTION!!…Should require “improvement” or “simplification”! And from a blind person, too! He was so outraged that he left the school!
But the seeds for Braille’s new system of writing were sown, and he began to work on his own form of embossed writing.
While some of the schoolmasters and directors were impressed by young Braille’s ingenuity and creativity, other teachers, like Barbier, felt insulted. Not because a child had dared to challenge the skills of an adult, but because a system of writing accessible only to the blind would mean that sighted people couldn’t read it. And if they couldn’t read it, then they wouldn’t understand it! It was many years before Braille’s system of writing would be adopted in the school, and not after a LOT of protest from both the teachers, and the students.
The beauty of the Braille system, vs. the Barbier system was that Braille’s was so much simpler. With just six dots instead of up to twelve dots, a blind person could feel everything under the tip of one finger, instead of having to stroke the page constantly, to make sure that they hadn’t left anything out. The six-dot layout of the Braille system meant that there was a total of up to 64 dot-combinations. More than enough combinations to represent the 26 letters of the alphabet, and all necessary punctuation-marks. Simple, and effective.
Blind Music
Braille was not only academically intelligent, he was also very fond of music. Since music is largely tactile in nature, there’s no need to see the instrument you’re playing, you just need to know where your fingers are, and where they have to go to produce the correct notes.
However, it still meant that blind people were incapable of reading sheet-music. To fix this, Braille also developed an entire musical system for blind musicians, based on his system of raised dots.
Adoption of the Braille System
Adoption of this new system of writing was slow. Even when Braille became a teacher at the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, the school still relied on older, less effective methods of communication.
The teachers at the Institute were unwilling to uproot everything that they had done, and change it for an entirely new system. In fact, when the institute’s history-teacher reproduced a history textbook all in Braille (using a newly-invented Braille typewriter), he was fired from his position!
Braille himself became increasingly ill and by his 40s, he was compelled to resign from the school due to increasingly poor health. It was strongly suspected that he was beginning to suffer from consumption (more commonly known today as tuberculosis).
Braille died in Paris in 1852, just two days after his 43rd birthday.
The Spread of Braille
Braille spread slowly at first. The first hurdle to fall was the National Institute for Blind Youth. Fed up with the teachers’ banning of Braille’s new system, the students insisted that they would stop attending school if the more effective Braille system did not replace the older and less effective Hauy systems. Eventually the schoolmasters had to back down and Braille’s system was finally introduced in 1854, two years after Braille died.
And yet, the school which had fostered the system’s creation was actually not the first to use it! Embarrassingly, it was actually the second! The Institute for the Blind in the Netherlands started using Braille’s system as early as 1846!
Throughout the 19th century, Braille became more and more widespread. By the 1870s, it was being recognised as being superior to other methods of blind communications. By the 1880s, it was being used in almost all respected schools for the blind. By the 1910s, it was being used in all blind schools in America. And by the 1930s, a universal Braille Code for the English language was developed and adopted, worldwide.
Writing Braille
In Braille’s day, he wrote out his texts using a stylus, a wooden frame, and a special line-guide to produce his dot-writing. Today, the blind use something a bit more advanced than that. Although today there are even braille laptops and computers, for many, the mainstay of writing braille is by using this machine:
Developed in the 1950s, the Perkins Brailler has been used to type out braille for over fifty years. Essentially, it’s a braille typewriter. It has a carrying-handle, carriage return-lever, even a bell that rings at the end of each line. Along with the Perkins Brailler, there is also the more modern “Mountbatten” Brailler, named after Lord Louis Mountbatten, who left a bequest in his will, for the development of a braille typing-machine. The Mountbatten Brailler came out in 1991.
“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits!”
– George Carlin.
In 1972, the late, and great, standup comedian George Dennis Carlin (who sadly departed this world at the age of 71, back in 2008…you will be missed!), broke new ground in the world of publicly-broadcast profanities.
His famous routine, “Seven Words you can *NEVER* Say on Television” was so controversial that it landed him in court! Carlin won when it was determined that his profane rant did not breech his right to freedom of speech under the Constitution of the United States of America. It was such a landmark case that it was taught in American schools, something that Carlin himself acknowledged in an interview shortly before his death.
Swearing is as much a part of life as flowers, bees and crying babies. Swearing is relaxing, stress-relieving, fun, controversial, dangerous, impolite, comedic, condemned…and has a long and varied history, as colourful as the language itself. Come on…You’ve always wanted to know the histories of these particular words. Admit it! Now go ahead…read them. You know you want to…
A History of the Profane
If the message-boards on IMDB* are anything to go by, a large percentage of people firmly believe that swearing was not invented prior to the 1900s, and that prior to the dawn of the 20th Century, everyone was courteous, clean-mouthed and contented.
Wrong!
Swearing has a history that, like all facets of language, goes back centuries. In the case of swearing, as far back as language itself. It would be almost impossible to pinpoint when swearing itself started, but the words themselves can be dated or broken down with surprising accuracy. So lock the door and earmuff the parrot, wrap the kids’ mouths up with duct-tape and make sure granny isn’t dropping by with a tray of homemade cookies anytime soon…
The first swear-words were likely linked to religion. In the Medieval world, religion was the center of everyone’s lives. To say something bad about the Church could get you in hot water (literally, if you weren’t careful!), so profanities (that is, swear-words with religious attachments) were only uttered when the user was particularly vexed. Among these were…
Damn
This word is used as frequently in speech as salt and pepper are used in seasoning your food. Damn, and it’s variations, comes from the Latin word ‘Damnum‘, which meant, variously ‘Cost’, ‘Penalty’, or ‘Fine’ (as in a fine to be paid). It is related closely to the more likely Latin word: ‘Damnare‘, which means ‘to judge‘, from which we get the English word ‘Condemn‘. So ‘the condemned’ literally means ‘the judged’ or the one upon whom judgement has (or will) been passed. Hence the term: ‘Damn you to Hell!’, or literally, to bring Hell’s judgement upon you. Heavy stuff!
‘Damn’ as a word, descendant from Latin, entered the English vocabulary in the 1300s. From the 1700s up until the 1930s, it was considered highly offensive. It was avoided in print, and was certainly not allowed on radio or film! Its religious and judging history caused it to be considered as very rude, and it was not a word to be uttered within earshot of others!
Although not the first time it was mentioned on film, Clark Gable’s historic line from the 1939 film ‘Gone with the Wind‘; “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!“, only made it past the Hays Code censors because under the terms of the Code, a swear-word was allowed in the script of a film-adaptation of a novel, if the word appeared in the novel itself…which it did!
‘Damn’ is hardly considered a highly offensive word these days, and is used freely by a wide range of people in almost any age group. But its exclusion from polite language shows us how guarded we once were in our speech.
