"A strange Thing written upon a Glass Window in Queen Elizabeth's Time"
March 17, 2024 9:26 AM Subscribe
Madeleine Pelling (The Telegraph, 3/17/2024), "Seriously scandalous and surprisingly sexy: how the Georgians redefined graffiti" -- archived: "In October 1731, ... 'Hurlothrumbo' set out into the freezing streets of London. Armed only with a pencil and paper, he was on a most peculiar hunt. His quarry? The graffiti that lined the city's many surfaces, left behind by its inhabitants." The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, part 1 and 2, 3, & 4. The play Hurlothrumbo. Pelling on women archaeologists in the 1780s via the Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Pelling's Writing on the Wall, reviewed (archived) and at Goodreads / StoryGraph. Pelling's podcast, most recently discussing St Patrick.
In Hurlothrumbo's collection, part 1, I noticed one example that's doubtless misinformed homophobia, but it begins "Omnia Vincit Amor" and discusses "kisses" in a context that reminds me that was also a euphemism that Anne Lister used a century later for sex with other women.
The review of Pelling's book suggests she looks for LGBTQ+ examples elsewhere too:
The review of Pelling's book suggests she looks for LGBTQ+ examples elsewhere too:
Pelling sometimes reaches forward into the 19th century. In 1865, the poet John Addington Symonds was walking in Regent’s Park when he spotted a wall drawing of male genitalia "glued together" and adorned with the words "prick to prick so sweet." Symonds, a married man grappling with his homosexuality, was "pierced … to the marrow of my soul." He wrote that he had seen "a score of graffiti in my time. But they had not hitherto appealed to me. Now the wolf leapt out."posted by Wobbuffet at 1:34 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]
presumably the original text was censored and highly selective
These kinds of texts are fun for sure, but it's no good treating them as if they were scholarly compendiums. I expect half of the contents, if not more, were simply made up. Thus, the compendium is more an interesting subject of study in itself than a study of 18th-century reality.
posted by praemunire at 2:13 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]
These kinds of texts are fun for sure, but it's no good treating them as if they were scholarly compendiums. I expect half of the contents, if not more, were simply made up. Thus, the compendium is more an interesting subject of study in itself than a study of 18th-century reality.
posted by praemunire at 2:13 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]
I don't know Maddy Pelling, but I recall seeing things from her like a year or so ago where she was out actually looking at surviving examples of graffiti relevant to her work. A more recent example I see doesn't seem like the same kind of material, but if she's taking Hurlothrumbo seriously, my supposition is that's based on some amount of empirical cross-checking. I guess that's another thing to look for in her book though.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:27 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:27 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]
The thing about graffiti on glass windows is that you need a diamond (or something similarly sharp) to do it, so the range of people doing it is pretty restricted, unless they wew using a glass cutter (I have no idea how Georgian glaziers cut glass), There are certaunly some from the Elizabethan era. The most famous was by Siir Walter Raleigh, who wrote "fain would I climb but that I fear to fall" on a window using a diamond ing the queen had given him, followed by a reply from Elizabeth I saying "if thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all"
Having said that, when I worked briefly at a big restoration project on the inner courtyard at Chatsworth House (the window frames had at one point been gilded. Imagine!), the stonemasons working on the upper floors (servant's bedrooms) were very excited to find that one footman had listed the names of all the female servants he had slept with, with dates on a window.
posted by Fuchsoid at 4:13 PM on March 17 [5 favorites]
Having said that, when I worked briefly at a big restoration project on the inner courtyard at Chatsworth House (the window frames had at one point been gilded. Imagine!), the stonemasons working on the upper floors (servant's bedrooms) were very excited to find that one footman had listed the names of all the female servants he had slept with, with dates on a window.
posted by Fuchsoid at 4:13 PM on March 17 [5 favorites]
Also, wouldnt Hurlothrumbo be a great sock puppet name?
posted by Fuchsoid at 4:19 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]
posted by Fuchsoid at 4:19 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]
Yep, one comparable example is window graffiti by Robert Burns, including a poem left on the window of an inn in 1790 that at least alludes to sex:
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:08 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]
I MURDER hate by field or flood,Here's a picture of the diamond-tipped stylus he used.
