Monday, April 27, 2009

Jolsons in DC, 1927

Al Jolson was born in Lithuania and spent his youth in Washington DC. At 14 he left home to make his fortune in New York City. By 1927, when these photos were taken, he had established himself as an entertainment celebrity.

The first photo shows the family townhouse at 713 4½ St. SW and two adjoining buildings. The next two show the father alone and paired with Al's step-mother. The three are from collections of the Prints and Photos Division of the Library of Congress.




{Al's father, Moses Reuben Yoelson, was a cantor and rabbi in a DC synagogue. Al's biographies say that Moses was a strict disciplinarian who enforced strict religious observances and insisted that Al study to become a cantor and rabbi himself.}



{Al's birth mother died the year she and the children of the family came to America. The biographies say that Al was deeply affected by and never fully recovered from this tragedy. It's likely he had little to do with this step mother.}




Here are some details from the first of the three photos:


{The Jolson home has a traditional and quite handsome facade, but it's clearly falling apart. You can tell from this and the state of the two other buildings that we are not in a ritzy part of town.}



{why are the bricks loose and some missing from the Jolson house? Why are they scarred? Why are they in disrepair while the ones on the second hand store are not?}



{The shop to the left with, presumably, its proprietor.}



{The man in the doorway of the second hand shop.}



{The second hand shop clearly dealt in clothing. The overcoat is heavy and -- as you'd expect -- leads potential customers to expect good things inside. The number of shoes and boots is surprising.}



{This poster in the second hand shop side window also appears in the window of the barber shop.}



{The term "White Barber Shop" seems to mean just what you'd expect: the place catered to white men.}



{Close up of the announcements on the barber shop door. The seem to advertise products, after-shave, talc, and the like.}



{Notice the woman looking out at the photographer. She may have been the barber's wife or an assistant. Note also the placards. They establish that the photo was taken in March -- or maybe February -- 1927.}



{You can't tell much from this detail except that the models are all of the white race.}



{The poster of the shows at the Howard Theater, a landmark institution in DC: "The Howard Theatre provided a place where color barriers blurred and music unified. For most of the 20th century, it held audiences captive with music, dance, drama and comedy. Speakers like Booker T. Washington shared the stage with musicals, road shows, vaudeville acts, theater productions and community programs. Later, Washington's favorite son Duke Ellington opened a new era of jazz big bands on The Howard's stage."}



{This coat is a mystery. It might be the photographer's, but at this season of the year that seems unlikely.}




LC's bibliographic details are sparse. They show that the house is where Al Jolson's parents lived. They give the address as 4½ St. NW. They identify the source as the Harris & Ewing firm of photographers (more on H&E here.)

When the photo appeared on the Shorpy blog, commenters identified some components.

One decodes a flyer in the barber shop window: "Washington Post, Mar 25, 1927. Kiatta vs. Taylor on Mat. George Kiatta, Syrian mat expert will meet George Taylor in a wrestling bout at the Mutual theater tonight. Taylor has recently won victories over Dutch Green and other good middle-weight wrestlers."

Another, the blog's author, says the woman in the window might be a cardboard image, not a real person.

A third says the address can't be in northwest DC (as the bib record claims): "Note that address is in the southwest quadrant. I don't think there was a 4½ Street in the northwest." He quotes:
Washington Post, Jun 24, 1923
Native Washingtonians Succeed in
Varied Fields of Endeavor . . .

To the southwest section of Washington as well as America generally the stage is typified by one name, "Al Jolson," for he is the pride of that neighborhood where he lived from the time he was a child of eight after coming to America from Europe until the dawn of fame drew his steps away from the Capital.

Down in the substantial home at 713 Four-and-one-half street southwest, his boyhood home and where his father, the Rev. M.R. Yoelson still resides, there is always joy when "Al" is coming to town. For they know that although he is a personal friend of President Harding, who always tries to see his show and appreciates his humor and genius to the full, the "dearest spot on earth to him is Home, Sweet Home" and his big car caries him swiftly away from the uptown theater to his home where a reunion with his dear ones awaits him.