Hell
‘Hell’, and its combinations and variations, has been around ever since the dawn of Christianity. Once considered highly offensive, to send someone to, or wish they’d go to Hell, is now a commonly-used profanity.
Then there’s the curses we use to insult a person’s parentage and background. Although rather tossed around today, these words once had serious and significant social stigmas attached to them, and were considered highly offensive words. Whether or not they still are, is a matter for debate.
Bitch
Once used as a word exclusively against women, this word comes from the correct term for a female dog (a convenience that some people, including Bart Simpson, have used, for getting away with using the word!). ‘Bitch’ comes from the Norse word ‘Bikkja’ (also meaning ‘female dog’).
The Oxford Dictionary dates it as far back as 1000.A.D. For those who like reading old documents, this particular word appears in Samuel Pepy’s famous 1660s diary on a number of occasions. Don’t believe me? Search for Pepy’s diary online (it is out there) and read it. In modern times, ‘Bitch’ has expanded to mean more than women and dogs, but to include anything or anyone of low worth, submissiveness and/or over whom someone else has control.
Bastard
Sometimes used jokingly, this word is still hurled around as an insult as freely today as it ever was. Known since Medieval times, to be called a ‘bastard’ was a considerable insult. A ‘bastard’ is, in essence, a child born outside of lawful wedlock. To be labeled a bastard suggested that your mother and/or father were of loose morals or commitments. That your mother slept around and that your father was a rake, cad and philanderer.
As a ‘bastard’, you were an illegitimate child. In past times, being an illegitimate child was a serious issue. The word ‘Bastard’ comes from the Latin ‘Bastardus‘ and further back, to ‘Bastum‘. A ‘bastum’ was a saddle-bag worn on a horse’s back, and which held the rider’s personal possessions. The implication was that the child was born to someone who had a one-night-stand and then rode off the next day…hence ‘bastard’.
To be a bastard had serious legal implications in the United Kingdom. From the 1200s onwards, a child born as a bastard was not allowed to inherit…ANYTHING. If his, or her parents died, the child could not hope to inherit any money, any land, any titles, any privileges or concessions whatsoever. They would be left destitute, a burden of the State. All worldly possessions of the parents, along with anything worth inheriting, was given to the firstborn legitimate child (born within wedlock). This law remained in effect until 1926!
Under the Legitimacy Act of 1926, British bastards could claim inheritance from their parents if said parents died intestate (without leaving a valid will). Prior to this, a bastard had no rights of inheritance. The fact that it took until the 1920s for this to happen shows what a stigma being a bastard really was.
Next comes probably the most controversial batch of swear-words, which continue to carry more weight than any of the others in our expletive-laden modern society. The words relating to bodily waste, sex, and other taboo subjects.
Shit/Crap
Okay, now we’re getting into the heavier stuff…A favourite swear-word for centuries, ‘shit’ comes from the Old English ‘scite‘, meaning ‘dung’, and the Ancient Greek ‘Skatos‘, from which we get ‘scat’.
It’s often believed that the word ‘Crap’, meaning more or less the same thing as ‘Shit’, came from famous lavatory salesman, Thomas Crapper! True? …False. ‘Crap’ comes from the Latin ‘Crappa‘, or ‘chaff’ (as in ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’). It’s from this etymology that we get ‘crap’ meaning ‘waste’ or ‘rejected matter’, since ‘crappa’ (chaff) would be left behind after the wheat had been threshed to get the grains out.
Cunt
The female genitals and the vagina, cunt’s history could come from almost anywhere. But like ‘Fuck’, it is strongly believed to come from German. Specifically an old form of German, and the word ‘Krozte‘…prostitute. It’s most famous use in English comes from the number of ‘Gropecunt Lanes’ that proliferate English towns and cities throughout the British Isles.
Fuck
Aaah…fuck!
Yes, we’d get there in the end!
And there’s nothing like discussing fuck while listening to Vivaldi’s ‘Spring‘ from the Four Seasons Suite.
Although the film above has purely comedic purposes, it is more or less correct. ‘Fuck’ comes from the German and Dutch words ‘Fuk’ and ‘Fokken’, meaning ‘strike’ and ‘breed’ (verb) respectively. Although this may not be entirely correct, the Oxford Dictionary says that its origins are most likely Germanic.
Its first appearance in English comes from the late 1400s (approx, 1475) where it appeared in an (appropriately coded!) poem titled ‘Flen Flyys‘ (‘Fleas and Flies’). Why was the poem coded? Because if it was read, one might realise it was actually written as an insult to the friars (brothers, or monks) of Cambridgeshire in England, suggesting that the religious order was not as chaste and devout as one might expect monks to be!
‘Fuck’ was so controversial that it didn’t even appear in a dictionary until 1775! The dictionary, written by Christian minister John Ash, also included a definition of ‘Cunt’!
Through over five hundred years, ‘Fuck’ has lost none of its controversy, although it has started courting humor of late. A few years back, American author Adam Mansbach wrote the now infamous (and if you’ve read it…really funny!) children’s book: “Go the Fuck to Sleep!“. The book originally started as a Facebook joke, when Mansbach complained about the difficulties of getting his young daughter to sleep, and said: “Look out for my forthcoming children’s book: “Go the _ to Sleep!”. The book was eventually written by Mansbach when the overwhelming response from readers was that they’d love to see such a book, just to prove one existed!
Since its release in mid-2011, the book has become quite famous, and was notably read by actor Samuel L. Jackson. Later on, Mansbach released a more G-rated version of the book, designed to be read TO children.
Of course, ‘Fuck’ doesn’t mean the same thing in every language. During WWII, Allied soldiers making their way across Europe in 1944 and 1945 came across the Austrian town of…Fucking (pronounced ‘Fooking’). Ever since this chance encounter, the town of Fucking has had to repeatedly replace street-signs that have been stolen from within the town-limits by eager tourists…
Historic Profanities
Swearing, cursing and insulting others has been around for centuries. And has been practiced by some of the greatest users of the English Language, from Sam Pepys to Stephen Fry. Even William Shakespeare!
Anyone who’s had to study ‘Macbeth’ in school probably remembers Lady Macbeth’s famous line: “Out! Out! Damn spot!” But Shakespeare went a bit more bravely than that into the sea of linguistic suicide…
These are not, strictly speaking, swear-words as we might know them today. They’re more like insults. Each will be accompanied by an explanation, since the context is rather old nowadays. Each quote is followed by the play in which it appears. The master of the English Language was a great insulter, and here are a selection of some of the finest insults that appeared in his written works:
“There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune!” – Henry VI.
In Elizabethan times, stewed prunes (and prunes in general) were the favoured snack of prostitutes…
“Thou misshapen dick!” – Henry VI (ouch!!)
