Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 13, 2012

Aesop’s Mothers

By daseger

For Mother’s Day, I was planning to do a post called “Grimm Mothers” (a title I love) about fairy-tale mothers, but I quickly realized that most of the mothers in the Grimm tales are evil stepmothers, and being one myself (not evil, just a stepmother), I decided to shift my focus from fairy tales to fables. Aesop’s Fables, especially the larger editions, actually includes quite a few interesting mothers, most of which you don’t come across very often: lobster and crab mothers, mole mothers, lark and moon mothers, in addition to mothers dealing with wolves and thieves. So we have real maternal diversity today. There are so many editions of Aesop to choose from; this title has never been out of print since the dawn of printing and there are manuscript versions before that.

Aesop telling his tales to an audience of men and beasts; the frontispiece to John Ogilby, The Fables of Aesop paraphrased in verse (London, Thomas Warren for Andrew Crook, 1651).

For images, I really like a mid-nineteenth-century edition illustrated by C.H. Bennett, The Fables of Aesop and Others, Translated into Human Nature (W. Kent & Co., 1857). Bennett injected “humanity” into the fables by putting Aesop’s animals in contemporary clothes, situations, and environments, complete with “family pictures” on the walls. You can find later colored versions of these plates, but those below are from the first edition.

Lobsters, apes and moles….a half-century later, “golden-age” illustrator Arthur Rackham offered up images of even more unusual mothers, a crab and a moon, for a “new translation” of Aesop’s Fables (1912) which is still in print today: an absolute classic.

The fable of the moon: The Moon once begged her Mother to make her a gown. “How can I?” replied she; “there’s no fitting your figure. At one time you’re a New Moon, and at another you’re a Full Moon; and between whiles you’re neither one nor the other.”

8 Comments | tags: Art, books, holidays | posted in Culture, History

May 12, 2012

Zouaves

By daseger

This poster for the Watch City Festival this weekend in Waltham, a very happening city to the west of us, caught my eye not only because of its fetching image but also because of its reference to the Salem Zouaves, a reference I’ve seen quite a few times in these past few months. Who or what are the Salem Zouaves, you may ask, a question I’ve been asking myself. I think I’m going to use this post to try to figure them out.

It’s not too difficult to figure out who the Salem Zouaves are here in the present: a reenactment group who “recreate the exotic, flashy drill and uniforms of the original Salem Zouaves, including our signature bayonet and sabre fencing.” But who were the original exotic Salem Zouaves? Apparently they were a Civil War incarnation of the Salem Light Infantry, and among the first responders to President Lincoln’s call for volunteer militias to defend the capital after hostilities broke out in April of 1861. They were attached to the 8th Massachusetts Regiment, and spent several months guarding Old Ironsides in Baltimore Harbor before returning home. I doubt that their sabres or bayonets left their sides. This is hardly heroic service deserving of reenactment 150 years later: what’s the rest of the story?

I suspect the secret of the Zouaves’ appeal, then and now, lies more in their exuberance than their service. They looked and acted in a dramatic, romantic, even theatrical fashion, and thus captured the imagination of those who wanted to believe that war was glorious. The mid-19th century Zouave craze was inspired by the dashing exploits of French soldiers in north Africa who adapted the native attire for their own uniforms before and after the Crimean War (1853-56), which was the first war to be documented extensively by “foreign correspondents” for the major western newspapers, along with photographers like Roger Fenton, who had himself photographed as a Zouave on the front. The majority of his striking Crimean photographs, including his famous “Valley of the Shadow of Death” can be accessed through the Library of Congress.

Roger Fenton in the Crimea, 1855 (Library of Congress) and a mid-nineteenth-century print of French Zouaves (New York Public Library Digital Gallery).

Roger Fenton did not want to offend early Victorian sensibilities by showing pictures of the dead and wounded, so the contemporary image of the Crimean War that emerged was one of dashing exploits in an exotic locale, symbolized succinctly by the Zouaves. In America, several voluntary militia companies–still very much in existence after their colonial foundation–transformed themselves into Zouave regiments. The key figure in the transformation of Salem’s Light Infantry into the Salem Zouaves was clearly Arthur Forrester Devereux, the son of a prosperous Salem family who became commander of the Infantry in 1859. In his early career, Devereux lived in Chicago, where he became a close associate of the founder of the American Zouave movement, Elmer Ellsworth, a close associate of Abraham Lincoln who would also be the first casualty/martyr of the Civil War (in the process of taking down a confederate flag in Alexandria, Virginia spied from the White House). Devereux seems to have been more fascinated by the precision drill tactics of the Zouaves than their uniforms, but his company was well-outfitted just the same. Pictorial envelopes of the era, one of my very favorite visual sources for the Civil War, emphasize both Zouave distinctions: they stand out among other regional regiments on the first postcard (the Salem Zouaves are #6, at right), and are able to deftly jump confederate cannonballs in one minute and form a human hanging post in the next!