The boys and girls at Jefferson school, just around the corner, treasure every scrap they can learn of Al Jolson, for he is one of their own, "a Jefferson school boy" through all his healthy, happy boyhood, a marble champion, a baseball player and popular among his mates.



Some sources:

Al Jolson, article in wikipedia.

AL JOLSON Biography on notablebiographies.com

One bio says this of Al's parents:
Father: Moshe Reuben Yoelson (a Rabbi) (b. Moshe Reuben Hesselson, 1857, Kurland, Latvia - d. December 23, 1945, Washington, D.C.)
Mother: Naomi Etta Cantor (b. 1860 - died in childbirth, February 6, 1895, at 208 4 1/2 Street SW, Washington, D.C.)
Jolson on jewishvirtuallibrary.org. This site says of Al:
He was the youngest of four children of Rabbi Moses Reuben Yoelson and his wife, Naomi (Cantor). Anti-Jewish pogroms were common and the family immigrated to Washington, D.C., in 1880, where Rabbi Yoelson obtained a job as a cantor in a synagogue.

Jolson's mother died when he was 10. His formal education wasn't much but he learned much more from the streets, where he would sing and dance on the corner to earn spending money. In constant conflict with his father, who wanted him to follow a religious life, Al ran away to New York to join his older brother, Harry, who had left home and changed his name to Jolson. Al also changed his family name to Jolson and in 1899, he appeared as an extra in a Jewish play called Children of the Ghetto. At 15, he joined his brother in a three-man comedy act that toured the vaudeville circuits. They were known as Jolson, Palmer and Jolson. It was during this tour that he used burnt cork to darken his face, which became his trademark in show business.
Jolson Biography on musicals101.com. This site says:
Asa Yoelson was born in Seredzius (a.k.a. Srednike), a Jewish village ("schtetle") in the Lithuanian region of Imperial Russia. Although he would claim Mar. 26, 1886 as his birth date, no documentation exists to verify it – it may have been anytime from 1884 onwards. The openly anti-Semitic authorities were not interested in recording the arrival of another Jew. Asa was the fourth surviving child of cantor Moshe Yoelson and his wife Naomi, after daughters Rose and Etta, and their son Hirsh. The Yoelsons raised their family according to strict orthodox tradition, and Moshe expected his sons would one day become cantors too. He trained both boys to sing, propping open their mouths with matchsticks to encourage them to sing loud and clear.

Moshe Yoelson wanted to get his family away from the ongoing threat of Tsarist oppression. Soon after Moshe's studies brought him the title of rabbi in 1890, he traveled to America, promising to send for his wife and children at the earliest opportunity. The emotionally strong but physically ailing Naomi held the family together, becoming the center of young Asa's world. When Moshe became head of a Washington D.C. congregation in 1894, Naomi and the children made the long journey to join him there. Any hopes the Yoelson's had of resuming a normal family life were dashed when Naomi's died in 1895. Eight year old Asa was in the next room, his world shattered.

Joost wins a time trial

Joost Posthuma took fifth place overall and won the time trial of a short one-day Dutch race, the Ronde van Made (Tour of Made). In addition the the time trial, the race consisted of a 50K criterium (urban race) and a scratch race (a race consisting of multiple laps around a short circuit in which lapped riders are -- generally -- eliminated).

The following thumb images are from Joost's web site; click to view the (copyrighted) full size versions.
  Joost at the start of the race
  Joost at the start of the time trial segment
  During the time trial segment
  With Desirée van Deelen, the Rondemiss Profronde Maden, on the podium following the time trial
  At the start of the scratch race
  During the criterium

Sunday, April 26, 2009

prosecuting social advantages

Extracts from a long letter which Emerson sent his wife:
LONDON, April 20, 1848.      

Dear Lydian,

The steamer is in: everybody has letters, and I have none, none from you or the dear little Ellen who writes me short, pert, good notes, all blessings fall on the child! It must be that you too have decided that boats run a little too often for mere human pens moved by hands that have many more things to drive. . . .