No explanations needed there. ‘Dick’ transcends the historical barriers…
“Thou Bitch-Wolf’s son!” – Troilus and Cressida.
Again, not much of an explanation needed.
“This sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh!” – Henry VI.
Basically…lazy.
“You dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish!” – Henry VI
A neat’s tongue is a sheep’s tongue. All the way up to Victorian times, neat’s tongue was a popular dish…hungry, anyone? A pizzle? You can guess. As for a stock-fish? Something fit only for boiling in water to make soup with, to be thrown out at the end of the process. In other words…something practically worthless.
To think that swearing never existed before our time is of course, completely incorrect. Different words were used and the same words might have held different meanings, but the truth is that, no matter how far back you go, in search of a squeaky-clean happy-chappy world that perhaps your grandparents might have told you once existed in the dim and distant past…swearing has always been a fact of life.
“Welcome to my house. Come freely, go safely; and leave something of the happiness which you bring”. “Count Dracula?” “I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house…”
And so, the reader of “Dracula”, by Irish writer Abraham Stoker, is introduced to the most famous vampire in the history of the world…Count Dracula.
Even a cursory look at the movie-lineups, or the local TV guide will tell you how popular vampires are at the moment. There’s the Twilight series, Vampire Diaries, The Gates, Moonlight and True Blood.
Vampires have been part of folklore for centuries. They have a hold over us because of the lure of the mythical, the horrific, the supernatural, the forbidden and the natural fear of death. But where do all the myths and legends of vampires come from? Where do we get all our modern preconceptions of what vampires are, what they can, or can’t do, and how they survive?
Although the classic vampire, the tall, handsome, pale-skinned mystery-man with the dark eyes, cold skin and a birth-certificate that’s literally carved in stone, does not exist, the roots of vampire folklore are taken from the lives of actual people. Two of the most famous of these people are Vlad Tepeche, and Elizabeth Bathory.
The Original Vampires
‘Vlad the Impaler’ and the ‘Blood Countess’, two of the most ruthless and sadistic killers in history, lived lives almost literally drenched in blood. They lived about a hundred years apart (the mid-1400s and the mid-1500s respectively) but they have survived to this day as the original inspirations for the vampires we think of today.
Vlad the Impaler was the ruler of the Principality of Wallachia in the mid-1400s. Wallachia is part of modern Romania and Transylvania. He received his nickname from his favoured method of execution…impalement. A horrific form of torture and death in which the victim was literally impaled by a wooden shaft or stake, several feet, or even yards long, in any number of ways, through the abdomen, through the anus, or in the back. It was a long, slow and agonising death. Vlad was known for feasting amongst the stake-forests of his victims, eating and drinking while the dead and dying surrounded him on all sides. He was feared and reviled by everyone. As ruler, his power was absolute and his word unchallenged. He worked his enemies to death, or killed them, mostly through his most favoured of all methods, for which he is remembered.
Elizabeth Bathory, the ‘Blood Countess’, was famous for torturing and killing hundreds of young women and girls, virgins, for their blood. She and four others were eventually arrested in the early 1600s, and put on trial. Three of the four collaborators were sentenced to death for the suspected, upwards of 650 murders they’d committed (although they were only tried for 80 of them). They were variously, decapitated, or had their fingers ripped off and were then burned at the stake. Only one woman was granted imprisonment, after it was proved that she acted under duress and coercion. The Countess herself was walled up inside her castle. She died there in 1614, at the age of 54.
These two legendary blood fiends and the legends surrounding them have given rise to the classic image of the vampire: A bloodsucking monster who preys on human victims, young girls, boys, virgins, and who lives in the wilds of Eastern Europe.
Myths and legends of vampires stemmed from such stories, legends and peoples as these. But while they are the elements of vampires, where do we get our modern conceptions of them?
“Dracula”, by Abraham Stoker
Abraham “Bram” Stoker, is the novelist who put the legend of the vampire into popular print. His 1890s horror extravaganza, “Dracula“, fed the Victorian obsession with death, demons, religion, ghosts, technology, science, science-fiction, life, rebirth and mortality, like nothing else before it, with the possible exception of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece “Frankenstein” (written while on holiday with friends during a ghost-storytelling session).
It is from this one book, Dracula, that we gain nearly all our popular concepts of what a vampire is, what it can do, what it can’t do, what its limitations are, and what abilities it has.
“Dracula” is one of my favourite books. I’ll admit that freely. It’s a real classic gothic horror story that has lasted over a hundred years as one of the spookiest and scariest stories ever written. And in such a convincing way, you’d almost think it was true, if it wasn’t.
For those of you who haven’t had the chance to read “Dracula”…you have my pity. The entire book is written as an epistolary novel. Never heard of the word ‘epistolary’ before? It means that all the chapters are written, and formatted in such a way that the entire book is supposedly made up of ‘actual records’ of a ‘real-life’ vampire-hunt. “Dracula” is composed of diary-extracts, journal-pages, shorthand notes, telegrams, letters, typewritten copy, newspaper cuttings, and, showing how modern Mr. Stoker wanted the book to appear, even audio-recordings, from the recently-invented cylinder phonograph. The start of the book begins, not with a chapter, but with the following passage:
“How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilties of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them”.
This was all designed to give ‘Dracula’ a feeling of realism, to make it even scarier to the reader. And it is from ‘Dracula’ that we get many of the main elements of vampire lore, such as driving stakes through their hearts, decapitating the bodies, the fangs, the holes in the neck, the coffins stuffed with soil, the cold skin, bats, wolves, no reflections in a mirror, a fear of the crucifix, holy water, vampires being impotent in sunlight and only gaining their full power after sundown…all of this comes from just ONE book. Even the alternate word for ‘vampire’, the more old-fashioned and creepy-sounding ‘Nosferatu‘, comes from this book! ‘Dracula’ was one of the first publications to use this word. Bram Stoker came across it during his research, and must’ve reckoned it sounded pretty cool and creepy! Etymologists believe it is taken from the Greek “Nosophoros“, meaning ‘disease-carrying’ or ‘infected’.
Dracula fed the Victorian desire for the new, the fantastic, the old, the gruesome, the scary, the splendid, the forbidden and the fanciful. You have old castles, carriages, demonic beings, but you also have the latest of Victorian technologies: Telegraphs, steam-trains, typewriters, gramophones, electric lights, even blood-transfusions, which were pretty new technology during the Victorian era.
“Dracula” in Film
It is interesting to note that, despite Dracula’s ongoing popularity, there has never been a single film that is a true and complete adaptation of the story. Not one. Go ahead and read all their synopses. Every single film deviates from the book in one way or another.