Tho’ glory’s name may screen us;
In wars at home I’ll spend my blood,
Life-giving wars of Venus:
The deities that I adore
Are social Peace and Plenty;
I’m better pleased to make one more,
Than be the death of twenty.
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:08 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]
if she's taking Hurlothrumbo seriously, my supposition is that's based on some amount of empirical cross-checking
Yes, and I've cross-checked some--kids do say the darnedest things!
Obviously, people wrote graffiti in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as they did in most times and places where there were writing systems, and despite the random depredations of time, some of it has even survived down to us, which is, in fact, pretty cool and interesting. (As is the text itself!) But the early modern/modern English were also no more immune to embellished stories of folk wit and wisdom than we are today. Consider "Overheard in New York."
posted by praemunire at 5:44 PM on March 17
Yes, and I've cross-checked some--kids do say the darnedest things!
Obviously, people wrote graffiti in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as they did in most times and places where there were writing systems, and despite the random depredations of time, some of it has even survived down to us, which is, in fact, pretty cool and interesting. (As is the text itself!) But the early modern/modern English were also no more immune to embellished stories of folk wit and wisdom than we are today. Consider "Overheard in New York."
posted by praemunire at 5:44 PM on March 17
I'm not sure anyone in any era has taken what purports to be graffiti as a record of facts that occurred, but which content seems unlikely to be actual 18th C. graffiti?
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:04 PM on March 17
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:04 PM on March 17
> you need a diamond (or something similarly sharp) to do it,
It's all about hardness ... you can scratch glass with case-hardened steel, which would have existed back then, although it will wear out quicker than the Tungsten Carbide or diamond tools we'd use today.
posted by nickzoic at 6:38 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]
It's all about hardness ... you can scratch glass with case-hardened steel, which would have existed back then, although it will wear out quicker than the Tungsten Carbide or diamond tools we'd use today.
posted by nickzoic at 6:38 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]
which content seems unlikely to be actual 18th C. graffiti
Pretty much any of it could be made up. The author of the text was presumably trying to sound plausible, yet funny. (Again, consider something like the late lamented "Overheard in New York.") If I was to single one out, the one where I'm really squinting at her is where she seems to be treating the supposed "Celia" (standard poetic name for a pretty girl, already a bit of a flag) graffito as not only real, but recording an actual story rather than being itself just a dirty joke!
Maybe in the book itself she gives really good reasons to think the "graffiti" were authentic, but which is more likely, that a guy made up a bunch of stuff he thought would sound witty on urinals (maybe with some actual graffiti he'd seen tossed in there, some of the more famous stuff in the more notable locations) to sell a funny book (this kind of "wit" is well within the literary tradition by this point), or that he went around to a ton of London privies dutifully recording material as a kind of folk anthropologist? (Note by the second edition people were apparently sending in entries from the universities, which is even more suspicious!)
Profile's not a scholarly publisher, Pelling has a Ph.D. but she doesn't seem to have a scholarly job right now, has never published a scholarly (or any other) book, and seems to be mostly working in popular history; this may just not be a rigorous scholarly study. It's still a good story, still worth writing about--heck, I'd pick up the book when it went on sale on Kindle the way this subgenre of popular history book tends to. Even the Guardian piece itself for long stretches doesn't treat the specific graffiti examples as too literal; I wouldn't be shocked if she has an intro section in the chapter the Guardian piece is drawn from where she says that most of these particular graffiti aren't attested elsewhere, but se non è vero, è molto ben trovato.
posted by praemunire at 1:33 PM on March 18
Pretty much any of it could be made up. The author of the text was presumably trying to sound plausible, yet funny. (Again, consider something like the late lamented "Overheard in New York.") If I was to single one out, the one where I'm really squinting at her is where she seems to be treating the supposed "Celia" (standard poetic name for a pretty girl, already a bit of a flag) graffito as not only real, but recording an actual story rather than being itself just a dirty joke!
