Well...

Well, I was going to have a new post today, but when I sat down to write it I realized I didn't really have any information of any substance.  (It was going to be on Caroline Reboux, a milliner often credited with coming up with the cloche hat.)  So, instead there's this little thing.

RIP George Washington, who died on today's date in 1799.

I'm going to take a couple weeks off for the holidays (between travel and work it's just not going to happen).  I'll be back on January 4th.  Until then, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year!

The First Miss America

            I apologize for the complete silence here over the last couple weeks.  Just over two weeks ago I got sick and had been sleeping pretty much non-stop, causing me to miss the post on the 23^rd.  Last week, I was still sick and was also recovering from Thanksgiving, so last week I missed as well.  I should’ve said something, but… Too late now.  Sorry.

            I’ve been thinking of doing this person for a while now.  She came up when I was looking at Pinterest for neat old photos of people that might work.  I’d started research before I got sick, but hadn’t finished.  I’ve been finishing this week and came across a quote of hers that she “never cared to be Miss America.  It wasn’t my idea.  I am so bored by it all.  I really want to forget the whole thing” (1).  At that point I was running out of time for a post for today.  I stuck with her, but I admit it feels a little weird since I picked Margaret Gorman precisely because she was the first Miss America, and here I’m finding out she later didn’t like it…  So there’s information here about her, but also about the first year or so that “Miss America” existed.  Hopefully Margaret wouldn’t hate that so much.

            Margaret Gorman was born August 18, 1905.  She was the second child in her family; she had an older brother, and a younger brother and sister.  Her father, Michael J. Gorman, was the executive clerk to the Secretary of Agriculture (I’m not sure which one though).  Margaret’s family lived in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., near Montrose Park.  She would continue to live in D.C. for her whole life.

            When Margaret was between her sophomore and junior years in high school at Western High School (now the Duke Ellington School of Arts), her photo was entered into a popularity contest run by the Washington Herald.  Margaret had blue eyes and blonde ringlets; her looks were compared to those of the actress Mary Pickford.  Margaret was chosen as one of the finalists for the Washington Herald’s contest, and, with the other finalists, was toured around the city before a winner was chosen.

            Margaret was chosen as Miss Washington, D.C., for 1921, “due to her athletic ability, past accomplishments, and outgoing personality” (2).  When she was notified that she’d won, and would be competing in a contest in Atlantic City, she was at a park playing marbles in the dirt.

            In 1920 Atlantic City had been trying to figure out how to keep tourists in the city after Labor Day, which was the traditional end to the summer holidays.  What the city came up with was the Atlantic City Pageant.  Miss Atlantic City, Ethel Charles, acted as the hostess for the pageant, a tradition that would continue for years.  Margaret was invited to the Second Annual Atlantic City Pageant as Miss Washington, D.C., to compete over the September 7^th and 8^th weekend.

            The Pageant was kicked off by a parade and the actual competition part of the weekend started “by the arrival of King Neptune on a barge that landed at the Atlantic City Yacht Club” (3).

Margaret was going to be competing in the “Inner-City Beauty” contest, competing against seven other finalists from cities in the northeastern United States.  The contestants for Miss Inner-City Beauty were “judged in stylish afternoon attire by the judges”, as well as by the public “who shared in fifty percent of the final score” (4).  The public crowded the contestants, asked them questions and tried to get to know them.  While this was definitely a beauty contest, personality did play a part when talking with the public.

One of the other titles up for grabs was “The Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America”, so of course the contestants were in bathing attire.  Some of the contestants “violated a local modesty ordinance by appearing barelegged on the beach” (5).  Margaret, though, “wore dark, knee-high stockings and a chiffon bathing costume with a tiered skirt that came almost to her knees” (6).

For the announcement of a winner, the contestants were “escorted and presented on the stage of the Keith Theatre on the Garden Pier” (7).  There were multiple prizes being awarded in the Inner-City Beauty contest.  Miss Washington, D.C., Margaret, won the amateur prize, the Watkins Trophy; Miss South Jersey, Kathryn M. Gearon, came in second, winning one hundred dollars in gold.  There was also a professional prize awarded to the silent film actress, Virginia Lee, who was Miss New York.

Miss Washington, D.C., also won The Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America.  With two titles under her belt, Margaret went on to win the grand prize for the Atlantic City Pageant, The Golden Mermaid Trophy.  She also was given a key to the city that she shared with King Neptune.

Upon winning, one of Margaret’s friends from school back in D.C. sent her a telegram, telling her “Congratulations.  Don’t get stuck up” (8).  Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, also commented on her win, telling The New York Times “She represents the type of womanhood America needs – strong, red-blooded, able to shoulder the responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood.  It is in her type that the hope of the country rests” (9).

Since she had won the grand prize, Margaret was expected to defend her title the next year.  However, the Washington Herald had already named its new Miss Washington, D.C., for 1922, so Margaret could no longer use that title.  The titles she had won in Atlantic City (Miss Inner-City Beauty, Amateur and Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America) were long, clunky titles.  The Atlantic City committee wanted something easier to call Margaret, and decided on Miss America.

This first Miss America title is funny.  Because of all the confusion over who had what title, and what those titles all were, causing confusion about what to call Margaret, Margaret was crowned 1921’s Miss America at the end of her year, in 1922.  This made her not only the first Miss America, but the only Miss America to receive her crown at the end of her reign.

Margaret did compete in 1922, defending this new, but yearlong, title.  She was still popular with the crowds, who still compromised half the vote.  However, Margaret didn’t successfully defend her title, losing her crown to Miss Ohio, Mary Campbell.  Mary Campbell went on to successfully defend her title in 1923, making her the only two time winner of Miss America.

As well as being the first, Margaret set other Miss America records.  She was just 5’1” and 108lbs, making her the smallest Miss America winner.  (In 1949, Jacque Mercer, Miss Arizona, became the lightest Miss America at just 106lbs, but was two and a half inches taller than Margaret.)  Margaret is also the slimmest Miss America with measurements of just 30-25-32 (of course this is helped by the fact that Margaret was just sixteen when she won).

            Over most of its run, the Miss America contest has been heavily criticized as a beauty pageant and for having women on parade.  This is something that started almost right at its creation.  Throughout the 1920s the contest was protested and so the early organizers “presented the contestants as natural and unsophisticated, stressing their youth and wholesomeness.  Publicity stressed that they did not wear make-up nor bob their hair” (10).

            Margaret competed for a few more years in the 1920s in Atlantic City, but never won anything again.  In 1925 she married Victor Cahill, who worked in real estate.  They lived in D.C. together until Victor’s death in 1957.  Margaret became something of a socialite over the years, and enjoyed travelling throughout her life.