Dracula, and vampires in general, remain popular. Dracula is the second-most popular main character to be featured in film! A total of 217 films thusfar. The most popular is of course the master detective, Sherlock Holmes (with a mind-boggling 223 films!)
Popularity of Vampires?
What is it about the Vampire that keeps us coming back for more? Why do we keep creating new and more vampire TV shows, vampire books, vampire movies? Why is one of the most famous characters on Sesame Street a vampire count!?
The vampire feeds our morbid fascination with death and the possibility of life thereafter. The idea of immortality and the ability to live forever and never die…but at a terrible price. Also, vampires are cool! They can fly, change forms, they can control weather, climb walls, sneak around, they can control dogs, they can do damn near anything!…Except eat garlic-bread. Like wizards in the Harry Potter series, they feed our desire to have something outside our everyday lives, and our fantasies to have more than our everyday abilities. It’s this combination of fear and awe, of repulsion and reverence that, in my mind, keeps vampires coming back for another bite…
And welcome to another installment of the origins of common English phrases. In this posting, we have…
Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls off a Brass Monkey
Meaning: REALLY REALLY REALLY COLD!!
Before you start, this has nothing to do with primate testicles.
A ‘brass monkey’ was the nickname given to the rack or stand which held cannonballs on old wooden battleships. Brass was chosen because it doesn’t rust in the salty air of the ocean. But in cold weather, the brass would freeze and shrink at a faster rate than the iron cannonballs. This meant that the cannonballs would become unstable in cold weather and roll off the rapidly shrinking ‘monkey’, scattering and rolling all over the deck. As this would only happen in extremely cold temperatures, when it was ‘cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey’, it had to be exceptionally nippy outside.
Sleep Tight!
Meaning: Sleep Comfortably.
We’ve all had our parents say this to us at least once, right?
“Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed-bugs bite!”
Thanks to the news-stories being flashed across our television screens in this increasingly health-conscious world that we inhabit, we’re all rather aware of what bed-bugs are. Little blood-sucking bastards which crawl around in dirty linen.
But what exactly is the ‘sleep tight’ thing?
“Sleep Tight” refers to the earliest forms of beds.
Back when going to bed literally meant having to make your own bed, ‘sleeping tight’ meant just that. Sleeping nice and tight, a necessity, any chiropractor will tell you, for keeping perfect spinal alignment.
On early beds, the wooden frame had holes drilled into it. Through these holes, ropes were weaved back and forth lengthwise and widthwise across the empty middle of the bedframe. Such weaving was usually done by a man called a webber or a webster. If your name’s ‘Webber’ or ‘Webster’ and you ever wondered where it came from, it’s from this type of weaving, or ‘webbing’, which was strung across bedframes.
To prevent the mattress falling through the rope webbing, or netting strung out between the bedframe, it was necessary, every now and then, to pull in the slack of the ropes so that the mattress wouldn’t sag down during the night. Thus, you were quite literally “sleeping tight”, with firm, tightly-stretched webbing for a better night’s sleep.
Good night!
“In the Limelight”
Meaning: To be the center of attention.
Some people love being in the limelight. Others hate it. But what does light have to do with citrus fruits?
…nothing at all.
The ‘lime’ mentioned in ‘limelight’ comes from a compound called calcium oxide, more commonly known as ‘quicklime’, a sort of chalky, white substance.
In the Regency period, major public buildings such as theaters could be effectively lit at night for the first time. The laying of the first gas-mains, with gas-jets and nozzles allowed large public institutions to be lit brightly at night for the first time in history. No longer did people have to rely on candles and oil-lamps to light the way. While gaslight was a vast improvement over candlelight (especially once they’d worked out the kinks), there was still one big issue…Gaslight is stationary.
You have a wall-bracket, or a chandelier of gas-jets, which you would light and then cover with a glass shield. And…that was it. It was bright, but it wasn’t that bright, and it couldn’t be moved around like an oil-lamp or candles. Theaters with performances taking place at night were lit by footlights on the stage (gas or oil-fired) and by gas or oil-lamps hanging from the ceiling. But the light was not nearly powerful enough to make it effective.
Enter…Limelight!
It was discovered in the 1820s that you could light oxygen and hydrogen and create a powerful flame.
…Yeah.
But people already knew about gases and stuff like that. So what’s the big deal?
Nothing. But then they realised that this very powerful flame, if played over a lump of quicklime, suddenly became blindingly bright. It was discovered that by shifting the position of the flame, or by adjusting it’s size via the amounts of oxygen or hydrogen that were fed to it, the light produced from the flame burning up the quicklime could be vastly intensified or reduced. For the brightest possible light, the hottest part of the flame had to be concentrated on the lump of quicklime.
Realising the potential uses for this, theaters were quick to jump at the chance to use this new type of lighting. Using mirrors and lenses to focus and direct the beam, for the first time in history it was possible for theaters to have powerful and directional lights. Limelights were the grandparents of the huge spotlights that we’re familiar with today. The first theater limelights were fired up in 1837. Their use continued for decades, before finally losing ground to the much more powerful electric lights that were becoming cheaper and more plentiful by the 1880s and 1890s.
For all its power and brightness and fantastic illumination, limelighting was not without its dangers. It wasn’t uncommon for the balloons of oxygen or (especially) hydrogen to be punctured and leak or explode. In especially bad accidents, the entire theater could burn down!
Although we now use electric spotlamps, the old phrase of being “in the limelight” still exists today.
“Wet Blanket”
Meaning: To be a downer. A pessimist. A killjoy.
The term ‘wet blanket’ came around in the 1800s. Like “limelight”, it too was taken from the world of the theater. As early theaters were lit by gas, candles, oil or limelight, the risk of fire was constant. All it took was one careless person, one tipped lamp, or one misadjustment of the limelighter’s gas-levers to cause an explosion or fire in the middle of the performance. To minimise the risk of fire, literal wet blankets were kept in buckets of water on the stage. This way, if the heat from the oil or gas-fired footlights, common to many theaters of the time, did start a fire, a cheap and effective fire-extinguisher was near at hand to prevent a complete disaster. In time, the act of throwing a wet blanket on a fire to put it out became synonymous with someone ‘putting out’ the fun a situation and becoming a buzz-kill.
“‘Round about the caldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw.— Toad, that under cold stone, Days and nights has thirty-one; Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot! ALL. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble. 2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,— For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. ALL. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble. 3 WITCH. Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf; Witches’ mummy; maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark; Root of hemlock digg’d i the dark; Liver of blaspheming Jew; Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse; Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips; Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,— Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingrediants of our caldron. ALL. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble. 2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon’s blood, Then the charm is firm and good.”
