Fascinating book.

Agnes and Margaret Smith were born (twins) in 1843. Their father was a lawyer. He was left around £7 million by his uncle, and when he himself died in 1866 Agnes and Margaret were unmarried at 23 and very rich. They immediately travelled to Egypt. They are known particularly for their discoveries of early versions of the Gospels at St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, and their editing and translation work on these texts. Their expedition to Sinai in 1892 was evidently very difficult and there were arguments with the people who went with them – other scholars and their wives. Throughout the sister’s lives they struggled both with public perception that they had fallen over manuscripts by chance, rather than setting out, via extensive planning and study, to find them, and also with press reports that minimised other scholars’ participation and therefore alienated their colleagues. These things may appear to be opposed, but in fact were not – as the press were able to exclude other scholars from accounts at the same time as presenting Agnes and Margaret as untutored.

Soskice’s description of the expedition and the interpersonal stuff is gripping and often wince-inducing, and she also makes it clear what difficult work – physically as well as intellectually – the photocopying, copying and translating of the texts was. But I was less interested in the actual results of their work on the Gospels than in their discoveries in Cairo in 1896 leading to their friend Solomon Schechter’s discovery (if that’s the correct word) of the Cairo genizah:

[Schechter] spent many hours, stretching into days, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with the Chief Rabbi [of Cairo] until this patient nurturing was rewarded with trust and the rabbi took him, by carriage [not sure why she specifies the type of transport], to Cairo’s oldest synagogue, the Ben Ezra. At the end of one of the galleries was an opening high in the wall and accessible only by ladder. Schechter climbed up and peered down into a ‘windowless and doorless room of fair dimensions’. The sight that met his eyes was one to thrill and appal the scholar: a chaos of books and papers, manuscripts and printed texts, tossed in at random over eight centuries. He had found, as he suspected he might, a genizah.
A genizah, as Schechter explained in a letter to The Times [1897] is an institution that takes its name: ‘from the Hebrew verb ‘ganaz’ and signifies treasure-house or hiding place. When applied to books it means much the same thing as burial in the case of men. When the spirit is gone, we put the corpse out of sight to protect it from abuse. In like manner, when the writing is worn out, we hide it to preserve it from profanation.’
Developed Jewish law determined that no document containing the four letters of the Holy Name, or Tetragammaton, should be destroyed. …
As well as ‘dead’ books, Schechter explained, genizot became home to ailing or invalided books (some of whose pages might be missing) and to ‘disgraced’ books whose contents were deemed not entirely orthodox. In time, any document written in the sacred language – love songs and wine songs, wills, marriage contracts, letters of divorce – might find its way into a genizah. The window high on the wall of the Ben Ezra synagogue was a postbox to nowhere that, for 800 years, had received the offcast Hebrew writings of Cairo’s Jewish community.

Soskice quotes more of Schechter’s letter to The Times:

It is a battlefield of books, a battle in which the literary productions of many centuries had their share, and their disjecta membra are now strewn over its area. Some of the belligerents have perished outright, and are literally ground to dust in the terrible struggle for space, whilst others … are squeezed into big, unshapely lumps, which even with the aid of chemical appliances can no longer be separated without serious damage to their constituents. In their present condition these lumps sometimes afford curiously suggestive combinations; as, for instance, when you find a piece of some rationalistic work in which the very existence of either angel or devil is denied, clinging for its very life to an amulet in which these same beings (mostly the latter) are bound over to be on their good behaviour and not to interfere with Miss Yair’s love for somebody.

Agnes and Margaret joined Schechter in Cairo in January 1897 to work on the archive. Soskice lists some of the finds:

fragments of old Talmuds; old and forgotten hymns; rabbinic Midrash; a draft copy in his own hand of the Guide to the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides … many personal documents, such as a letter to Maimonides from his brother … a letter from a schoolmaster about a child’s bad behaviour, ‘As soon as he comes in, he starts fighting with his sister and cursing her incessantly’ … from a father to a schoolmaster, ‘Please don’t spank my son for being late. His homework delayed him’. There are a young child’s doodles from the eleventh century; letters from wives to distant husbands, ‘We have weaned the baby. Do not ask me what we suffer for him: trouble, crying, sleepless nights’ … A woman from Jerusalem writes [in 1567], in Yiddish, to her son in Cairo, asking him to bring the grandchildren to see her …

The book also describes the sisters’ later lives in Cambridge (they had both married, but neither of their husbands lived long) and gives a sense of that society and some of the problems for women in it, and the sisters’ achievements despite this.

Photograph from 1914 – Agnes and Margaret are the two older women to the left:

Good quote from Margaret from late 1890s or early nineteenth century, when they were living in Cambridge and involved with St Columba’s church mission. She “was asked by a young Sunday School teacher to visit a pupil about whom she was anxious. Margaret went at once, and reported back, ‘You are quite right. The father does drink. If I lived in a house like theirs, I should drink too’.”