            As the years went on, Margaret tried to distance herself from Miss America and from having been a beauty queen.  As the quote at the beginning says, Margaret “never cared to be Miss America.  It wasn’t my idea.  I am so bored by it all.  I really want to forget the whole thing” (11).  She also said “My husband hated it … I did too” (12).  In 1960, Margaret was persuaded to attend that year’s competition, but “later called the organizers cheap for not reimbursing her for $1,500 in expenses” (13).

            Despite all that, Margaret did keep her outfit from her winning year: a sea green chiffon and sequined costume.

            Margaret Gorman Cahill died on October 1, 1995 at age 90.

            I admit, I don’t know how to feel about Miss America.  Part of me loves it because it’s a competition and you can see all the gorgeous clothes they get to wear and some of the talents the women have are neat.  But part of me hates it because it is just a beauty contest, ultimately, and it presents such a narrow idea of what beauty is.  I think the inception of the contest is interesting though, that it was a popularity and beauty contest, first won by a high schooler.  That it was seen as this all-American, “red-blooded” thing, like Samuel Gompers said.

I also find it really interesting because of when it was created.  The 20s are one of my favorite periods to read about and study.  The rise of the beauty industry, the new ideals of femininity, the higher waistlines, the rush forward into modernity after the Great War.  It seems appropriate that Miss America was born out of this decade.

1, 2, 11 - Margaret Gorman

3, 9, 10 - People & Events: The First MissAmerica Beauty Pageant, 1921

4, 7 - 1921:Margaret Gorman

5, 6, 12, 13 - Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Margaret G. Cahill, 90, Is Dead; Was FirstMiss America, in 1921,” The New YorkTimes, October 5, 1995.

8 - Margaret Gorman: First Miss America and Washingtonian

Coles Phillips

            A few years ago I saw a book at the store, drawn to the cover art.  I didn’t remember what the book was called or who it was by, but I remembered that cover.  Early 2014, I found the book again because I remembered the cover.  The book is Fadeaway Girl by Martha Grimes.  I bought the book and read it (it was fine; turns out it was the latest in a series I hadn’t read), and the book talked briefly about the Fadeaway Girls of artist Coles Phillips.  I’ve been a little obsessed with his art ever since.  Not just the Fadeaway Girls, but his advertisements and magazine covers too.  As of this writing, two of my social media profiles are his work.

            Clarence Coles Phillips was born in October 1880 in Springfield, Ohio.  From the age of eight, and throughout his life, he raised pigeons.  He was always interested in art, too, but that wasn’t really a viable career in late-1800s Ohio.  After Coles graduated high school, his father got him a job at the American Radiator Company in Springfield.  Coles didn’t really care for this though and, after securing a letter of recommendation (you can never be too safe), he enrolled at Kenyon College in 1902.  While at Kenyon he joined the Alpha Delta Phi literary society, as well as doing illustrations.  The 1901-1904 editions of the Kenyon College yearbook, The Reveille, published some of his illustrations.  Coles decided that, like American Radiator, Kenyon wasn’t really right for him, and moved to Manhattan after his junior year.

            In New York, Coles pulled out that letter of recommendation from his boss at American Radiator in Ohio, and got a job at their New York office, rising up to be a salesman.  While at American Radiator, though, Coles was caught with a caricature of his boss and was fired.  By chance, a friend of Coles’ told J. A. Mitchell, publisher of Life, what happened.  Mitchell offered Coles a job at the humor magazine (not the photo-journalism magazine that would come later).  Coles decided to go to art school first though.

            For three months Coles took night classes at Chase School of Art.  Those three months were the only formal art training he ever had.  Coles decided school wasn’t right for him again.  He worked for a time at a studio that did assembly-line art; Coles was responsible for feet and ankles (which would come in handy when he did hosiery ads later on).  After this he moved briefly to an advertising agency, but decided to open his own instead.  In 1906, C. C. Phillips & Co. Agency opened with only two employees, one of whom was Edward Hopper, one of Coles’ former classmates.

            In 1907, Coles met with J. A. Mitchell and was hired on at Life.  Coles first nationally published illustration was a black and white centerfold of a young lady across the table from an old lady, captioned with a line from The Rubiyat.  This first illustration came out April 11, 1907, and more black and white centerfolds followed.  Coles’ art was very popular with Life’s readers.

            That same year, Coles met Teresa Hyde, a nurse.  She became his most frequent model in his early years, and in early 1910 they married.  From 1905, Coles had been living in New Rochelle, New York.  New Rochelle was popular with illustrators at this time and for years afterwards.  Illustrators J. C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell also lived in New Rochelle.

            Shortly after he began at Life, the magazine switched over to color covers and asked Coles to do the art.  They wanted something new and distinct to set their magazine apart.  Coles gave them his fadeaway idea.

            The story goes that Coles got the idea for the fadeaway technique when he was visiting a friend.  The friend was dressed in a tux, playing a violin, in a very dimly lit room.  Coles couldn’t see all of his friend, but rather the friend was suggested by “the highlights on the violin, the shine on his shoes, and the small bits of white shirt that were visible” (1).

Coles had tried his new technique in black and white, but wanted to try it in color.  Doing the fadeaway technique for the magazine cover required studying the proportions of the canvas and the final dimensions for the cover, to make sure the effect would not get lost between painting and printing.  Coles' first cover for Life was February 20, 1908.  This played with the ideas he was forming, but wasn’t a true fadeaway image.  He continued to tweak his work, and on May 28, 1908, the first Fadeaway Girl cover was published.  Like his friend in the tux in the dark, the Fadeaway Girl was “a figure whose clothing matched, and disappeared into, the background” (2).

Over the next four years, Coles did over fifty-four covers for Life, moving on to a contract with Good Housekeeping for covers for them for five years, becoming their sole cover artist beginning for two years beginning in July 1912.  Other magazines he did covers for included Colliers, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Saturday Evening Post, Women’s Home Journal, and Liberty.  In the middle of this time, in 1911, Coles Phillips went from C. Coles Phillips to just Coles Phillips.  Coles was one of the first illustrators to “insist that his name appear with all his images, including advertising work, and he usually painted a signature in print letters into each work” (3).

Part of why the fadeaway technique was so popular, on the publisher’s end, was that, while it was new and striking and popular with audiences left to fill-in the rest of the image themselves, the magazines were “getting by with single color or two-color covers in a day when full-color covers were de rigeur for the better magazines” (4).

In addition to producing art for magazines, Coles was also designing book covers.  These covers started quickly after his Life covers.  His cover for The Gorgeous Isle by Gertrude Atherton came out in October 1908.  Other books Coles did covers or illustrations for included The Siege of the Seven Suitors by Meredith Nicholson, Michael Thwaites’ Wife by Miriam Michelson, and The Fascinating Mrs. Halton by E. F. Benson.