This passage, from “Macbeth“, by Shakespeare, is one of the most famous pieces of fiction in the world involving witches.
Witchcraft holds a lot of power over all of us. It’s all over global culture, in the East and West. Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Bewitched, Harry Potter, the witches in “The Wizard of Oz“, and countless other examples, are everywhere we look. Take, for example, classic European fairy-tales and the stock character of the evil witch, such as in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty‘.
Witchcraft, both good and bad, has been with us for centuries. But what is it and where did it come from? Where do we get these visions of cauldrons, broomsticks, pointed hats, cloaks, black cats, potions and poisons, fancy Latin verses and heavy, leatherbound spellbooks written in Gothic German-style script? This is a History of Witchcraft.
Disclaimer:Reading this posting will not result in attaining magical powers, the ability to fly, read tea-leaves, turn people into toads, turn yourself into a toad, eat toads, cackle maniacally or grow warts.
What is Witchcraft?
Witchcraft as most people think of it, is the casting of spells and the brewing of potions and flying around on broomsticks, to save on the rising cost of petrol. But where did it all come from?
Witchcraft has of course, been around for centuries. In older times, witches were seen as part and parcel of everyday life in medieval Europe. They were at the same time feared and respected. Trusted and mistrusted. But what did they do?
A History of Witchcraft
The first witches were seen as rather harmless people. They fulfilled the role in the village community of the ‘wise woman’.
A ‘Wise Woman’ had less to do with cursing people and casting spells on them or turning children into pigs, and more with helping people. A wise woman, as the name suggests, was supposed to be an older woman full of wisdom. The wise woman carried out the duties in the village such as being the community midwife for expectant mothers, treating the sick using folk-remedies, giving advice to the worried and help to the needy, and telling fortunes and generally trying to help their neighbours. In this respect, witches or ‘wise women’ were seen kind of like community aid-workers.
Such witches or wise women had been a staple of village life…indeed, a staple of EUROPEAN life…for centuries. Ever since the Anglo-Saxons and the Dark Ages. Both men and women practiced witchcraft, which believed in ties to the land, sourcing cures and medicines from plants and animals, and harnessing the powers of nature. All in all, a pretty harmless pursuit.
Evil Witches
For most of history, witches were part of everyday life. Nobody really worried about them, minded them, or paid them that much attention at all. They were like the stock characters in any village. Priest. Blacksmith. Baker. Chandler. Witch. They came as standard fare in most communities. But how did witches turn from being benevolent and wise, helpful old ladies to the wicked, scary, evil crones that most people think of them today?
Well, it depended on where you lived. Some communities really couldn’t care less about witches. If they were there…they were there. If they weren’t…meh!
Other communities, however, were highly suspicious of witches. Many people, including a king of England (James I of England, who took the throne after Queen Elizabeth died in 1603) increasingly grew to believe that witches were not the harmless creatures that most people thought of them to be, but dangerous and satanic beings who caused bad things to happen.
You have to understand that attitudes were changing towards witchcraft. It was believed more and more that witches gained their ‘supernatural’ powers from making a deal with Satan, Head Demon of Hell. Witches were able to brew ‘potions’ (which were really just home-remedies and medicines) and cast spells…supposedly, and cause horrible things to happen. That being the case, they had to be rooted out and destroyed, to protect Godfearing, religious and Christian peoples of the world. And to help them in this, King James I wrote a book.
Don’t believe me? Here it is:
The printing is a bit hard to read, but it says (translated to modern English spelling):
“DEMONOLOGY In form of a Dialogue Divided into three books Written by the High and Mighty Prince James, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.”
So yes, King James did believe in witches. And this book which he wrote, “Demonology“, was designed to help people spot witches and, to use a 21st century euphemism, ‘neutralise’ them. In fact, so much did James believe in witches that there was actually a Witchraft Act in the English Parliament. It was made law the year after James took the throne, in 1604. It named the practicing of witchcraft as a capital offense, one punishable by death…in Stuart times, that generally meant burning at the stake.
Old Jimmy’s book gives us one of our most detailed insights into witchcraft, mostly because it was written with dead seriousness.
So, to deal with witches, you first needed to know what a witch looked like!
Spotting a Witch
The Water Test
According to ‘Demonology‘, there are several ways of spotting a witch. One of the easiest ways was to chuck a witch into a pond.
Right. I’ll stop here for a bit, while all the Monty Python fans suddenly remember something of vital importance, and rush off to YouTube to relive the famous “SHE’S A WITCH!” sketch, from ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail‘. Oh hell. I’ll post it here:
Although this video is supposed to be a joke (one of the best in the history of television!), people really DID believe that you could tell if someone was a witch if you chucked her…or him! (About 20% of people suspected of being witches were actually men!) into a body of water. And just like in the Monty Python sketch, if the suspect floated on the water, he or she was automatically believed to be…A WITCH!! (Burn her! Burn her!!)
What’s the rationale behind this?
Well…Water symbolises life, purity and holiness (although any body of water in medieval Europe was likely to be heavily contaminated, so there goes the whole ‘purity’ thing).
What does this mean?
Okay. You find someone who you think is a witch. You chuck the offending person into the water. The rationale was that water, being pure and holy, would reject a work of Satan (ie: a witch), so a real witch would float on top of the water.
On the other hand, if the person was pure and untainted by witchcraft, the water would accept him or her, and pull the offending person into its grasp (ie: an innocent person sinks).
Now this might seem like a stupid, catch-22 situation of “Damned if you are, and damned if you ain’t”, but it wasn’t that stupid.
If you DID sink (and were therefore, pure and innocent), they WOULD actually fish you out of the water! The object of the test wasn’t to see if you would drown! So you weren’t going to die of innocence!
The Nipple Test
I know this sounds like some sort of schoolboy prank or something, but yes, there is a nipple-test.
And yes, I do mean nipple as in teats. As in boobs.
How does it work?
Well, everyone’s got two nipples (or if you’re a chick, two breasts with teats).
This was considered normal, healthy and holy. Just as God had intended.
A witch, on the other hand, having made a deal with Satan, would have a *gasp* THIRD NIPPLE!
For this test, the accused would have to strip naked. And then everyone would start checking them out. They were looking for third nipples. These could be anywhere on your body. Chest, abdomen, arm, leg, halfway up your ass, on your back, on your hand…anywhere!
If they found one, you were labelled a witch!
How does this work out?
Well…ordinary nipples are used for feeding babies. But a third nipple must be used to feed things which aren’t babies! Such as familiars.
“What’s a Familiar?” you ask.
A familiar is a creature of darkness which the witch keeps with her. The creature (an animal) was the manifestation of an evil spirit, a sort of servant or assistant, which the Witch used to help carry out her evil and cunning plans.