Wd be interesting to read Agnes’s novels – Effie Maxwell and Glenmavis.

Quotes Florence Nightingale’s reaction to exploring the ruins in Egypt then having to return to mundane conversation: “It is very hard to be all day by the deathbed of the greatest of your race, and to come home and talk about quails or London”.

Relevant links

Genizah in Wikipedia
Agnes and Margaret in Wikipedia, including links to texts of their books.
Article about the Cairo Genizah collection now at Cambridge.
Short film about the Cairo Genizah.

IN THE SHADOW OF SINAI: A STORY OF TRAVEL AND RESEARCH FROM 1895-1897 and How the Codex was found : a narrative of two visits to Sinai from Mrs. Lewis’s journals, 1892-1893

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 27 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Pattern is in US terms and I used a 4.5 hook.

Chain four, slip stitch into first chain to form circle.

Chain three, nine dc into circle.

Cut and end yarn. Restart with new length of yarn in same colour, five chain into any of dc in previous row. (If you don’t end yarn and restart it’s difficult to get the dc in the next row evenly spaced.)

DC into next dc. Chain 2, dc into next dc, chain 2 and repeat round the circle – 10 dc in total, counting first 3 chain as one dc.

Slipstitch to join row. Into each gap, 1 sc, 2 hdc, 2 dc, 1 hdc (this is deliberately asymmetrical).

Fasten off first colour. Join next colour in any gap between the ten petals. Chain 5, sc into next gap, chain 5, sc into next gap and repeat round circle. SC in gap to end.

Into each chain-five space, 1 sc, 1 hdc, 1 dc, 1 treble, 1 dc, 1 hdc, 1 sc (seven stitches in total). Slipstitch and fasten off.

Sew in ends.

To make a scarf, I made 18 using two alternating colours and sewed them together. This made a scarf 186 cm long, wch is probably longer than needed. Each flower is 10-11cm wide, depending on stretch. I used acrylic for this (because I couldn’t find colours I liked in posher yarns).

I will link this from Ravelry.

Following your article (Why is British public life dominated by men?, G2, 3 December), readers might be interested in my analysis of the choice of Christmas books in the Guardian, published the previous week. Books were chosen by 33 men and nine women. The gender imbalance in those asked to choose books might not have mattered if men and women were similar in their choice of books. But they were not. Among the books the women chose, half were by men and half by women. Among the books the men chose, three-quarters were by men and only one-quarter by women. The result was that the Guardian “recommended” 44 books by women, but 87 books by men.

Gender bias is often unnoticed. I suspect most readers will not have seen that twice as many books by men were recommended, compared with books by women. This is just one example of the way in which women’s contribution to culture is devalued and made invisible.
Jan Pahl
Canterbury, Kent

The article on lack of women is here and the book choices here.

Jan Pahl is Professor Emeritus of Social Policy at the University of Kent.

I like this bit of unashamed foreshadowing at the point Harold is kidnapped by gypsies:

‘I hope Harold got home before the fog began,’ he [the rector, Herbert] thought; ‘but of course he must have come back long ago. He will laugh at my losing my way in the garden.’
No, Herbert Westlake! it will be many a long and weary day before you again listen to that merry laugh, and gaze on that bright face you love so well. There are troubled waters to pass through, and severe tests of faith to endure, before you again press to your heart the boy who, unknown to yourself, has become part of your very life!

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Merle is a strong-minded woman who wants to work although her uncle and aunt are prepared to support her on their limited income. She can’t become a governess, “‘not even a nursery governess’”, because of “the great difficulty and stumbling block of my young life”:

I had been well-taught in a good school; I had had unusual advantages, for Aunt Agatha was an accomplished and clever woman, and spared no pains with me in her leisure hours; but by some freak of Nature, not such an unusual thing as people would have us believe, from some want of power in the brain – at least, so a clever man has since told me – I was unable to master more than the rudiments of spelling. …
As a child I have lain sobbing on my bed, beaten down by a very anguish of humiliation at being unable to commit the column of double syllables to memory …
For a long time my teachers refused to admit my incapacity; they preferred attributing it to idleness, stubborness, and want of attention; even Aunt Agatha was puzzled by it, for I was a quick child in other things, could draw very well for my age, and could accomplish wonders in needlework, was a fair scholar in history and geography, soon acquired a good French accent, and did some of my lessons most creditably.
But the construction of words baffles me to this day. I should be unwilling to write the simplest letter without a dictionary lying snugly near my hand.

This early account of what seems to be something like dyslexia is interesting.

Merle becomes a children’s nurse, “‘the upper nurse, I mean; for, of course, there is an under nurse kept’”, as her employer says in embarrassment when interviewing her – “‘one feels a little uncomfortable at seeing a gentlewoman desert the ranks to which she belongs’”. Merle thinks that looking after children “would indeed be a gentlewoman’s work”.