I have been busy during the last fortnight, but have added no very noticeable persons to my list of acquaintances. A good deal of time is lost here in their politics, as I read the newspaper daily, and the revolution, fixed for the 10th instant, occupied all men's thought until the Chartist petition was actually carried to the Commons. And the rain, too, which falls at any time almost every day, these things, and the many miles of street you must afoot or by 'bus or cab achieve to make any visit, put me, who am, as you know, always faint-hearted at the name of visiting, much out of the humor of prosecuting my social advantages.

I have dined with Mr. and Mrs. Lyell one day, and one with a good Dr. Forbes, who carried me to the Royal Institution to hear Faraday, who is reckoned the best lecturer in London. It seems very doubtful whether I shall read lectures here even now. Chapman makes himself very busy about it, and a few people, and I shall, no doubt, have a good opportunity, but I am not ready, and it is a lottery business, and I do much incline to decline it, on grounds that I can only tell you of at home, and go to Paris for a few weeks, get my long-promised French lesson, and come home to be poor and pay for my learning. I have really been at work every day here with my old tools of book and pen, and shall at last have something to show for it all.

The best sights I have seen lately are, the British Museum, whose chambers of antiquities I visited with the Bancrofts on a private day, under the guidance of Sir Charles Fellowes, who brought home the Xanthian marbles, and really gave us the most instructive chapter on the subject of Greek remains that I have ever heard or read of. ... Then the King's Library, which I saw under the guidance of Panizzi, the librarian, and afterwards of Coventry Patmore, a poet, who is a sub-librarian. Then I heard Grisi the other night sing at Covent Garden, Grisi and Alboni, the rivals of the opera.

Being admitted an honorary member of the Reform Club, I went over all that magnificent house with Mr. Field, through its kitchen, reckoned the best in Europe, which was shown to me by Soyer, renowned in the literature of saucepan and soup. Another day through, over, and under the new Houses of Parliament, . . . among the chiefest samples of the delight which Englishmen find in spending a great deal of money. Carlyle has been quite ill lately with inflamed sore throat, and as he is a very in-tractable patient, his wife and brother have no small trouble to keep him in bed or even in the house. I certainly obtained a fairer share of the conversation when I visited him. He is very grim lately on these ominous times, which have been and are deeply alarming to all England.

I find Chapman very anxious to establish a journal common to Old and New England, as was long ago proposed. Froude and Clough and other Oxonians and others would gladly conspire. Let the Massachusetts Quarterly give place to this, and we should have two legs and bestride the sea. But what do I, or what does any friend of mine in America, care for a journal? Not enough, I fear, to secure any energetic work on that side. . . . 'T is certain the Mass. Q. R. will fail unless Henry Thoreau and Alcott and Channing and Charles Newcomb the four — old-visaged four — fly to the rescue.

I am sorry that Alcott's editor, the Dumont of our Bentham, Baruch of our Jeremiah, is so slow to be born. . . .

Young Palgrave at Oxford gave me a letter to Sir William Hooker, who presides over Kew Gardens, and Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft having a good will to go there, and being already acquainted with him, we went thither yesterday in their carriage, and had the benefit of this eminent guide through these eminent gardens. The day was the finest of the year, and the garden is the richest on the face of the earth. Adam would find all his old acquaintances of Eden here.

Since I have been in London I have not earned a single pound. The universal anxiety of people on political and social dangers makes no favorable theatre for letters and lectures. The poor booksellers sell no book for the last month. Neither have I yet had any new chapters quite ripe to offer for reading to a private class. But all this question must very shortly decide itself. Either I shall undertake something in London, or go to Liverpool or to Bristol, as has been proposed, or renounce all such thought, and determine to pay for my pleasures by publishing my new papers when I get home.

My newest writing (except always an English journal which grows a little day by day) is a kind of "Natural History of Intellect;" very unpromising title, is it not? and, you will say, the better it is, the worse. I dined with the Geological Club yesterday, and in the evening attended the meeting of the Society, and had a very good opportunity of hearing Sedgwick, who is their best man, Ramsay, Jukes, Forbes, Buckland, and others.