By 1911, Coles Phillips’ art was so popular that a collection of his art from Life and Good Housekeeping was published in the collection A Gallery of Girls.  This was followed with another in 1912 called A Young Man’s Fancy.

            At the turn of the century, the Gibson Girl was the popular girl for illustrations and advertisements.  She was prim and proper, with big hair and sleepy eyes.  The girl of the teens and twenties was modern and athletic.  She showed more skin “but she still had a wholesome look to her” (5).  Coles Phillips helped popularize this image.

            In addition to his art in books and magazines, Coles Phillips did advertisements too, a rare artist at the time who didn’t see a problem with doing commercial art as well.  These advertisements are really what helped popularize the new girl of the teens and twenties.  A lot of his ads were for women’s clothing, including hosiery.  He also did ads for automobiles and flatware.  A lot of the companies he did work for necessitated a more modern and athletic girl than the Gibson Girl had been.  You can’t advertise hosiery without showing a girl’s legs.  Automobiles were seen as fast and daring, and so the girls became so too.  In 1924 he “caused a sensation with his ‘Miss Sunburn’, a bathing beauty created for Unguetine sun tanning lotion” (6).

            In 1920 Coles Phillips entered the Clark Equipment Company’s “The Spirit of Transportation” competition.  While he lost to Maxfield Parrish, James Cady Ewell, and Jonas Lie, his entry took everyone by surprise.  While a number of the entries had classical themes, Coles’ had a winged, naked woman carrying a torch in front of an automobile.  Like the 1924 Miss Sunburn ad, this was more than audiences were used to seeing in such a modern style.  Despite the shock some of his work elicited, Coles’ popularity didn’t diminish.  In 1921 and 1922 the U. S. Naval Academy included his work in its yearbook, Lucky Bag.  He continued to produced advertisements as well.

            In 1924, Coles was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the kidney.  He’d been sick on and off and would continue to be so until his death.  In January of 1927, problems with his eyesight made painting increasingly difficult and so he turned to writing.  He didn’t live much longer though.  On June 13, 1927, neighbor and friend, J. C. Leyendecker took Coles and Teresa’s four children to Manhattan for the Lindbergh ticker tape parade.  While they were out, Coles died at home from his kidney problems.  He was just 47.

            Coles Phillips’ art during his lifetime and afterwards was featured on “magazine covers, illustrations and ads, postcards, posters, poster stamps, prints, book illustrations, calendars, hosiery and silverware boxes, fans, blotters, streetcar signs, and booklets” (7).  In 1993 he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame (8).

            I’m just going to leave you with a bunch of his art (in addition to those scattered throughout this post).  I just love his techniques and the overall feel his art has.  I hope you all enjoy it as well.

1, 3, 7 - Norm Platnick, “Coles Phillips and the Fade-AwayLady,” American Art Archives.

2, 4 - Coles Phillips

5, 8 - Coles Phillips

6 - Coles Phillips: American Imagist

Elihu Palmer

            When I have no idea what to write about, or am coming up with too many ideas and can’t narrow them down, I ask other people what or who they would want me to look up and write about.  That’s how I did the Eastern State Penitentiary piece (hi mom!) and that’s how we have today’s post, courtesy of my husband.  Today’s is tricky (I think that’s part of why he picked it).  I fully admit that I usually start by Googling the topic or looking at Wikipedia.  I always try and find that information elsewhere, but Wikipedia is actually a pretty good place to start for basic information; some of their articles are even starred or locked, showing their accuracy.  Today’s topic, Elihu Palmer, had a stub on Wikipedia.  Oooookay…  Everywhere I looked had similar information, but with some extra tidbits here and there, so we’re going to see how well I pulled something together from little information.

            Elihu Palmer was born in 1764 in Canterbury, Connecticut.  That’s about all we known about him until he was in his twenties.  Already having issues learning about him…  When he was growing up, though, we know what was going on in the country.  We weren’t the United States yet, but we were getting there.  The country would be founded without explicit religion, and with the idea that all religions could be practiced free of persecution.  Many of the Founding Fathers were deists, believing that the natural world and reason and observation were all one needed to determine if there was a god or not.

            Unitarianism was also gaining in popularity at this time.  Unitarianism is a branch of Protestantism that believes in one god, not the Trinity like Catholics believe in.  They also believe that Jesus is not God himself, but human, though could possibly still be considered a savior.  In 1782 the first recognized Unitarian church opened in the United States in Boston, Massachusetts.  Unitarians were a very liberal branch of Christianity and the Enlightenment helped their beliefs gain popularity.  All of this is to say that even among ministers, some very radical ideas were emerging, and some of them broke with religion altogether.

            Elihu Palmer studied to be a Presbyterian minister at Dartmouth, and graduated in 1787, taking a position in what is now Queens in New York.  Within a year, though, Palmer was dismissed from his position.  In 1789, he moved to Philadelphia and joined a Baptist Church.  Ultimately, though, the Baptists too kicked him out.  In both of these cases, it seems that Palmer had begun speaking in more deist terms, and against the divinity of Jesus.  Palmer then “became somewhat of a physical, spiritual, and intellectual wanderer” (1).

            Palmer wound up in New York City where he became a Universalist, but also publicly rejected Jesus’s divinity, which wasn’t part of Universalist beliefs.  Palmer and his wife worked for deism and his ideas began to gain traction.  He even planned speeches challenging Jesus’s divinity, and published ads for them in the local papers (2).  With all of his outspokenness though, Palmer and his followers were banned from Philadelphia.

            Palmer decided to become a lawyer, and passed the Pennsylvania bar in 1793.  Despite having been banned, he returned to Philadelphia.  This was a fateful decision.  In 1793, a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia.  Over five thousand people died, Palmer’s wife being one of those who died.  Palmer survived, but was blinded.  “His enemies naturally saw his blindness as God’s punishment for heresy” (3), even though there were many religious people who died in the epidemic as well.

            After his blinding, Palmer couldn’t practice law anymore, and so became a travelling lecturer for deism.  His first stop was in Augusta, Georgia and he was received favorably, or at least cordially.  Georgia had based their separation of church and state rules on Virginia’s religious freedom act (4).  While in Augusta, Palmer also helped to collect “materials for Dr. Jedidiah Morse’s ‘Geography’” (5); Morse wrote geography textbooks, and his son would create Morse Code.

            After lecturing in Georgia, Palmer moved back to Philadelphia, and then on to New York, still lecturing throughout the East Coast.  Palmer’s first speech in New York took place on Christmas Day.  Palmer believed this was a day “well suited to the denunciation of both Christianity and Christ” (6).  In New York in 1796, Palmer formed the Deistical Society of New York.