In the picture, Merle is sitting down with one of the children in her lap. He has had a life-threatening attack of croup. His mother, who hates the social obligations of her position as the wife of a politician and philanthropist, has just come back from a party to which she went dressed as Berengaria, the wife of Richard I.

Merle is treated differently to the other servants, despite trying to know her place. She says

My mistress was very particular about this. She would never hear of my being out late alone.
‘It is all very well for Hannah or Travers [other servants],’ she would say, but in your case it is different.’

Much religion – Merle persuades her employer to live a less worldly life.

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Wonder if I’ll ever find a book where I’ve read all the books in the ads. I’ve usually read one or two. I must seek out “Miss Nettie’s Girls”.

From “The Golden Mean: Annabel Lyon talks to Lucinda Byatt about the balancing act of writing historical fiction”.

Byatt talking about the book she’s currently writing, about Aristotle’s daughter:

I’m going to begin the new novel with Aristotle’s death so that she is abruptly alone in the world, and muct figure out how she’s going to live her life as an intelligent and resourceful young woman in an extremely restrictive society. I’m finding it a real challenge, for the reasons I mentioned above when writing about women at that time. I have to stop myself from imposing a lot of anachronistic attitudes onto them, from assuming they must all have been clinically depressed because of their oppression, or that things couldn’t really have been that bad. The truth – the emotional truth, wch is what interests me most [not sure what the distinction is here] – has to lie somewhere in betweem. What did it look like to be a happy woman at that time? What did a fulfilled female life look like? That’s what I’m struggling to understand now.

Also, from the interviewer – “Hilary Mantel recently remarked [on the Culture Show apparently] that the only thing to be done with ‘the lost or the dead’ is to ‘write them into being’.”

There is a frontispiece, wch is graphically very dull I think but amusingly and interestingly* shows Elsie sitting on the beach in full mourning. Presumably people did have to do this. I can’t scan it at the moment but will do. *I have Show-not-Tell Fail.

Here’s a description of tea-time before Elsie’s husband dies:

It had been wont to be a time of glad, free, cheerful, often mirthful intercourse between parents and children; no rude and noisy hilarity, but the most enjoyable social converse and interchange of thought and feeling, in which the young people, while showing the most perfect respect and deference to their parents, and un-selfish consideration for each other, were yet under no galling constraint, but might ask questions and give free expression to their opinions, if they wished ; and were indeed encouraged to do so.

Doesn’t it sound terrible?

Here’s Elsie’s son Edward before going to college:

Mother,” he said, ” I think I have a pretty clear idea of some of the temptations of college life: doubtless there are always a good many idle, profane, drinking, dissolute fellows among the students, but it does not seem possible that I shall ever find pleasure in the society of such.

Impossible not to think Prig. When he comes back from college, you’ll be glad to hear that Elsie takes one look at him and knows “that I can believe my boy has come back to me as pure and innocent as he went!”.

I like Mr Embury falling for Molly Percival (who I think is Elsie’s father’s half-brother’s daughter, but I may be wrong) because she is a “cripple”:

“Your very helplessness draws me to you and makes you doubly dear. I want to take care of you, my poor child. I want to make up your loss to you as far as my love and sympathy can; to make your life bright and happy in spite of your terrible trial. … Your love, dear girl, and the blessed privilege of taking care of you, are all I ask, all I want … “

Can we say co-dependency? Also I think it’s odd that he brings his daughters to the proposal, but keeps them out of sight (behind a bush?) until she’s accepted:

“You will be mine? my own dear wife? a sweet mother to my darlings. I have brought them with me, that their beauty and sweetness, their pretty innocent ways, may plead my cause with you, for I know that you love little children.” He was gone before she could reply, and the next moment was at her side again, bearing in his arms two lovely little creatures of three and five.

Speaking of children, this is random, though admittedly from a non-Christian (=bad person): ‘”the heat and threats of yellow fever drove us North. I scattered the younger children about among other relatives, leaving several at your house, Adelaide”‘.

In the second half of the book Elsie’s son and daughter live in a cottage with some friends and do their own housekeeping. There are some interesting menus. Violet is planning

“potatoes, (sweet)corn, beans, tomats (sic – this is dialect from a boy bringing the groceries), cabbage, lettuce, and young beets … ” … “There’s a chicken all ready for the oven – cousin showed me how to make the stuffing and all that. I’ve engaged fresh fish and oysters – they’ll be coming in directly. I shall make an oyster pie and broil the fish. I mean to make a boiled pudding and sauce for dessert, and have bought nuts, raisins and almonds, oranges, bananas and candies besides, and engaged ice cream and cake.” … (they also have) the lettuce, the cold-slaw and bread and butter … the tarts

It turns out that Vi can’t cook well enough, her timings all go wrong (I sympathise) and some of the food is inedible. Elsie has foreseen this (you would have to kill her) and sent a hamper of “a pair of cold roast fowls, a boiled tongue, pickles, jellies, pies and cakes in variety”.