The third nipple was where the witch would nurse or feed her familiar, to keep it fed and alive. A familiar was believed to take the form of an animal. This could be an insect, a bird, like a crow, or most famously…
A black cat.
Which is why witches are seen with cats.
The Test of Prayer
Another test of witchiness was to ask the accused to recite the Lord’s Prayer. By this logic, anyone who could say the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly was deemed not to be a witch.
Pretty easy, huh?
Of course, if you made ONE mistake, you were automatically believed to be a witch, because a mistake was a sign that the Devil was fighting against you and against the holy words spouting from your chief facial orifice.
Test of Bodily Imperfections
This one is also pretty easy. You get the accused to strip naked and then check their bodies for imperfections. This ranged from extra fingers or toes, warts, and other birth-defects. These were supposed to be signs of demonic collusion.
Dealing with Witches
Okay, you have a witch, you’ve tested her, you’ve interrogated her…now what?
It’s popularly believed that witches are burned at the stake. And indeed they were, but this wasn’t the only way to dispatch witches. You could also hang them or crush them to death.
Such was the fear of witches that there were national laws regulating witchcraft all over Europe. In England alone, between the mid-1500s up to the early 1700s, there were FOUR acts. The first was in 1542, and was passed by Henry VIII. The second one was passed in 1562, by Henry’s second daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. While Henry’s law dictated that witches should be put to death, the Elizabethan Witchcraft Act allowed witches to be imprisoned. An actual penalty of death would only be handed down if it could be proven that the use of witchcraft had caused the death of another person.
The next act was the 1604 act. It went against the Elizabethan act of forty-two years earlier, stating that witchcraft was punishable by death, whether or not it was used for good, or evil purposes.
The last act came in 1736. By this time, belief in actual witchcraft was beginning to wane, but the law stated that anyone who pretended to be a witch, or have witch-like powers, and used them to con people or trick them out of say, money, land or personal properties and possessions, would be breaking the law. The Witchcraft Act of 1736 remained in the books until the 1950s! It shows you how much people still believed in witches!
Which Witch is Which?
Witch trials happened all over the world. They happened TWICE in the American…colony, as it would’ve been back then…of Massachusetts. Once in the 1650s, and again, in 1692. This last one was the famous Salem Witch Trials.
Whether or not witchcraft was something people really, really, in their heart-of-hearts believed in, we’ll probably never know. But what is true is that once witch-hunting fever took hold, we can be fairly sure that some of the people dobbed in, to stand in the dock, were sent there by people happy to be rid of them.
In other words…a witch-trial was a great way to get rid of that pesky neighbour of yours. Just scream out “SHE’S A WITCH!!!!” and the mob-justice would do the rest.
Of course, in the case of Salem, since the judges allowed what was called “spectral evidence” to be admitted into court, the chance to get rid of people you really hated suddenly shot up through the roof!
What is ‘spectral evidence’?
You stand in the dock and tell everyone that you have an invisible apparition in front of you. This ‘spectre’ was supposedly the guilty spirit of the person who was the witch that was tormenting you. It is a witness that only YOU can see, only YOU can hear, only YOU can talk to…You get the idea.
“Oh come on…that can’t be real”, you say.
Oh yes it was. You could stand in the witness box and lie your ass off, and the judges would take whatever falsehoods you spouted as gospel truth, even though NOBODY could see, or hear anything.
That said, a witch-hunt, which has entered the English language to mean a senseless and blind pursuit of someone to charge them with a crime, whether they be truly guilty of it or not, was not really a witch-hunt.
Yes, they did ask a lot of loaded questions during interrogations (Not: “Are you a witch?”, but “How long have you been a witch?” etc), yes, they allowed in goofy evidence, but to get off the hook for witchcraft, it was actually fairly easy. All you had to do was stand up and say…”Yes, I am witch!”
And just like the whole make-up-your-own-evidence thing, I didn’t pull that out of the air, either. Just like spectral evidence, that also, is 100% true. One way to get off the hook was to confess to being a witch! Whereafter, the judge would slap you on the wrist for being a naughty girl, and you had to promise never to practice witchcraft again. Admitting you were a witch was a bit like religious confession of sins. If you admitted you had a problem and would face it, then there was nothing wrong.
It was when you fought the process that you got into serious strife.
The famous 1692 witch trials took place in the community of Salem Village. There were actually TWO Salems in the colony of Massachusetts in 1692. One was Salem Town. Salem Town was a sort of middle-class, business-minded community built next to Massachusetts Bay. Its inhabitants were traders, merchants and shopkeepers. Well-to-do, educated and level-headed. This peaceful and comfortable waterside community would have nothing to do with witches! They were too smart for that…
…Salem Village, located a few miles to the north, however, was a rural place. A farming village. In this quiet, tucked-away, isolated community, generally free of outside interaction. You could say that Salem Town represented the forward-thinking, sensible people, and Salem Village the backwards, and gullible country folk. And to a certain extent this was true.
Of course, not everyone who was accused of being a witch was executed. One way to get off the hook was, as mentioned earlier, to confess to being a witch. Another way was to be acquitted for lack of evidence. At the height of the Salem hysteria, over 200 people were accused of witchcraft. Of those 200, 20 were executed. Most by hanging, or by being crushed to death by heavy stones.
In the end, it was the governor of Massachusetts Colony that put an end to the Witch Trials, believing that everything had just gotten out of hand. In retrospect, the people of Salem Village realised how crazy things had been during the trials and several people later confessed to giving false testimony during the heat of the moment.
The End of Witchcraft
Although witchcraft survives today as Wicca, and as its own religion, the days of people being burned at the stake, of black cats, familiars, water-tests, warts, pointy hats, “Demonology“, and bubbling cauldrons of ooze have long since disappeared.
The 1700s killed off the traditional dark, evil reputation of the witch, and all the things that went with it. The 18th Century was an age of change. It was the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Age of Colonization, the Age of Discovery…and people increasingly began to realise…the Age of giving up stupid old superstitions! By the end of the 1700s, fear of witches and spells and curses had pretty much died out. Witchcraft was no-longer a capital offense and the last witch-trials were held in Europen in the 1780s. The Witchcraft Act of 1736 in England labelled anyone pretending to be a witch, or pretending to practice witchcraft, as a con-artist. It was an offense punishable by time in prison, but you weren’t likely to be burned at the stake for it!
Want to Know More?
There’s lots of documentaries about the history of witchcraft on YouTube, some are more general, some are more specific, some concentrate just on the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, but they’re all detailed and fascinating watching.
We’ve all seen that movie ‘The King’s Speech’. We all know what it’s about. We all know about the struggles, trials, tribulations and torments that surrounded King George VI, the man who never wanted to be king, but who guided his country through one of the darkest periods in British history.