            Palmer was an extreme deist, though, holding positions that many did not.  He believed that “the flawed teachings of Jesus were responsible for Christianity’s sordid history” (7) and that belief in supernatural experiences “undermines nature’s principles and furthers human misery by setting up unreasonable expectations” (8).  He believed in natural philosophy and criticized institutional Christianity.  Palmer was a close friend of Thomas Paine, but his beliefs were much more extreme than Paine’s.  Paine believed there were still ethical things in the New Testament and that there was virtue in the teachings of Jesus (9).  The two wrote similarly though, being incredibly honest about their beliefs and pulling no punches.   Palmer, though, didn’t care about what others believed if they were against his beliefs.

            Despite his abrasiveness, Palmer was popular and was important for secularism in the young country.  Deism was largely seen as only for educated and/or upper-class people.  Palmer brought deism down to a level that was accessible for everyone.  The Deistical Society he formed in New York, as well as in Philadelphia and Baltimore, had members that were shopkeepers and artisans.  “With the exception of doctors, almost no members of learned professions were recorded as members” (J).  Palmer founded two newspapers in 1800 and 1803; the only reason the papers had to stop publication was because the subscribers couldn’t pay their bills on time, not because there was a lack of subscribers.

            In addition to his speeches, Palmer wrote.  He wrote the speeches he gave, he wrote pieces for his and others’ newspapers, and he wrote a book, Principles of Nature, published first in 1801.  In Principles of Nature, Palmer reiterated his belief that “‘the world in infinitely worse’ for following Jesus” (10).  Palmer believed it was the “nonreligious advances in human thought” (11) which led to the creation of the printing press and eventually to the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions.  He believed the Enlightenment had allowed for the enfranchisement of men “who had never before been considered fit to govern themselves” (12).

            Principles of Nature had sold out three editions by the time of Palmer’s death in 1806 at 42 while on a speaking tour.  Upon his death, his widow (he remarried shortly after the death of his first wife) was left without property or money and only made due with the help of Thomas Paine.  Principles of Nature was still being published after Palmer’s death.  In 1819, the London publisher Richard Carlile published it with help from his wife while he was in prison for having published other scandalous or heretical books.  In 1824, two booksellers went to prison for three years each for selling Principles of Nature and The Age of Reason.

            That’s Elihu Palmer.  Still not a whole lot of information about him, but I’ve tried to do the best I could.  Even though we don’t know a lot about him personally, and his seeming abrasiveness led to some unpopularity, I think he’s important to know and know about.  Like mentioned earlier, he helped bring deism and Enlightenment ideas to those who maybe hadn’t heard of it.  He laid foundations for freethinking and secularism in the United States, even if we don’t know his name.  I’m glad my husband suggested him. 

1, 5 - Elihu Palmer

2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12 - Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holtand Company, 2004).

7, 10 - Elihu Palmer

8 - Palmer, Elihu

Black Cats

            I’m a bit behind on this one, as Hallowe’en was Saturday, but today’s still closer to Hallowe’en than last Monday was so… Let’s call it good.  As someone who has two mostly black cats, I find it interesting that they’re often considered bad luck.  Our black (and white) kitties are the sweetest cats (if a little butthole-y sometimes, haha).  So many people are predisposed against black cats though because they have such a negative history and negative connotations.  If anything, now, I’m biased towards them.

            There are twenty-two recognized breeds of cat that can have solid black cats.  The only breed of cat that is always all black is the Bombay; created in the 1950s by mixing the black American shorthair and the sable Burmese, they were created to look like a mini panther.  Slightly more male than female cats can be all black.  Because of the high melanin in black cats, they generally have that golden yellow eye color.  A lot of black cats are really just suppressed tabby cats; you can see the tabby in certain lights.  Black cats with a white root are called “black smoke”, while black cats that look brown in the sun are said to “rust” in the sunlight.

            To combat the negative history of black cats (which we’ll get to shortly), August 17 is “Black Cat Appreciation Day” and October 27 in Great Britain is “Black Cat Day”.  These days are trying to get more people to not be afraid of black cats and to love them.  In the United States in shelters, black cats have a lower adoption rate than other colors of cats.  Social media pushes towards making black cats favorable are helping.  Oddly, social media is also causing people to shy away from adopting black cats because they don’t photograph as well and therefore probably won’t become the next internet superstar cat.

            Now to get to the history of black cats (and a little on cats generally).  In Egypt, cats were revered.  They could catch and kill cobras and other pests.  A lot of cats were even honored with mummification.  In Ancient Egypt there was even a cat goddess, Bast or Bastet.  Bastet was a woman with the head of a cat (originally the head of a lion.  Cats as pets were becoming popular and so her image changed around 1000 BCE).  Egyptians believed they could gain Bastet’s favor by having black cats in their home.  Cats were so revered that killing a cat was a capital offense.

            The Norse liked cats as well.  One of the names that the goddess Freya was known as was Mistress of the Cats.  Her chariot was pulled by multiple pairs of large cats the color of night.  With the spread of Christianity, though, other religions became bad and the things they believed were turned on their head.  This is probably part of why cats became bad: the Egyptians and Norse liked them and Christianity couldn’t have that.

            We’ll get to black cats’ association with witches shortly, but first, in some places black cats are considered good luck.  In a lot of Britain black cats are good, and in Japan as well.  One belief in England was that “a lady who owns a black cat will have many suitors” (1).  In most of the UK, a black cat crossing your path is good.  In Germany, if the cat crosses from right to left it is considered bad luck, but if they cross from left to right it’s good luck.  In the English Midlands, a black cat is considered good luck to give to a bride on her wedding day.

            In some of England, and much of Europe, black cats are unlucky.  Essex was the first place in England to get cats, and they also had a lot of witchcraft.  In England and Ireland, there is the story of the Cat Sith, a large black cat, possibly with a white spot on its chest.  The Cat Sith is either a fairy disguised as a cat, or a witch in the form of a cat.  The Cat Sith could “steal a dead person’s sould before [the] gods could claim it”.

            By 1348, black cats were associated with the devil and were nearly exterminated.  This was the time of the Black Death, believed to be caused by God’s wrath.  People would try to “placate him by burning women accused of witchcraft” (2); black cats were guilty by association.  With the killing of so many cats, it actually caused the rat population to explode, making the plague worse.  In Kidwelly in southwest Wales, though, when people came to the town after the plague, the only living creature around was a black cat and so it became the town’s mascot.

            Cats were associated with witches because “alley cats were often cared for and fed by the poor lonely old ladies … later accused of witchery” (3).  Cats were then seen as these witches’ companions, which morphed into being their familiars.  In 1560s Lincolnshire, another story goes, a father and son were out walking at night when a black cat crossed their path, and so they threw rocks at it causing the cat to run into a house.  Unfortunately the house it ran into was that of a suspected witch.  When the woman was seen the next day she had bruises like the cat would have had, and was limping.  This helped lead to the belief that witches could turn into black cats at night.  It was even said that you shouldn’t discuss anything family related or personal in front of a black cat in case it was a witch in disguise.