I’m having a hard time reconciling these printed exploits with the reality of the war; the very existence of the dashing Zouaves seems to point to a clash between war expectations and experience. Harem pants just don’t seem to fit into my perception of the Civil War! And we have seen that the Salem Zouaves did not last long nor did they see any real action: though Arthur Devereux certainly did, commanding the 19th Massachusetts Regiment at Gettysburg. Perhaps the Salem company is not representative: there were regiments like the 114th Pennsylvania and the famous 5th New York Volunteer Infantry of Abram Duryée that were thoroughly, and heroically engaged.

The 114th Pennsylvania at Brandy Station, Pennsylvania, in April, 1864 (Library of Congress); the 5th New York Voluntary Infantry in Virginia in the winter of 1862-63 as drawn by wartime illustrator Edwin Forbes (New York Public Library Digital Gallery).

Despite the service of the brave men in these companies, it’s still difficult for me to see the American Zouave movement as much more than fashionable , a perception that is reinforced by contemporary images such as those below: a page from Godey’s Lady Book (of all places!!!) illustrating the new Zouave jacket in 1860, and Thomas Nast’s 1862 painting The Young Zouave. But I could be wrong.

6 Comments | tags: Art, Library of Congress, Local Events, material culture, Nineteenth Century, Photography, print culture | posted in History, Salem

May 10, 2012

Cicely & Alexander

By daseger

It’s been raining for about a week and everyone I talk to is complaining, but not me: everything is so lush and green. I keep peeking out of my third-floor study window down at the garden below, a blissful escape from grading papers. This is what I see: red, wet bricks and green, wet plants.

What you don’t see from this perspective are the shade borders that lead out to the street. They are lined with two of my favorite stalwart spring plants: Sweet Cicely (myrrhis odorata) and Golden Alexander (zizea aurea). These two plants never fail me, and provide fluffy little long-lasting flowers long before anything else has bloomed. Though Sweet Cicely is an herb with a long European heritage and Golden Alexander is a native wildflower, they actually have much in common: both belong to the same Apiaceae family of flowering plants, which used to be called the Umbelliferae family, for their hollow stems and umbel (umbrella-like) flowers. This is a large group of plants that includes carrots, parsley, fennel, dill and other utilitarian potherb plants. I think that the owners of my house and tenders of my garden from a century or more ago would probably be a little horrified by these lowly plants taking up so much prominent space, but I like them.

The path from street to garden; Sweet Cicely and Golden Alexander close-up.

Both plants are referenced in early modern herbals. Even though my Alexander is an American native, it is related to a European genus called Smyrnium whose seeds were apparently sold by apothecaries’ shops throughout Europe. Nicholas Culpepper, the seventeenth-century physician, astrologer, botanist, and author of The English Physician (1652) and The Complete Herbal (1653), describes Alexander as “an herb of Jupiter, and therefore friendly to nature, for it warms a cold stomach, and opens a stoppage of the liver and spleen; it is good to move women’s courses, to expel the afterbirth, to break wind, to provoke urine and helps the stranguary; and these things the seeds will do likewise. If either of them be boiled in wine, or being bruised and taken in wine, is also effectual against the biting of serpents.” Sweet Cicely, also an herb of Jupiter, has almost exactly the same virtues with the added benefit of being a preservative against the plague (when drunk with wine, of course).

A century after Culpepper, Elizabeth Blackwell included both Cicely and Alexander in her Curious Herbal (1737-39), an ambitious enterprise she took on to pay her husband’s debts and get him out of debtor’s prison (she was successful, but he was later implicated in a treasonous conspiracy and executed). The British Library has digitized King George III’s copy, so everyone can see Elizabeth’s hand-colored engravings drawn from specimens in the Chelsea Physic Garden.