To-day I have heard Dr. Carpenter lecture at the Royal Institution. . . .

Dear love to all the children three, and to dear friends whom I do not begin to name for fear to choose. I never name any without a sense of crying injustice, so multitudinous are my debts, happy, unhappy man that I am! Fare you well.
Waldo       




{Charles Lyell, author of the Principles of Geology, which essentially founded the modern science of geology; source: taggart.glg.msu.edu/isb200/beagle.htm}



{Edward Forbes (February 12, 1815 – November 18, 1854), a British naturalist; source: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Edward_Forbes}



{Michael Faraday (1791-1867), an English chemist and physicist born in a working class south London neighborhood; source: http://www.rare-earth-magnets.com/magnet_university/michael_faraday.htm. For more on Faraday see: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Faraday.html}



{Michael Faraday, later in life; taken from a painting by A. Blakely in the posession, in 1917, of the Royal Society; source: http://www.marcdatabase.com/~lemur/lemur.com/gallery-of-antiquarian-technology/worthies/}



{Note from William Lloyd Garrison to Henry Grafton Chapman; source: flickr. Henry Chapman was an abolitionist and wealthy Boston merchant; he was husband of Maria Weston Chapman, member of the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 and from 1839 until 1842, and editor of the anti-slavery journal, Non-Resistant.}



{Carlotta Grisi: Giselle as a Willi, floating above her own grave; source: http://www.giselle-ballet.com/about/story.shtml. For more on Grisi, see: http://www.operatoday.com/content/2005/12/a_fresh_look_at.php, "Giulia Grisi must be, by whatever standard is applied, regarded as one of the greatest and most important soprano singers who ever graced the operatic stage."}



{Marietta Alboni (1824-1894); source: http://www.divasthesite.com/The_Opera_Divas.htm, 'an Italian contralto and bel canto specialist. As a student at Bologna she became a pupil to Rossini, who later instructed her in the leading contralto roles in the majority of his operas. Walt Whitman was one of her biggest fans, and after a performance of hers at Metropolitan Hall, he wrote of her, “The teeming lady comes, the lustrous orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother, sister of loftiest gods, Alboni’s self I hear.”'}


{Marietta Alboni ritratta da un pittore dell'epoca; source: http://www.coroalboni.it/Biografia%20di%20Marietta%20Alboni.htm}



{Reform Club ~ a Social Club for Reformers; source: http://www.reformclub.com/}



{Alexis Soyer; source: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/library/spec/bookmonth/archive/jan2007. He was a French chef who became the most famous cook in Victorian London. He also tried to alleviate suffering of the Irish poor in the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849), and improve the food provided to British soldiers in the Crimean War.}


Some images from Alexis Soyer’s book The gastronomic regeneration, a simplified and entirely new system of cookery with nearly two thousand practical receipts; illustrated with numerous engravings and correct and minute plans how kitchens of every size are to be constructed and furnished (Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1849).

{A dinner party of wealthy people}


{Menu for a dinner party of wealthy people}


{A modest dinner party}


{Menu for a modest dinner party}


{One of Soyer's cookstoves at the Reform Club}


{One of many images showing the contents of a useful kitchen}






{Froude, later in life: source: http://www.librarything.com/}



{Arthur Hugh Clough, (1819 – 1861) English poet: source: http://www.librarything.com/}



{Francis Turner Palgrave, (1824 - 1897) British critic and poet; source: http://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/ "Francis Palgrave was the eldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861), historian and antiquary. Sir Francis had been born the son of Meyer Cohen but adopted the maiden name of his wife's mother, converting to Christianity. Despite their Jewish ancestry the family embraced Anglo-Catholicism with some fervour. After Charterhouse, Francis went up to Balliol College, Oxford and this brought him into contact with Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough. After some months, in 1846, as private secretary to W E Gladstone he joined the Education Department where he spent the rest of his active life."}



{Sir William Jackson Hooker, (1785 – 1865) English botanist; source: http://www.kew.org/
}