            These beliefs helped feed into the Pilgrims paranoias related to the devil.  They were afraid of anything devil related.  Witches were brides of the devil or had signed a pact with him.  Anything related to the witch was therefore bad as well.  Black cats got caught up in this.  In some cases anyone caught with a black cat could “be severely punished or even killed” (4).  It didn’t help that the color black itself had negative connotations: black mass, black magic, etc.

            Witches also were associated with black cats because of the cats’ natural ability to blend in at night as well as cats’ highly nocturnal nature.  The way cats almost always land on their feet when they fall, and the reflective tapetum lucidum in their eyes, added to the strange behavior cats were known for.  If we add to all this that the Pilgrims were in a new and unfamiliar place and were suspicious of the unusual anyway, this added up to a lot of cries of witchcraft and lots of negative associations for black cats.

            King Charles I of England didn’t believe all this nonsense though.  He was on the other side of the matter and believed black cats to be lucky.  He owned a black cat and just loved it and believed it brought him good luck.  When his cat died, Charles believed his luck was gone as well.  Supposedly the next day Charles was arrested and charged with high treason; his luck had definitely run out.

            Other people also didn’t think of black cats as bad.  Sailors in search of a ship cat wanted a black cat because it would bring them good luck.  Fisherman’s wives also wanted black cats because of this association with the sea, hoping the cat “would be able to use their influence to protect their husbands at sea” (5).  If a black cat walked onto a ship and then walked off again, though, the ship would sink on its next trip.  In the 18^th century, pirates believed that a black cat walking towards you was bad luck, but walking away from you was good luck.  Many in the UK believed the opposite: that a cat was bringing you good luck and if it was walking away from you it was taking the luck away with it.

            In Yorkshire it was believed that black cats were lucky to own, but unlucky if they just crossed your path.  In Scotland a strange black cat appearing on your porch brought you prosperity.  In Japan, “black manekineko (beckoning cats) are a wish for good health” (6).

            In the 1880s, black became associated with anarchists and so a black cat in a fighting stance became an anarchist symbol.  In the early 20^th century, the International Workers of the World (IWW), or the Wobblies, used a black cat as their symbol, playing off its negative history.  If an employer the Wobblies had an issue with saw the black cat symbol, they knew it was bad luck for them.

            In England, early 20^th century football cartoons used black cats.  When one young supporter kept a black kitten in his pocket throughout the 1937 finals, and Sunderland won, Sunderland adopted the cat as their nickname/mascot.  In the early days of television, many channel thirteens used black cats as their mascots, as well, to play off the unlucky nature of their channel number. 

            There are positive cats, and specifically black cats, in popular culture though.  There are Dick Whittington and Puss in Boots.  There’s Felix the Cat, and Booboo Kitty from Laverne and Shirley.  There was a black cat named Isis on an original episode of Star Trek.  There are black cats in Edgar Allan Poe stories, Neil Gaiman stories; there’s a black cat character in a Marvel comic; there’s a Janet Jackson song.  There are still negative connotations related to black cats, but I think the positives are slowly gaining on them.  I, for one, love my black kitties and hate to think that people have silly superstitions about them.

1, 4, 5 - Black Cat

2 - Simon Edge, “Beware the black cat,” Express, July 31, 2014.

3 - Why Black Cats Are Considered Bad Luck

6 - Samantha M., “A History of Black Cats – the good. thebad. the thoughtfully creative.”, BlackCat Rescue, November 3, 2011.

The Royal Menagerie

            I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately (to the detriment of my audiobook listening…).  My mom recommended the Rex Factor podcast, and it’s great.  The gist of it is, the hosts go through all the Kings and Queens of England and rate them in different categories and determine if the monarch has the Rex Factor.  Presumably (because I’m not that far yet) they’ll pit those who do have the Rex Factor against each other and try and figure out who the best English monarch was.  I think they’re doing Scotland now that they have finished England, which should be cool too.  All this to say: I heard about today’s topic in a couple episodes of Rex Factor and decided to look into it further.

            Throughout history, monarchs have been exchanging crazy gifts as a way of showing how powerful they are and to forge alliances.  This included food stuffs, gems, princesses (because really, you’re giving away your daughter to another country in order to forge an alliance, and what shows power more than that?), as well as all sorts of wild and exotic animals.  A lot of these animals were not even natural to the country that was gifting them, and so it showed that monarch’s wealth in that he could pay for this crazy animal to come from India or Africa or wherever and just give it away.  Some animals signified the strength of the monarch giving it away as well.

            England was given a lot of gifts of exotic animals over the years; as well as being symbols of wealth and power for those gifting them, they were symbols of power for the English monarch as well, often being purely “for the entertainment and curiosity of the court” (1).  Some monarchs wanted to show off so much, they acquired exotic animals on their own.  William the Conqueror was the first king to keep animals.  His home, Woodstock, was stocked with a number of exotic animals, though what kinds they were isn’t known.  William’s son, Henry I, enclosed Woodstock’s grounds and expanded the collection of animals to ultimately include “lions, leopards, lynxes, camels, owls and a porcupine” (2).  These two were really just the king keeping these animals because he wanted to, the gifted animals would begin later.

            The first records of what became known as The Tower Menagerie or The Royal Menagerie began in 1204 with King John.  John kept his animals at the Tower of London, a practice that would continue for over six-hundred years.  We know John received three boat loads of animals from Normandy, but we don’t know what they were.  We do know he had lions and bears, though.  The only way we know he really had anything is because of bookkeeping records referencing them.

John’s son, Henry III, is usually credited with the creation of the Menagerie, because we know so much more about the amounts and kinds of animals he had.  Henry III came to power in 1216; the first known gifts of animals were in 1235.  Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, gave Henry III three lions or leopards as a wedding gift upon Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence.  Frederick II had married Henry III’s sister, Isabella, and “this gift was a sign of their alliance and friendship” (3).  Frederick gave Henry three lions (or leopards) because there were three lions on Henry’s shield; this emblem is still used on English football and cricket patches.

            In 1251 Henry III was given a “white bear” from King Haakon IV of Norway, generally believed to be a polar bear, though that term was not in use then.  The bear was kept muzzled and chained when it was on land, but was put on a large rope and was allowed to fish in the Thames.  The sheriffs had “to pay fourpence a day towards the upkeep” of the bear (4).

            The sheriffs’ having to pay to keep the king’s animals is a recurring theme.  Just three years later they had to pay to build an elephant house at the Tower for the arrival of at least one, male, African Elephant from King Louis IX of France.  The elephant obviously needed a lot more space than the lions did, and so a forty foot long, wooden elephant house was built with the money from the sheriffs.  The elephant house eventually was converted into prison cells.