5 Comments | tags: books, Flora and Fauna, Garden | posted in Home

May 8, 2012

The Milkman Cometh

By daseger

Today’s post is prompted by a great photograph of Salem milkmen about to go on their delivery routes given to me by my friend Nelson Dionne. It was taken by the turn-of-the-(last)century commercial photographer Leland Tilford, who was really good at these “daily life” scenes. Nelson acquired about 300 of the Tilford photographs and published many of them in an Arcadia book he co-authored with Jerome Curley called Salem: Then & Now (2009). I just love this particular photograph: the line of earnest milkmen and their horses about to go to work, the lone man leaning out of the second-story window, the banner drink buttermilk, live forever. This is really another world, and only a mere century away!

On Sunday, I recovered from having hundreds of people file through my house for the May Day tour (they were all lovely, but it is still an exhausting experience) by lying on the couch and watching old movies from the 1950s and 1960s, all of which seemed to feature milkmen as minor, but still contributing, characters. There was a time when the milkman was a regular presence in homes, but certainly no longer. I’m old enough, and spent my childhood in a rural enough place, to remember deliveries of milk in glass bottles in general, and the cream on top in particular, but there is a dairy in Salem (Puleo‘s, established in 1928) that still delivers today. New England, of course, is a dairy dreamland, and a couple of years ago Historic New England had a great traveling exhibition, which is still archived on their site, entitled From Dairy to Doorstep: Milk Delivery in New England, 1860-1960. It is so interesting to see the development and transformation of this important industry, from commercialization through mechanization and pasteurization, in a regional context. But after viewing the exhibition in reality a couple of years ago, and digitally today, I was still thirsty for more.

Scenes from the expanding dairy industry in the northeastern US, 1910s-1950s:

8-year-old Jack in western Massachusetts gets ready for his milk deliveries on a “stone boat”, from a Lewis Wickes Hine report on rural child labor in the Library of Congress, 1915; a milkman making deliveries in the New York suburbs, 1925, and H.P. Hood milkmen and trucks in the 1950s, University of Massachusetts Special Collections.

From at least the 1920s, there were escalating emphases on sterilization and specialization; here in New England, the Hood Company definitely showcased the former, while condensed and super-creamy “swiss milk” represented new milk markets.

Milk postcard (H.P. Hood & Sons, “the most sanitary milk depot in New England”) and posters from the 1920s, New York Public Library Digital Collection.

The production and distribution of milk, like most evolving industries, has an impact on gender: the coming of the milkman means the disappearance of the milk maid, a very prominent figure in British print culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but much less so in America. Looking through the print and caricature collections in the British Museum, I see that the milkmaid takes on a number of representative roles: she is the picture (and bearer) of health in the countryside and the yoke-bearing female representative of the “lower orders” in the city, while in the satirical prints of Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray she epitomizes a “loose” woman, spilling her milk as she winds up in a haystack with any man who wanders into her midst. The best way to criticize a man at the end of the eighteenth century was to turn him into a woman, and poor King George III appears as a milkmaid several times, usually during bouts of his recurrent illness.

Milk maids of England: in the city (1804), the country (1807) and at Windsor (George III, 1792), British Museum.

Leave a comment | tags: British Museum, England, Massachusetts, Photography, print culture | posted in History, Salem

May 6, 2012

A Bit of Bridgman

By daseger

I’m on the trail of yet-another-new-to-me-Salem-artist today: Lewis Jesse Bridgman (1857-1931), an incredibly prolific illustrator of countless children’s books and historical sketches from the 1880s to the 1920s. Actually, Bridgman is not entirely unknown to me, having seen a little exhibition of some of his whimsical images at our local frame shop (The Art Corner) a couple of years ago, and I probably could count all of his titles if I wanted too, but I’m a bit lazy today after the big house tour yesterday (hence the very late post). So these images are just the tip of the iceberg for Bridgman, who should be a lot better known, I think.

Bridgman, usually credited as “J.L. Bridgman” and sometimes just as “Bridgman”, which tells you just how eminent he was after the turn of the last century, was born in Lawrence and moved to Salem after his graduation from Harvard. He lived on Summit Avenue, off Lafayette, for much of his life but seems to have acquired a Boston address later on. He illustrated books by Rudyard Kipling, Annie Fellows Johnston, Sylvester Baxter, and Edith Robinson, as well as Mary Hazelton Blanchard’s popular Our Little (African, Indian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, German, Siamese & Eskimo–maybe more!) Cousin series. As his reputation grew, his name gets larger on the cover and title pages, until it becomes part of the title, as in Bridgman’s Kewts (1902), one of several books he produced for H.M. Caldwell, Publishers after 1900.