Maybe in the book itself she gives really good reasons to think the "graffiti" were authentic, but which is more likely, that a guy made up a bunch of stuff he thought would sound witty on urinals (maybe with some actual graffiti he'd seen tossed in there, some of the more famous stuff in the more notable locations) to sell a funny book (this kind of "wit" is well within the literary tradition by this point), or that he went around to a ton of London privies dutifully recording material as a kind of folk anthropologist? (Note by the second edition people were apparently sending in entries from the universities, which is even more suspicious!)
Profile's not a scholarly publisher, Pelling has a Ph.D. but she doesn't seem to have a scholarly job right now, has never published a scholarly (or any other) book, and seems to be mostly working in popular history; this may just not be a rigorous scholarly study. It's still a good story, still worth writing about--heck, I'd pick up the book when it went on sale on Kindle the way this subgenre of popular history book tends to. Even the Guardian piece itself for long stretches doesn't treat the specific graffiti examples as too literal; I wouldn't be shocked if she has an intro section in the chapter the Guardian piece is drawn from where she says that most of these particular graffiti aren't attested elsewhere, but se non è vero, è molto ben trovato.
posted by praemunire at 1:33 PM on March 18
This is grand, Wobbuffet. Thank you for the post.
posted by doctornemo at 4:33 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]
posted by doctornemo at 4:33 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]
Nelson, that also brought to mind Shelley:
"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few."
posted by doctornemo at 4:34 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]
"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few."
posted by doctornemo at 4:34 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]
Pretty much any of it could be made up.
I appreciate you did essentially address the question. What it makes clear is you're approaching this from a generic point of view where anything could be true--could be lies all the way down. And, like, it could be? But the conversation at this point not only isn't informed by anything empirical, and not only isn't informed by anything comparative (like the Burns poems or the "long established and well known" practice of window pane graffiti using diamonds), and not only isn't informed by relevant history (like London becoming, in the late 17th/early 18th C. the center point of European trade in rough cut diamonds)--take a moment to consider whether these feel like surprising external evidence backing up Hurlothrumbo saying this graffiti had been etched with diamonds by people who could afford it--it's at best an internal textual evaluation of an 18th C. text that's not even informed by comparison with, you know, comparable 18th C. texts--fabrications, fiction, verifiable nonfiction, and otherwise--combined in a pretty dubious way with evoking tropes about the reliability of popular history and taking a dump on a young scholar's interest in reaching a wide audience
So, for a moment taking texts alone as a kind of evidence, in the 1720s-1730s specifically, we're talking about an era when fictional narratives--composed as fiction--were still routinely terrible at verisimilitude in spite of being marketed as being plausible. Famously, that changed very gradually throughout the 18th C. (the "rhetoric of probability" dissertation I posted here previously gives an overview while trying to frame it in a new way), and if we suppose fiction--distinct from fabrication--is what Hurlothrumbo was aiming at, then they were a genius with superfluous details that weren't what audiences expected from fiction at the time. Dozens of long examples contemporary with Hurlothrumbo's text leap to mind, but here's a pamphlet that's typical and in many ways close in nature: Round About Our Coal-Fire, a short book of games and earthy humor for Christmas. Its earthy anecdotes are just wildly non-specific and--importantly--non-specific in the ways jest books and pamphlet fiction usually were. Hurlothrumbo's textual apparatus--full of dates, author initials, locations, etc.--is more detailed than relatively informal non-fiction too, e.g. this article on the origins of children's games, again published around the same time and just something that happened to be at the top of my mind.