{Adam Sedgwick, one of the founders of modern geology; source: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/sedgwick.html}




{William Benjamin Carpenter, (1813 – 1885) English physiologist and naturalist; source: finadagrave.com}



Some sources:

A memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by James Elliot Cabot (Cambridge, Printed at the Riverside Press, 1887)

The gastronomic regeneration, a simplified and entirely new system of cookery with nearly two thousand practical receipts; illustrated with numerous engravings and correct and minute plans how kitchens of every size are to be constructed and furnished (Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1849)

Friday, April 24, 2009

Victorian antiquities and prostitutes

Here is Emerson's journal entry for April 25, 1848, and those preceding it since my last post on his journal entries.
April [day not given].       


The British Museum holds the relics of ancient art, and the relics of ancient nature, in adjacent chambers. It is alike impossible to reanimate either.

The arrangement of the antique remains is surprisingly imperfect and careless, without order, or skilful disposition, or names or numbers. A warehouse of old marbles. People go to the Elgin chamber many times, and at last the beauty of the whole comes to them at once, like music. The figures sit like gods in heaven.

Coventry Patmore's remark was, that to come out of the other room to this was from a roomful of snobs to a room full of gentlemen.

There are 420,000 volumes in the library, as Mr. Panizzi assured me, and fifty or sixty thousand manuscripts. In the Bodleian Library probably not more than 120,000 books. Five libraries have the right to a copy of every book that is printed: this, the Bodleian, the Advocates' at Edinburgh, the Dublin University(?), and Trinity College, Cambridge(?). The King's Library at Paris is much larger than this — 1,500,000, said Colman. Here the line of shelves runs twelve miles. It is impossible to read from the glut of books. I looked at some engravings in the print-room with Mr. Patmore, who is connected with this Library.

Ah! there is a nation completely appointed, and perhaps conveniently small.

St. Paul's is, as I remember it, a very handsome, noble architectural exploit, but singularly unaffecting. When I formerly came to it from the Italian cathedrals, I said, "Well, here is New York." It seems the best of show-buildings, a fine British vaunt, but there is no moral interest attached to it.

It is certain that more people speak English correctly in the United States than in Britain.

The Government offers free passage to Australia for twenty-five thousand women. In Australia are six men to one woman. Miss Coutts has established a school to teach poor girls, taken out of the street, how to read and write and make a pudding and be a colonist's wife. They do very well so long as they are there, but when it comes to embarking for Australia they prefer to go back to the London street, though in these times it would seem as if they must eat the pavement. Such is the absurd love of home of the English race, said Dickens.

--------------
April 15.       

At the British Museum with the Bancrofts under the guidance of Sir Charles Fellows. Lycian Art. The triumphal Temple plagiarism of the Parthenon. Exact truth and fitness of every particular of Greek work. There are ten statues because ten cities sent aid out of thirteen. Every statue stands on an emblem, as crab, dove, snake, etc., which the coins now show to be the arms of the ten cities. The gods are at the eastern end. The friezes describe accurately the siege of the city.

The reconstruction of the Temple, like that of the Dinornis, the most beautiful work of archaic science. History, geology, chemistry, and good sense. The temple itself imitates in stone the old carpentry of the country still visible in the huts of the peasantry, and is an ark. The women wear the same ornaments, the boys have the same tuft of hair.

Illustration of Homer and Herodotus. England holds these things for mankind and holds them well. Conservative, she is conservator.

Owen said he fell in with a sentinel in crossing the French frontier, who cried out, "Who are you?" Mr. Arnott said he should have replied, "The creature of circumstances."

One power streams into all natures. Mind is vegetable, and grows, thought out of thought, as joint out of joint in corn. Mind is chemical, and shows all the affinities and repulsions of chemistry, and works by presence. . . .

Mind knows the way because it has trod it before. Knowledge is becoming of that thing. Somewhere, sometime, some eternity, we have played this game before. Go through the British Museum and we are full of occult sympathies. I was azote.