            In 1264, the animals were moved to the west end of the Tower of London.  This new area had “rows of cages with arched entrances, enclosed behind grilles.  They were set in two storeys, and it appears that the animals used the upper cages during the day and were moved to the lower storey at night” (5).  Most popularly and in the long-term, the lions were kept here.  Originally just the Bulwark, this part of the Tower of London became known as Lion Tower under the reign of Edward I at the beginning of the fourteenth century.  Edward I created the position, Master of the King’s Bears and Apes, later called Keeper of the Lions and Leopards.

            We’ll skip ahead a few hundred years to the reign of Elizabeth I.  At some point during his reign, Henri IV of France had been sent an Indian elephant.  He found the elephant too expensive to feed, though, so he sent it on to Elizabeth I.  Elizabeth I is also the first monarch to open the menagerie to the public; previously it had only been for the enjoyment of the court.  At the time she opened it to the public, the menagerie included “lionesses, a lion, a tiger, a lynx, a wolf, a porcupine and an eagle” (6).  Under the reign of James I, public shows included lions, bears, and dogs fighting as entertainment (7).

            While James I was king, the British Empire was expanding, and he received gifts accordingly.  He received “a flying squirrel from Virginia, a tiger, a lioness, five camels and an elephant” (8); the camels and elephant were a gift from the King of Spain in 1623.  James was so invested in his lions in particular that he created a special nippled bottle so orphaned cubs could be fed.  James I’s elephant was housed at St. James rather than at the Tower of London and “was given wine daily from April to September, as it was believed it couldn’t drink water at that time of year” (9).  James I expanded the menagerie; because it was now open to the public, James had viewing platforms installed.

            Jumping forward a bit again, in 1672 Christopher Wren supervised the building of a new Lion House at the Tower.  People were still flocking in to see the animals and new structures were needed.

            Along with all the new visitors, misfortune streamed in.  In 1686, Mary Jenkinson was petting a lion’s paw “when it suddenly caught her arm ‘with his Claws and mouth, and most miserably tore her Flesh from the Bone’” (10).  Mary’s arm was amputated, but she still died.

            In addition to animals harming humans, humans harmed the animals, whether through intent or negligence.  Many of the animals had to travel great distances to get to England and then to the Menagerie.  People on the ships and in England didn’t know how to take care of these exotic animals and so many died on the voyages over.  Once in England, those that survived would still suffer due to their keepers just not knowing how to handle them.  Many animals were kept in cages that were much too small and were fed food that wasn’t part of their diet.  In addition to the elephant drinking wine mentioned above, some ostriches also suffered because of what people thought their diet was.  In the late eighteenth century, two ostriches were sent from the Dey of Tunis.  It was commonly believed at the time, for whatever reason…, that ostriches could digest iron.  In 1791, one of the ostriches died after having eaten over eighty nails that were fed to it (11).

            These animals were on display to entertain, not to educate, and everyone suffered for it.  Leopards were made or allowed to play with umbrellas; zebras were allowed to roam and one went into a soldier’s canteen and proceeded to drink what was available; while still on the ship it travelled over on, a baboon threw a nine-pound cannon ball at a young sailor boy on the ship and killed him; a wolf escaped; a monkey bit a soldier’s leg; in the 1780s monkeys were living in a completely furnished room, as if they were people.  Much like Mary Jenkinson above though, according to the 1810 guidebook, one monkey tore part of a boy’s leg off and so the monkeys were removed (12).

            In the early eighteenth century it cost three half pence to get in, or you could bring a cat or dog to be fed to the lions.  At this time the menagerie had slipped in the number of animals it had; there were really only lions, tigers, hyenas, and bears.  When George IV became king in 1820 (though he had been Prince Regent since 1811), he began rebuilding the menagerie.  With the help of his Keeper, Alfred Cops, George IV built the menagerie up from four animals (a lion, a panther, a tiger, and “a grizzly bear called Martin” (13)) in 1821, up to over sixty species and over two-hundred-eighty individual animals in 1828.  New additions to the menagerie included “a zebra, an alligator, a bearded griffin, a pig-faced baboon, an ocelot, kangaroos and a Bornean bear” (14).

            Alfred Cops was a good Keeper.  He seemed to really care about the animals and knew a bit better how to care for them.  He even brought some of his own animals to the Tower when he moved in (Keepers of the Royal Menagerie lived up in Lion Tower).  Despite all this, there were still accidents with the animals.  Cops himself had a boa close around his neck once while trying to feed it.  In early-mid 1830 a leopard attacked the person who had come in to clean its exercise yard.  In December 1830 a door was accidentally raised “allowing a lion and a Bengal tiger and tigress to meet” (15).  The animals fought for half an hour and were “only separated by applying heated rods to the mouths and nostrils of the tigers who were winning” (16); the lion still died a few days later.

            It was becoming apparent that the Tower was no longer suitable (if it really ever was) for the keeping of animals and for crowds to come through to see them.  When William IV became king, he really didn’t care about the menagerie, and so the animals were moved in 1831.  The Zoological Society of London at Regent’s Park received thirty-two animals beginning in 1831, and Dublin Zoo and another zoo received others.  By 1835 the last of the animals were transferred to Regent’s Park “after one of the lions was accused of biting a soldier” (17).  Only Alfred Cops and his personal animals remained.  When Cops died in 1853, Lion Tower was torn down.

            Despite this, the monarchy continued to receive animals from other countries and still does today.  Queen Elizabeth II has received jaguars and sloths from Brazil and was sent an elephant from Cameroon as a wedding anniversary present (18).  In 2011, an art installation by Kendra Haste was on display at the Tower of London.  The wire lions, near where Lion Tower stood, were a big hit; the display also included an elephant, polar bear, and baboons.

1, 15, 16 - Tower of London – The Royal Menagerie:life with the lions

2, 5 - Menagerie

3, 7, 10, 11, 12 - Tower of London - Tragic andSurprising Stories

4, 17 - Tower of London - Menagerie

6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18 - Julia Stuart, “Thepolar bear who lived at the Tower… along with a grumpy lion and a baboon whothrew cannon balls: Britain’s first (and most bizarre) zoo”, The Daily Mail, September 21, 2010.

The Father of Immunology

            This is another subject recommended by my mom.  A couple weeks ago I made the mistake of getting into a discussion about vaccines on Facebook.  I knew it was a bad idea as I was doing it but couldn’t help myself.  As you can imagine it didn’t go well…  I related the story to my mom and she suggested researching vaccines, or at least Edward Jenner.  So I did.

            Edward Anthony Jenner was born on May 17, 1749, the eighth of nine children.  His father was the Rev. Stephen Jenner, the vicar in Berkeley.  Because his father was a vicar, Edward had a better education than most.  He went to school at Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester, where he was inoculated against smallpox.  This inoculation supposedly had a lifelong impact on his health and may have affected his further career.