But all that would never have happened, and the film would never have taken place, if not for the very remarkable event that preceded it. The famous Abdication Crisis of 1936.
What Was the Abdication Crisis?
The Abdication Crisis of 1936 was the royal scandal of King Edward VIII abdicating the British throne to marry the woman he loved. Romantic? Perhaps. Scandalous? Certainly. Next to the rise of Nazism in Germany, it was the biggest talking-point all around Europe during the 1930s. In drawing-rooms, living-rooms, cafes, restaurants, boardrooms and down at the pub, people talked of little else except for the king and…’Mrs Simpson’.
Who Was King Edward VIII?
King Edward the Eighth is a figure shrouded in mystery. He was king for barely a year, he was known as a playboy, a dandy, a moderniser and a scoundrel. But who was he, really?
Edward VIII, full name…*deep breath*…Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David…was born on the 23rd of June, 1894, when his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, was on the throne.
Edward was the first of six children to the future King George V, and Queen Mary (formerly Mary of Teck). The other five kids were the future King George VI, Princess Mary, Prince Henry, Prince George, the Duke of Kent, and last but not least, the forgotten prince…John, who died at the age of 13 from the effects of epilepsy…a closely guarded royal shame and secret.
Life for the royal children was hardly the idyllic dream that we imagine it to be. And as we all know from horror movies, TV shows and the local tabloid news, those people who grow up to torture people in their secret underground lairs…like Joseph Fritzl…are almost invariably those who had horrible childhoods.
George V, rigid, formal and stiff to the last, instilled his children with naval discipline (it was, and still is a royal tradition for a prince to take up a posting in one of the armed forces), something that George himself had done with his older brother, Prince Albert-Victor (nicknamed ‘Eddie’), who died in the 1890s, with suspicions of him being Jack the Ripper and being as gay as Liberace still hanging around him.
George V once famously declared that: “My father was terrified of his father. I was terrified of my father. And my children are damn well going to be terrified of me!”
The two oldest brothers, Edward and Albert, the future George VI, were very close as children. They played, they spent time with each other, they hung out, they participated in sports (Albert or ‘Bertie’ was fond of hunting and fishing)…and they chased women.
The difference was that Albert chased after a society beauty. Her name was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon…the future Queen Mum.
King Edward, or as he was called at the time…’David’…chased after quite another kind of girl. In the end, he latched onto…Mrs. Simpson. Full name…
Wallis Warfield Simpson
She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield on the 19th of June, 1896. And almost from the start, scandal followed her everywhere.
Her first marriage was to Earl Winfield Spencer, a pilot in the U.S. Navy (the air-force at the time, not being a separate entity from the Navy and Army in the United States, as it was in England). It was during her marriage to Earl Spencer (1916-1927), that she travelled to Republican China. Wild rumors circulated that she attended whorehouses, brothels, bordellos, casinos, drinking-dens, and other disreputable establishments in the decadent and lively world of the Shanghai International Settlement in China, as well as other places in the Republic, such as the capital city of Peking (‘Beijing’ today).
Before she divorced Spencer, she suddenly got interested in another guy. Ernest Aldrich Simpson…from which the famous “Mrs. Simpson” comes from. She divorced Spencer in 1927, and married Simpson in 1928.
The Prince and Mrs. Simpson
In 1934, Mrs. Simpson effectively became the-then Prince Edward’s mistress. She wooed him, and he spent lavish amounts of money on her. The prince’s reputation as a playboy and a society mover-and-shaker made her sink her claws into him all the more.
By now, Wallis Simpson had already developed a bit of a reputation in the drawing-rooms of the British aristocracy and nobility. And everyone in-the-know began to whisper. The whisperings hit the ears of His Majesty, King George V, a notoriously straitlaced, uptight, old-fashioned, oldschool sort of monarch. He was furious and flat-out asked Prince Edward what the hell was going on!…Edward denied everything, even though royal courtiers brought the king secret reports that they had seen the prince and Mrs. Simpson sharing a bed together!
The Abdication Crisis of 1936
In January of 1936, King George V died. He was seventy years old. He was also full of conviction about two things.
ONE – That his second son, Prince Albert, was a hell of a boy with a lot of guts (not something he admitted to the prince’s face, of course).
TWO – That his older brother, the new King Edward VIII, would bring ruination to the monarchy with his involvement with the Simpson woman.
Prince Edward rose to the throne as King Edward VIII. All is well and good.
Except that he kept hanging onto the Simpson woman. And she was becoming more and more unpopular by the minute. The Duke and Duchess of York (the future George VI and the Queen Mum) were appalled by this. The Duchess and the Queen Mother (that’s Queen Mary, George V’s wife), were horrified by the new king’s carryings-on with Mrs. Simpson.
Not only was Mrs. Simpson unpopular, but Edward wasn’t much of a king.
He swept aside centuries-old traditions and customs. He shied away from his duties. He fired courtiers who had worked in the palace for decades. He didn’t even bother to read, sign or approve any of the bills, papers and documents that were sent to him to read…something that the current Queen Elizabeth does on a regular basis. He was barely a king at all!
Courtiers, government officials, and prominent aristocrats, were displeased with his overly casual attitude, his dislike of formality, and increasingly, his pro-Nazism stance. But it all came to a head when he summoned the prime minister, at the time, Stanley Baldwin, to tell him that he would marry Wallis Simpson, and that if he couldn’t, and if she wouldn’t become queen, then he would abdicate the throne.
This caused a HUGE sensation.
Several people in government and court and within the royal family itself, were mightily opposed this. But surely a king can marry who he wants…can’t he?
The reasons why everyone thought he couldn’t, were several. For one…
Social Implications.
Someone of such high standing as a king could not POSSIBLY marry a woman who was twice divorced, and who’s previous husbands were not even dead yet. On top of that, Mrs. Simpson was an AMERICAN!…which in itself was probably enough! And those two elements combined would ensure that she would almost never been accepted by the British people!
Religious Implications.
Edward VIII, as king, was the head of the Church of England. All British monarchs since Henry VIII back in the 1500s, were heads of the Church of England…since it was Henry VIII who created it! So what’s the issue here?
The Church of England does allow divorces. And it does allow remarriages.
But it does NOT allow the both things to happen at once! For the King to marry a woman who was divorced, but who had two living ex-husbands, was to go against everything that the church allowed! And the King, as head of the church, could not possibly do that and escape unscathed from the immense public outcry that would follow!
Political Implications
On top of that, even if the king married Mrs. Simpson. Even if she became queen, there was still the issue of what would happen?
Mrs. Simpson had divorced twice in the past! What happened if she divorced again? From the king? As the queen? Such a thing would never have happened before in British history, and it would’ve been a disaster!