It is a little fearful to see with what genius some people take to hunting; what knowledge they still have of the creature they hunt; how lately they were his organic enemy; and the physiognomies in the street have their type in woods.[1] As in the British Museum one feels his family ties, so in astronomy not less; little men copernicise.

Ludgate still keeps the hoary memory of Lud's town. Lud, son of Beli, is represented in the romantic chronicles as the elder brother of Cassivellaunus who fought with Julius Caesar.

Among the trades of despair is the searching the filth of the sewers for rings, shillings, teaspoons, etc., which have been washed out of the sinks. These sewers are so large that you can go underground great distances. Mr. Colman saw a man coming out of the ground with a bunch of candles. "Pray, sir, where did you come from?" "Oh, I've been seven miles," the man replied. They say that Chadwick[2] rode all under London on a little brown pony.

I wonder the young people are so eager to see Carlyle. It is like being hot to see the Mathematical or the Greek professor, before you have got your lesson. They fancy it needs only clean shirt and palaver. If the genius is true, it needs genius.

The Englishman is finished like a sea-shell. After the spires and volutes are all formed, or with the formation, the hard enamel varnishes every part. Pope, Swift, Jonson, Gibbon, Goldsmith, Gray. It seems an indemnity to the Briton for his precocious maturity. He has no generous daring in this age. The Platonism died in the Elizabethan. He is shut up in French limits. . . .

But Birmingham comes in, and says, "Never mind, I have some patent lustre that defies criticism." Moore made his whole fabric of the lustre: as we cover houses with a shell of inconsumable paint.

--------------
April 19.       

At Kew Gardens, which enclose in all more than six hundred acres, Sir William Hooker showed us his new glass palm-house . . . which cost .£40,000. The whole garden an admirable work of English power and taste. Good as Oxford or the British Museum. No expense spared, all climates searched. The Echino cactus Visnasa, which is a thousand years old, cost many hundred pounds to transport it from the mountains in Mexico to the sea. Here was tea growing, green and black ; here was clove, cinnamon, chocolate, lotus, caoutchouc, gutta-percha, kava, upas, baobab, orotava, the papaw, which makes tough meat tender, \hegraphtophyllumpictum or caricature-plant, on whose leaves were several good Punch portraits visible to me (lately, there was one so good of Lord Brougham appeared, that all men admire); the ivory nut; the Strelitzia Regina, named for Queen Charlotte, one of the gayest flowers in nature; it looked like a bird, and all but sung; the papyrus; the banian; a whole greenhouse or "stove" full of wonderful orchises, which are the rage of England now.

Sydney Smith said of Whewell, that Science was his forte and Omniscience was his foible.

Carlyle thought the clubs remarkable signs of the times. That union was no longer sought, but only the association of men who would not offend one another. There was nothing to do, but they could eat better.

He said, There are about 70,000 of these people who make what is called "society." Of course, they do not need to make any acquaintance with new people like Americans.

Plato [he found] very unsatisfactory reading, very tedious. The use of intellect not to know that it was there, but to do something with it.

Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale — who writes always to the unknown friend.

--------------
April 25.       

Carlyle. Dined with John Forster, Esq., at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and found Carlyle and Dickens, and young Pringle. Forster, who has an obstreperous cordiality, received Carlyle with loud salutation,"My Prophet!" Forster called Carlyle's passion, "musket-worship." There were only gentlemen present and the conversation turned on the shameful lewdness of the London streets at night. "I hear it," he said, "I hear whoredom in the House of Commons. Disraeli betrays whoredom, and the whole House of Commons universal incontinence, in every word they say." I said that when I came to Liverpool, I inquired whether the prostitution was always as gross in that city as it then appeared, for to me it seemed to betoken a fatal rottenness in the state, and I saw not how any boy could grow up safe. But I had been told it was not worse nor better for years. Carlyle and Dickens replied that chastity in the male sex was as good as gone in our times; and in England was so rare that they could name all the exceptions. Carlyle evidently believed that the same things were true in America. He had heard this and that of New York, etc. I assured them that it was not so with us; that, for the most part, young men of good standing and good education, with us, go virgins to their nuptial bed, as truly as their brides. Dickens replied that incontinence is so much the rule in England that if his own son were particularly chaste, he should be alarmed on his account, as if he could not be in good health. "Leigh Hunt," he said, "thought it indifferent."