            When he was fourteen, Edward was apprenticed to a surgeon, Mr. Daniel Ludlow, in South Gloucestershire.  Edward stayed with Mr. Ludlow for seven years.  In 1770, at the end of the seven years, Edward was apprenticed to John Hunter and his colleagues at St. George’s Hospital to study surgery and anatomy.  John  Hunter gave Edward the advice, “Don’t think; try”, the famous advice of William Harvey.  Edward returned to his boyhood area in 1773 and became a successful doctor and surgeon; he kept in contact with Hunter though, and Hunter even suggested Edward for the Royal Society.

            Back in Berkeley, Edward and some colleagues started the Gloucestershire Medical Society.  The group had meals and read medical papers.  Edward contributed papers on “angina pectoris, ophthalmia, and cardiac valvular disease and commented on cowpox” (1).  Edward was part of a similar group near Bristol as well.

            In 1788, Edward was elected to the Royal Society for a paper he wrote on the nested cuckoo; natural history was a lifelong passion of his.  In 1792, Edward received his MD from the University of St Andrews.  In March of 1788, Edward married Catharine Kingscote.  Edward and Catharine may have met while he was doing a ballooning experiment on or near her family’s property.  They would have two sons and a daughter together before Catharine’s death in 1815 from tuberculosis.

            A bit of background on vaccinations and smallpox.  Previous attempts had been made to stop people from catching these horrible diseases.  The Circassians had been doing inoculations for as long as was known, and the Turks had learned of it from them.  In 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought variolation to Britain from Istanbul.  Voltaire wrote that 60% of the population at the time caught smallpox, and 20% of the population would die from it.  Smallpox was devastating countries’ populations.  In 1765 John Fewster wrote a paper on the link of smallpox to cowpox, but did not pursue the connection.

            Starting in the 1770s, five people in both England and Germany were testing cowpox as a treatment against smallpox, but did not make proper headway.  At the time it was understood that milkmaids had relative immunity to smallpox.  Edward Jenner believed that if we could put pus from cowpox blisters into healthy people, it would protect them from smallpox.

            On May 14, 1796, Edward tested his theory on the eight-year-old son of his gardener.  Edward put pus from a milkmaid’s cowpox blisters into small cuts on both of the boy’s arms.  The boy developed a bit of a fever but was basically fine.  After the boy had recovered, Edward gave him the normal course of variolation for smallpox and the boy was fine; Edward tried again a while later and the boy was again fine.  This helped show that 1) we could prevent smallpox better than we’d been doing and 2) that we could create immunity from person to person, people did not have to come into contact with cows.

            Edward tried his procedure on twenty-three other subjects and the results held.  Edward published his findings and vaccination took off.  (Some of the conclusions Edward made were correct, others have been disproved due to improving science, but his theory about vaccination holds.)  Edward’s discovery spread across Europe and the world; by 1840 Britain had banned variolation and made vaccination for smallpox free of charge.  All this work on vaccination meant Edward couldn’t keep up his normal practice though; he was granted large sums of money to keep up his research rather than having to go back to his normal job.

            From 1803 to its disbanding in 1809, Edward was president of the Jennerian Society which was “concerned with promoting vaccination to eradicate smallpox” (2).  In 1808 the National Vaccine Establishment was founded; Edward didn’t like who was running it though and so was not very involved.  In 1805, Edward became a founding member of the Medical and Chirurgical Society, which later became the Royal Society of Medicine.  In 1802 Edward was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1806 a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

            In 1811 Edward returned to London.  He noted that the cases of smallpox that were around among the vaccinated were of much less severity than those of those who weren’t vaccinated.  This continued to show his research to be correct, and allowed him to continue making observations on vaccinations over time.

            In 1821 Edward was appointed physician to King George IV.  He was also elected mayor of Berkeley, and was a justice of the peace.  Throughout this time, Edward continued his natural history work too.  In 1823 he presented a paper to the Royal Society on bird migrations.

On January 25, 1823, Edward suffered a case of apoplexy that paralyzed his right side.  The next day, January 26, he suffered a stroke and died.  He was 73.  Edward Jenner was buried at St Mary’s in Berkeley and was survived by a son and a daughter.

            Edward’s recognitions did not stop with his death.  English settlers to Pennsylvania named a number of towns for him in Pennsylvania.  His house is now a small museum.  There are statues to him all over England.  Hospitals all over have wings named for him.  He has a crater on the moon named for him, and there’s even a character on The Walking Dead named Jenner for him.

Edward Jenner’s work laid the foundations for immunology, leading to him being called “The Father of Immunology”.  Most importantly, I think, in 1979 the World Health Organization “declared smallpox an eradicated disease” (3), largely due to vaccinations, but from other measures as well.  Some samples of smallpox still exist in places like the CDC, but hopefully we will never need them.

            Vaccinations are so important.  As that last paragraph says, the WHO has declared smallpox eradicated.  We are close to that with other diseases too, but access to vaccines in some places across the globe makes that difficult.  There’s no reason that some of these deadly diseases should be popping back up in the United States of all places.  They were nearly eradicated here and due to the anti-vaxx movement they’re coming back (I’m think of measles, etc. right now).  This is ridiculous.  People put their lives at risk to vaccinate rather than potentially get some of these diseases (look at those numbers from Voltaire again!  Also, I recommend finding the clip from the John Adams miniseries where Abigail vaccinates –or I guess actually variolates– the family against smallpox), and we’re not vaccinating because that’s somehow seen as worse?  I don’t get it… Okay, soapbox-ing over.

1, 2, 3 – Edward Jenner

Sigrid Undset

            Apologies for the lack of post last week.  I was behind to begin with, I got halfway through typing up my notes but I was feeling horrible, and wound up spending all day in bed instead of doing anything at all productive. L  But here we are this week with the post I should’ve written for last week.  Hopefully that won’t happen again.

            This week we have a Nobel Prize winner in literature for a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while (I finally picked it up last weekend!), Sigrid Undset.  Sigrid was born at her mother’s childhood home in Kalundborg, Denmark on May 20, 1882.  She was the oldest of three daughters of Charlotte Undset (née Anna Maria Charlotte Gyth) and Ingvald Martin Undset, a Norwegian architect.  When Sigrid was two, her family moved to Kristiana, Norway (what is now Oslo; the name changed in 1925).

            When Sigrid was eleven, her father died after a prolonged illness.  This put the family in financial trouble, and Sigrid had to give up her hopes of going to university.  Instead, Sigrid enrolled in a one year secretarial course, and at age sixteen went to work for an engineering company in Kristiana; she would work there for ten years.