Here’s a very small sample of Bridgman’s work in print, in no particular order, but beginning with my favorite, PK Fitzhugh’s King Time: or the Mystical Land of the Hours (1908), another Caldwell title. With its clockfaced characters gallivanting through time, this is one of the most charming children’s books that I’ve ever seen, and I think it illustrates the range of Bridgman’s talents very well.

One of Bridgman’s own titles, Seem-So’s (1903), which plays with imagery and silhouettes in a very clever way, and a page from Bridgman’s Kewts, in which bald little creatures dressed in worldly costumes travel through the US (unfortunately the African Kewt is named Sambo): here they are gazing upon a Newport mansion. Two more Caldwell titles from the same era: an alligator in pursuit of a rabbit in Christmas Comes but Once a Year (1903), and the cover of Farmer Fox and other Rhymes (1904).

The decidedly less whimsical and colorful illustrations in Elbridge Streeter Brooks’ Story of New York (1888), one of Bridgman’s earliest commissions, are representative of some of the more “serious” historical and architectural illustrations that he did throughout his career, including pen and ink drawings of Salem landmarks and ships that he produced for the Essex Institute and Peabody Museum in the teens and 1920s. Though he will probably be forever pigeonholed as a children’s book illustrator, Mr. Bridgman seems to have possessed the ability to depict nearly everything in a variety of mediums. I couldn’t find a nice scan-able image, but I was particularly struck by his watercolor painting of a basement kitchen on Chestnut Street in the collection of Historic New England: a rather simple scene, beautifully rendered.

7 Comments | tags: Art, books, Chestnut Street | posted in Culture, Paper, Salem

May 3, 2012

Chestnut Street Days

By daseger

In 1926, the year of Salem’s tercentenary, the residents of Chestnut Street threw open their doors and some old clothes and welcomed the world into their stately homes, setting the precedent for four more “Chestnut Street Days” over the next half-century. This weekend the tradition will be revived with “May Day on Chestnut Street”, an event to benefit Hamilton Hall, during which ten homes on the street will be open to ticket-bearing guests. In a departure from the original Chestnut Street Days and the other big Salem house tour, Christmas in Salem, this tour promises to be a more low-key affair, with an emphasis on history and architecture rather than dress or decoration.

Brochures for this weekend’s tour of Chestnut Street, and the second Chestnut Street Day, held in 1939, featuring Samuel Chamberlain’s etching “Springtime in Salem”.

I am fortunate to live on this storied street and it is a privilege (and pleasure) that I never tire of, even as the tourist trolleys stop outside my bedroom window every half hour. I see Chestnut Street as an early (circa 1805) planned development, as Salem’s merchant princes sought to distance themselves from the busy wharves from which they conducted their business and live only amongst themselves, on a big broad street of boldly American (Federal) houses, filled with the wares (to varying degrees) that they brought home from the East. It is fortunate that the street and its houses were built, as both kept old money and old families (never a bad thing!) in Salem as the city experienced maritime decline and industrial growth and its accompanying dynamic change later in the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the street had become one of the symbols of “old Salem” and a succession of postcards, produced for a national market, reinforced that image, while at the same time freezing the street in time.

Images (mostly cards) of Chestnut Street in (somewhat) chronological order, 1890s-1980s.

The first picture above, which I included in one of my very first blog posts, shows the opening of Chestnut Street–looking west–about 1891. You can see Samuel McIntire’s amazing South Church on the right hand side, and the second photo shows the church in its entirety. It burned down in 1903, to be replaced by the Gothic Revival structure that you see immediately above, which also burned down, in 1950. Apparently it was recognized that the lot was cursed at that time, so it remains a church-less “McIntire Park”.

Detroit Publishing Company postcard of Chestnut Street looking west, 1906, in black-and-white and colored versions. These were reissued for many years as far as I can tell. The last card is a rarer western perspective, printed in Germany and published by A. Kagan of Boston, Massachusetts. The personal note on the back is dated 1918, but I can’t imagine American publishers ordering German postcards in 1918, so it must have been around for awhile.