Don’t start quoting Henry VIII here. His marriages were “annulled”, not “divorced”. He had them struck off the records, not just terminated.
Legal Implications
At the time, divorce proceedings between Mr. and Mrs. Simpson were not yet complete. And she had divorced her first husband, Mr. Earl Spencer, on grounds of “emotional incompatibility”. Under the Church of England, divorce was legal, but in England at the time, the only grounds for divorce lay in the act of adultery. Since adultery had not been committed, Mrs. Simpson’s divorce from her first husband wouldn’t hold water in an English courthouse. So even if she divorced her second husband, she would, in the eyes of the English legal system, still be married to her first. And if she was, then marrying the King would be a bigamous act, something that was obviously…illegal in England.
Nationalistic Inplications
The KING. The head of the United KINGdom…marry a lowly, disgusting, vile, peasantish, twice-divorced American slut!?
Such a thing would NEVER have worked out.
Although generally friendly, the United Kingdom and the United States were not yet the close chums and allies that we imagined them to be during the War years. The idea that the King should marry an American, whom most people in England saw as distasteful and just plain…WRONG, was repellent to the British aristocracy…and to just about every other class in the British system from that tier down!
On top of that, the Americans all seemed to be jumping on the idea that one of their lot, a Yankee girl, would become a British queen! The press was all over it!…and the Brits were getting all over her. No way was this ever going to work!
With all the uproar over this potential marriage, there were three possible avenues open to the King and his lover.
1. He marries her, she marries him. He remains king, she becomes queen.
No. Nobody wanted that (except maybe the King). It just wasn’t possible.
2. He marries her, she marries him. He remains king, she takes on some lesser aristocratic title.
Called a morganatic marriage, this was the style of marriage used to join a husband of higher rank or social status, to a woman of lower rank or social status. She wouldn’t get his titles or anything, but she would still be his wife. Such a thing had never happened in England (although it had happened in various royal houses in Europe), and it still…wasn’t going to happen. The king refused to accept this as an option.
3. He marries her. She marries him. He gives up the throne.
Ding!
This was the one!
On the 10th of December, the King formally abdicated the British throne. The first…last…and only…British monarch to willing do so in history. He signed this document, the Instrument of Abdication, in the presence of his brothers, who signed as witnesses to this historic event.
On the top right, you can see “Edward R.I.” (short for “Edward Rex Imperator” or ‘Edward, King-Emperor’, in Latin).
Below, you can see three more names: “Albert”, “Henry”, and “George”. In order, they are the future King George VI, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, Duke of Kent.
And so it was done. To this day, Edward VIII has had the shortest reign of any British monarch, in the history of the British monarchy. Unless you count the ‘reign’ of Lady Jane Grey, otherwise known as the “Nine Day Queen“, who was supposed to be the protestant successor to Edward VI, son of King Henry VIII.
The Effects of the Abdication
The Abdication, the first in the history of the British monarchy, destroyed the family. Once close as children, the new King George VI would now not even look at his brother, much less speak to him…and let’s not even mention Wallis Simpson! When the abdication was complete, and Prince Albert now realised that he would become the new king, and now fully understood that it was his own brother’s recklessness that had ended him up in this shitpile that he NEVER wanted to be in, he cried on the shoulders of his elderly mother, Queen Mary, for a full hour at her home at Marlborough House.
Prince Albert NEVER wanted to be king. He hated the whole idea of the job. It was his grandfather, Edward VII, the rakish son of Queen Victoria, who was the first royal to realise that for a monarchy to survive in the 20th century, things had to change. They had to do things differently.
Things like…attend openings. Give presentations. Cut ribbons. Pose for photographs. Greet famous celebrities. And worst of all…make speeches!
From childhood, Albert had suffered from a horrible and crippling stutter which, even with decades of therapy from his faithful friend and speech-therapist, Lionel Logue, he was never fully cured of. If you listen to any of George VI’s speeches, or watch any of his newsreel footage from the 1940s, you can still hear how bad his stutter was.
Ironically, this was not the first time that this had happened.
Just as Prince Albert was shoved into the limelight and jammed in the throne thanks to the actions of his older brother, so was his father, the late King George V, also shoved into the limelight. When his older brother, the Prince Albert Victor (the ‘Jack the Ripper’ suspect) died, the-then Prince George was shoved onto the stage, and even had to marry his dead brother’s prospective bride, the Princess Mary…which wasn’t that bad, because they actually loved each other quite devotedly…but it’s funny how history repeats itself. The scandalous older brother screws things up, and the younger, more intelligent one has to set right the incredible cock-up that was made as a result.
On the 11th of December, 1936, less than a year after his reign began, Edward VIII approached a microphone in a radio broadcasting-booth to announce to the world his abdication from the British throne, the first and only abdication in the history of the monarchy and the first real interruption to the line of succession since the Civil War of the 1640s. The announcer introduced the speaker as “His Royal Highness, Prince Edward”, since he was no longer officially king of England. The full speech made by the king may be heard here:
Once a popular, handsome, athletic celebrity, within a year, Prince Edward’s public…and private…image, had changed from one of the ideal royal prince, the heartthrob and glittering celebrity, to that of a second-rate king, who chose the love of a conniving, manipulative, gold-digging Yank over his much more important duties as king of a great nation in the years leading up to the Second World War.
Immediately after the abdication, the Duke of Windsor, as he was then styled, and his eventual wife, Wallis Simpson, left England for Europe. They were married on the 3rd of June, 1937. Had George V lived, it would’ve been his 72nd birthday. The furious Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, strongly suspected that her son chose this particular date for his wedding as a slight against the rest of his family, who had effectively disowned him for his disgraceful actions.
For the rest of his life, the Duke of Windsor, and his wife, the Duchess of Windsor, were not welcome in England. When Edward’s brother Albert ascended the throne as George VI, he refused to grant Wallis Simpson, by then Duchess of Windsor, the traditional “H.R.H” (‘Her Royal Highness’) form of address for a royal duchess. Edward was furious about this. Although only three little letters, their addition to the front of Wallis’s name (which would then read: “Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Windsor’), would mean that she was officially part of the British Royal Family. This would mean that people would have to bow and curtsy to her, as such. George VI did not believe (and neither did his wife, or mother believe) that she deserved such privileges, and so denied her the form of address which his brother so vehemently wanted.
King George VI died in 1952. During the war he became an incredibly heavy smoker and drinker, with stress-levels shooting through the roof. The stress, combined with the other tolls taken on his body meant that he was dead before he was even sixty years old. By contrast, his brother continued to live the carefree, playboy life that he’d always done. He died in 1972 at the age of 77. Wallis Simpson in 1986 at the age of 89.