Meanwhile, one of the reasons I posted Maddy Pelling's video lecture about women archaeologists in the 1780s is because it is relevant to what you are saying. You've said "it's no good treating them as if they were scholarly compendiums," but Maddy Pelling is familiar with scholarly texts in the same era? Looking one up for you, one that she discusses is this one about a bog body, published in Archaeologia, or, Miscellaneous tracts relating to antiquity. She knows what scholarly texts looked like in the 18th C. Could someone make up that many details too? Sure, absolutely--scientific fabrications happen all the time, and they're hard to spot. At the same time, taking a random potshot at Maddy Pelling's credentials feels pretty wrong. She's done other work that has specifically to do with the nature of 18th C. scholarship itself--and it was wrapped up right here in this post for you to look at--so she knows how bad it can get, which is plenty bad but also a lot worse than Hurlothrumbo. My hope is this is enough to suggest a pattern I'd guess you've seen many times in the past when someone on the internet offers generic speculation that could be true but offers no basis outside their armchair's reach, when even a young scholar with vastly more experience almost certainly already has this possibility in mind and sees other details worth considering. Personally, I'm done dealing with it here. Have a great evening.
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:53 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]
I appreciate you did essentially address the question. What it makes clear is you're approaching this from a generic point of view where anything could be true--could be lies all the way down. And, like, it could be? But the conversation at this point not only isn't informed by anything empirical, and not only isn't informed by anything comparative (like the Burns poems or the "long established and well known" practice of window pane graffiti using diamonds), and not only isn't informed by relevant history (like London becoming, in the late 17th/early 18th C. the center point of European trade in rough cut diamonds)--take a moment to consider whether these feel like surprising external evidence backing up Hurlothrumbo saying this graffiti had been etched with diamonds by people who could afford it--it's at best an internal textual evaluation of an 18th C. text that's not even informed by comparison with, you know, comparable 18th C. texts--fabrications, fiction, verifiable nonfiction, and otherwise--combined in a pretty dubious way with evoking tropes about the reliability of popular history and taking a dump on a young scholar's interest in reaching a wide audience
So, for a moment taking texts alone as a kind of evidence, in the 1720s-1730s specifically, we're talking about an era when fictional narratives--composed as fiction--were still routinely terrible at verisimilitude in spite of being marketed as being plausible. Famously, that changed very gradually throughout the 18th C. (the "rhetoric of probability" dissertation I posted here previously gives an overview while trying to frame it in a new way), and if we suppose fiction--distinct from fabrication--is what Hurlothrumbo was aiming at, then they were a genius with superfluous details that weren't what audiences expected from fiction at the time. Dozens of long examples contemporary with Hurlothrumbo's text leap to mind, but here's a pamphlet that's typical and in many ways close in nature: Round About Our Coal-Fire, a short book of games and earthy humor for Christmas. Its earthy anecdotes are just wildly non-specific and--importantly--non-specific in the ways jest books and pamphlet fiction usually were. Hurlothrumbo's textual apparatus--full of dates, author initials, locations, etc.--is more detailed than relatively informal non-fiction too, e.g. this article on the origins of children's games, again published around the same time and just something that happened to be at the top of my mind.
Meanwhile, one of the reasons I posted Maddy Pelling's video lecture about women archaeologists in the 1780s is because it is relevant to what you are saying. You've said "it's no good treating them as if they were scholarly compendiums," but Maddy Pelling is familiar with scholarly texts in the same era? Looking one up for you, one that she discusses is this one about a bog body, published in Archaeologia, or, Miscellaneous tracts relating to antiquity. She knows what scholarly texts looked like in the 18th C. Could someone make up that many details too? Sure, absolutely--scientific fabrications happen all the time, and they're hard to spot. At the same time, taking a random potshot at Maddy Pelling's credentials feels pretty wrong. She's done other work that has specifically to do with the nature of 18th C. scholarship itself--and it was wrapped up right here in this post for you to look at--so she knows how bad it can get, which is plenty bad but also a lot worse than Hurlothrumbo. My hope is this is enough to suggest a pattern I'd guess you've seen many times in the past when someone on the internet offers generic speculation that could be true but offers no basis outside their armchair's reach, when even a young scholar with vastly more experience almost certainly already has this possibility in mind and sees other details worth considering. Personally, I'm done dealing with it here. Have a great evening.
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:53 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]
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Also love this little poem Recall's Billie Holliday's great song posted by Nelson at 12:06 PM on March 17 [7 favorites]