The eastern perspective–looking towards the harbor and the center of town–is more common. Above are examples from the first two decades of the twentieth century. The “car card” is always striking because of its head-on view, but also because Chestnut Street has been one-way in the other direction for decades. The canopy of elms always makes me sad; I have no idea why chestnut Street was lined with elms rather than chestnut trees, other than the fact that all great American streets seem to have been planted with elms in the nineteenth century. Much of this land was an orchard belonging to the Pickering Family before Chestnut Street was laid out; maybe chestnuts reigned at that time.

A bit further up the street and a bit later, but still looking east. The middle card (courtesy of the Dionne Collection) appears to have been taken in the 1950s, while the last card is from the 1980s. Only the cars change!

I can’t resist closing with my own reissue of Felicie Waldo Howell’s (Mixter, 1897-1968) vibrant painting of the first Chestnut Street Day: Salem’s 300th Anniversary, Chestnut Street, June 1926. Such a great image–and a reminder that streets are all about people as well as houses.

6 Comments | tags: Architecture, Chestnut Street, ephemera, Local Events, Samuel McIntire | posted in History, Salem

May 1, 2012

Maypoles

By daseger

When I was a very little girl my family lived in a small village in central Vermont which had no preschool program, so my parents sent me to a private school the next town over. My memories of this school are positively idyllic: reading Peter Rabbit, singing, games, toast. A singular memory, reinforced by a photograph of me looking like a little dark-haired Swiss girl in a dirndl, is of a Maypole, and going round and round it holding my ribbon. Because of the Maypole, May Day was the most special holiday to me as a child, and I’ve tried to keep it up as an adult, with wreaths and May wine (made with sweet woodruff, a great spring plant) and a general spirit of merriment. But I’ve yet to erect a Maypole in my backyard.

It is interesting to me that my experience with the Maypole happened in Vermont, the least puritanical of all the New England states. The Puritans hated Maypoles, and any ceremony or ritual or image that detracted from the word of God. So dancing around the Maypole, a very popular custom in the medieval and Tudor eras, was prohibited during much of the very Puritan seventeenth century, both in old and New England. There was definitely a revival in the eighteenth century, but it might have been too late for Massachusetts. Thank goodness I had my Vermont childhood!

It’s hard to separate survival and revival in the history of the Maypole, but the custom seems to have been alive and well in the Elizabethan era, as illustrated by these amazing painted glass panels from the later sixteenth century depicting a Maypole and the various “Morris Dancers” who danced around it on May Day. They are from Betley Hall in Staffordshire, and were somehow saved from Puritan iconoclasm and incorporated into a later house. May Day celebrations seem to be part of every romantic history of the Elizabethan era, if only because the first Elizabeth makes a perfect May Queen.

Betley Hall glass panels, later sixteenth century, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; “May Day in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth”, Hodgson & Graves print, c. 1836, British Museum, London.

After the English Revolution, the maypoles of England reappeared, including a famously tall one in the Strand in London (to which, according to Walter Thornbury’s “St Mary-le-Strand and the Maypole” , Old and New London, Volume 3 (1878), Sir Isaac Newton attached his telescope) and in the center of the weeks-long “May Fair” in the Mayfair neighborhood. The Great Fire and the great rebuilding of the later seventeenth and and eighteenth centuries removed maypoles from the streets of London but the custom apparently continued, as they appear in print and paintings as symbols of “Merry Old England”. This particular symbolism seems to intensify in the nineteenth century, an age of dynamic change which threatened to sweep everything away that was both merry and old. There is a definite revival of the Maypole motif in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century by the Arts and Crafts movement; as the old merrymaking custom endures, so too will traditional craftsmanship in the midst of mass production.

Country Dances Round a Maypole, Francis Hayman, c. 1741-42 (Supper Box Decoration at Vauxhall Gardens), Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Edward Henry Corbould, May Day, 1873, British Museum, London; Kate Elinor Lambert, Woodcut device for the Stanton Press, 1921-22.

Another later nineteenth-century trend–the politicization of everything–also affected the maypole, which was appropriated primarily by the left side of the political spectrum, coincidentally with the association of May Day with workers’ movements. Below are two illustrations of a more modern Maypole: around which monopolists and workers dance.

Frederick Barr Opper, the Monopolists’ May-pole (including lots of Vanderbilts), Puck Magazine, 1885 and Walter Crane, The Workers’ May-pole”, 1894, Library of Congress.

Back to basics: of course, the survival (or revival) of the Maypole, in the nineteenth century and today, might simply be due to the fact that it provides entertainment for children, who probably see no greater meaning in its form than the focus of a simple dance in celebration of spring! That’s my memory.