            Throughout this time, Sigrid was writing fiction.  When she was sixteen she had started a novel set in Denmark in the Middle Ages.  This was completed by age twenty-two, but it was turned down by the publishers she approached.  Two years later, Sigrid had a new manuscript; it was only eighty pages and was set in contemporary Kristiana, focusing on a middle-class woman.  This too was turned down at first, but was then published.  The work, Fru Maria Oulie, created a stir upon its publication; the opening line reads “I have been unfaithful to my husband” and scandalized its readers with its frank discussion of adultery.

            The publication of Fru Maria Oulie made Sigrid Undset a “promising young author in Norway” (1).  In 1907 she joined the Norwegian Authors’ Union; in the 1930s she would head their Literary Council and was one of their chairmen as well.

            From the time Fru Maria Oulie was published in 1907 until 1919, Sigrid wrote about life in contemporary Kristiana, “about the city and its inhabitants,” “working people, of trivial family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children” (2).  She focused a lot on women and who and how they loved.  In 1911 Jenny was published, and in 1914 Varren (Spring) was published.  All of her works sold well immediately, and after her third book was published, she was able to quit her office job to write full time.

            Sigrid was given a writer’s scholarship and travelled throughout Europe.  She went to Denmark, Germany, and Italy, where she spent nine months in Rome.  Her parents had loved Rome and she spent her time travelling to all the same places she knew her parents had visited.  In Rome there was a group of Scandinavian writers and artists and Sigrid made friends with them.

            In Rome in 1909, Sigrid met the Norwegian painter Anders Castus Svarstad.  He was nine years older, and was married with three children, but they fell in love.  They waited three years for Anders’s divorce to finalize, and then married in 1912.  They travelled to London for six months and then came back to Rome where their first child was born in January 1913.  The child was a boy, named for his father.  By 1919, Sigrid had had another child, a mentally handicapped daughter, and had taken in Anders’s other three children, including a mentally handicapped son.

            Throughout this time, Sigrid continued writing, working on more novels and some short stories.  She also entered public debates, critical of women’s issues, and the moral and ethical issues she saw that had led to the First World War.

            In late 1919, Sigrid moved to Lillehammer, Norway with her two children, and pregnant with her third.  The plan was for Sigrid to rest in Lillehammer while hers and Anders’ home was being built in Kristiana.  However, the marriage broke up and the couple divorced before their home was completed.  Sigrid stayed in Lillehammer and her third child was born there in August of that year.

            Within two years, though, the home that was being built was completed.  Bjerkebæk was a large home with traditional Norwegian architecture.  It had a “large fenced garden with views of the town and the villages around” (3).

While the home was being completed, Sigrid worked on a Norwegian retelling of the King Arthur myth.  She also “studied Old Norse manuscripts and Medieval chronicles and visited and examined Medieval monasteries, both at home and abroad”, becoming “an authority on the period … and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her first novel about the Middle Ages” (4).  Her works are “precise, realistic, and never romanticized” (5), showing true human emotions, just set in a different time period.  By using the Middle Ages, she was able to give herself the necessary distance, but also allowed for her admiration of Medieval Christendom.

The work this research led to is Krisin Lavransdatter, a trilogy published between 1920 and 1922.  The trilogy shows “life in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, portrayed through the experiences of a woman from birth until death” (6).  In addition to the attention to detail about the historical period she was writing about, Sigrid employed modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness in Kristin Lavransdatter; these were cut out of the first English translations of the work though.

Around this same period, Sigrid became a Catholic.  Her parents had been atheists and her upbringing was secular, though living in a Lutheran country she had been baptized and had attended Lutheran church growing up.  With the outbreak of the First World War and the break-up of her marriage, Sigrid had had a crisis of faith, and Catholicism was the answer for her.  In 1924, at age 42, Sigrid was received into the Catholic Church and also became a lay Dominican.

Sigrid’s conversion was scandalous at the time in Norway.  As mentioned, Norway was a Lutheran country; almost no one practiced Catholicism.  There was also a lot of anti-Catholic rhetoric in the country at the time.  As an author, Sigrid was also part of the intelligentsia at the time.  They too didn’t accept her though, being mostly socialist and communist themselves.  Sigrid was open about her Catholicism though, defending the Catholic Church in public debates.

Her next work after Kristin Lavransdatter was Olav Audunssøn (translated in English as The Master of Hestviken).  Olav, a four volume novel, was written during her conversion and published right after; it takes place during a time period when Norway was a Catholic country.  After Olav, Sigrid went back to writing contemporary books, set in Oslo and “with a strong Catholic element” (7).  In 1928 Sigrid won the Nobel Prize for Literature “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages” (8).

Following this, Sigrid was translating the Icelandic Sagas into Modern Norwegian and writing literary essays on English literature, mainly on the Brontës and D. H. Lawrence.  In 1934 she published Eleven Years Old, an autobiographical piece about her childhood in Kristiana.  In the 1930s she was also starting a new historical piece, this time to be set in eighteenth century Scandinavia, but only one volume was published before World War Two broke out.  After the war Sigrid was too broken herself to finish writing it.

With World War Two came a lot of changes in Sigrid’s part of the world.  Stalin invaded Finland; Sigrid donated her Nobel Prize to the Finnish war effort.  In 1940 Germany invaded Norway.  Throughout the 1930s Sigrid had been critical of Hitler, and so fled Norway upon the German invasion.  She and her son first went to Sweden and then to the United States; they lived in Brooklyn and she pleaded for help for her country and for the Jews.  In 1940, also, her oldest son, Anders, was killed in battle (her daughter had died before the war broke out).

After World War Two ended, Sigrid returned to Norway, but never wrote again.  Sigrid Undset died in Lillehammer on June 10, 1949 at age 67.  She is buried in Mesnali, east of Lillehammer.  The son and daughter that predeceased her are buried there as well; there are three black crosses marking their graves.

Sigrid Undset has been honored in many ways.  In addition to the Nobel Prize in 1928, there is a crater on Venus named Undset for her.  She was on the 500 kronur note and a 1982 2 kronur postage stamp in Norway.  In 1998, Sweden put her on a stamp as well.  Her home of Bjerkebæk is now a part of the Maihaugen museum.

            The book I finally got of Sigrid Undset’s is Kristin Lavransdatter, but now I’m interested in her other works.  I think her books about contemporary Norway would be really interesting, reading about how Norway was in the early twentieth century, especially Fru Maria Oulie and its controversial opening line.  I’m also now interested in her more Catholic novels, though I’d wait and read those after I’d read her earlier works.  (While I love Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I wish I had read it after I’d read his earlier works.  He went through a similar conversion to Catholicism and it becomes more and more prevalent in his works.)  I hope I’ve inspired you all to go find some Sigrid Undset books as well!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 – Sigrid Undset

8 – Nobel Laureates in Literature