Carlyle is no idealist in opinions, but a protectionist in political economy, aristocrat in politics, epicure in diet, goes for murder, money, punishment by death, slavery, and all the pretty abominations, tempering them with epigrams. His seal holds a griffin with the word, Humilitate. He is a covenanter-philosophe and a sansculotte-aristocrat.[3] . . .

Yet it must be said of Carlyle that he has the kleins tads lie h traits of an islander and a Scotchman, and believes more deeply in London than if he had been born under Bow Bells, and is pretty sure to reprimand with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a vast continent which makes light of the British islands. He is an inspired Cockney.

(When I saw him, in 1848,[4] he was reading Wright's translation of some of Plato's Dialogues with displeasure. I was told by Clough, in 1852, that he has since changed his mind, and professes vast respect for Plato.)

Carlyle is Malleus Mediocritatis. He detects weakness on the instant in his companion, and touches it. ...

I fancy, too, that he does not care to see anybody whom he cannot eat, and reproduce tomorrow, in his pamphlet or pillory. Alcott was meat that he could not eat, and Margaret Fuller likewise, and he rejected them, at once.

He is the voice of London, a true Londoner with no sweet country breath in him, and the instigation of these new Pamphlets is the indignation of the night-walking in London streets. And 't is curious, the magnificence of his genius and the poverty of his aims. He draws his weapons from the skies, to fight for some wretched English property, or monopoly, or prejudice.

He looks for such an one as himself. He would willingly give way to you and listen, if you would declaim to him as he declaims to you. But he will not find such a mate. And a short, plain-dealing and a communication of results, as when Dalton and Dana met, and without speaking, scratched down on scraps of paper chemical formulas, surprising each other with authentic proof of a chemist, — that he does not care for.

-----------------
Notes by the editor of the Journals:

1. Some sentences of the above are printed in " Powers and Laws of Thought" (Natural History of Intellect, p. 22).

2 The engineer of the London water system.

3 A large part of what is written in the next pages of the Journal is printed in the " Carlyle," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

4 This paragraph, Mr. Emerson wrote into the Journal years later.



From the editor of Carlyle's letters:
TC, Emerson, Dickens, and Forster dined together, 25 April. Emerson wrote to his wife, 4 May, that he found Dickens “cordial and sensible. Carlyle dined there also, and it seemed the habit of the set to pet Carlyle a great deal, and draw out the mountainous mirth. The pictures which such people together give one of what is really going forward in private & in public life, are inestimable”.




{Elgin Marbles, detail; source: The Elgin Marbles}


{Coventry Patmore; source: Victorian Web}






{Baroness Burdett Coutts; source: The Triumph of Woman}


{Sir Charles Fellows; source: Fellows House}


{British Museum reconstruction of the temple at Lyceum; source: flickr}




{William Arnott; source: The Arnott Family; William Arnott}



{Imaginative depiction of Lud, King of the Britains, and founder of 'Kaer-Lud,' that is, the 'City of Lud', later corrupted to London; source: Llud, King of the Britons Died 58 b.c.}


{Edwin Chadwick; source: Edwin Chadwick - the Sanitary Man}


{Sir William Jackson Hooker; source: Kew History & Heritage; Sir William Jackson Hooker}


{Strelizia}








Thieves and their prostitutes; source: Mayhew's London Prostitutes



In 1862 an English social investigator, Henry Mayhew, published a report on prostitution in London. It formed a part of the larger work, London Labour and the London Poor. Here are its contents:


Some sources:

Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1820-1872, with Annotations, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes; Vol. VII, 1845-1848, (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912)

The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, edited by Charles Eliot Norton (Houghton, Mifflin, 1896)

Mayhew's London Prostitutes:

London labour and the London poor, by Henry Mayhew (C. Griffin, 1864)