For some reason although my local library has all the volumes of LLatLP, “Those That Will Not Work” is the only one you can borrow.

Here’s a good detailed street scene:

Let us take a picture from the New-cut, Lambeth. We observe many brokers’ shops along the street, with a heterogenous assortment of household furniture, tables, chairs, looking-glasses, plain and ornamental, cupboards, fire-screens, &c., ranged along the broad pavement; while on tables are stores of carpenters’ tools in great variety, copper-kettles, brushes, and bright tin pannikins, and other articles.

We see the dealer standing before his door, with blue apron, hailing the passer-by to make a purchase. Upon stands on the pavement at each side of his shop-door are cheeses of various kinds and of different qualities, cut up into quarters and slices, and rashers of bacon lying in piles in the open windows, or laid out on marble slabs. On deal racks are boxes of eggs, “fresh from the country,” and white as snow, and large pieces of bacon, ticketed as of “fine flavour,” and “very mild.”

Alongside is a milliner’s shop with the milliner, a smart young woman, seated knitting beneath an awning in front of her door. On iron and wooden rods, suspended on each side of the door-way, are black and white straw bonnets and crinolines, swinging in the wind; while on the tables in front are exposed boxes of gay feathers, and flowers of every tint, and fronts of shirts of various styles, with stacks of gownpieces of various patterns.

A green-grocer stands by his shop with a young girl of 17 by his side. On each side of the door are baskets of apples, with large boxes of onions and peas. Cabbages are heaped at the front of the shop, with piles of white turnips and red carrots.

Over the street is a furniture wareroom. Beneath the canvas awning before the shop are chairs of various kinds, straw-bottomed and seated with green or puce-coloured leather, fancy looking-glasses in gilt frames, parrots in cages, a brass-mounted portmanteau, and other miscellaneous articles. An active young shopman is seated by the shop-door, in a light cap and dark apron – with newspaper in hand.

Near the Victoria Theatre we notice a second-hand clothes store. On iron rods suspended over the doorway we find trowsers, vests, and coats of all patterns and sizes, and of every quality dangling in the wind; and on small wooden stands along the pavement are jackets and coats of various descriptious. Here are corduroy jackets, ticketed “15s. and 16s. made to order.” Corduroy trowsers warranted “first rate,” at 7s. 6d. Fustian trowsers to order for 8s. 6d.; while dummies are ranged on the pavement with coats buttoned upon them, inviting us to enter the shop.

In the vicinity we see stalls of workmen’s iron tools of various kinds — some old and rusty, others bright and new.

Re the “red carrots” – see the Carrot Museum and the picture of carrots of different colours on the homepage.

There’s a ballad-singer (who also begs, does odd jobs and steals handkerchiefs (“very clums[ily]y”)) who lists ballads he sings: Gentle Annie; She’s reckoned a good hand at it (can’t find this one); The Dandy Husband (number 25, about three-quarters of the way down the page); The Week’s Matrimony; The Old Woman’s Sayings (can’t find this); John Bull and the Taxes; The Dark-eyed Sailor; The Female Cabin Boy. Good stuff in these, from the Dandy Husband incompetently boiling a magpie and an owl, to the events of each day in The Week’s Matrimony, to the transvestism of The Female Cabin Boy, to John Bull’s complaints about taxes being raised to pay for the royal wedding – “They’re going to tax the women / that go out of doors at night … They’ll tax the bugs and fleas … They will in future tax all children / A week before they’re burn,” and, for good measure, “hang the Quakers”, presumably because they sometimes refuse to pay tax.

I would like to know what “yollenes” are. Sims quotes a 1541 translation of Heinrich Bullinger‘s The Christian State of Matrimony, originally published in 1540 (translation seems to have been by Myles Coverdale or Thomas Beccon, and the book was originally called Der christlich Eestand). “Parents were to be sure their daughters

avoyd all unhonest lovers and occasyons of the same, as unhonest daunsynge, wanton communicacion, coommary wythe rybaldes and fthy speachese, teache them to averte their sight and sences from all such unconveniences, let them avoyd yollenes, be occupied wither doing some profitable thyng for your family, or elles readynge some godly book, let them not reade bokes of fables, of fond lyght love, but call upon God to have pure hartes and chaste, that they might cleve only to thyr spouse.”

The word is not in the OED and although I have found the German text online, it is in scanned pages rather than etext so I haven’t been able to find this passage in German and work out what “yollenes” could mean.

Here’s a fifteenth-century boy complaining in his schoolbook:

Thou wyll not beleve how wery I am off fyshe, and how moch I desir that flesh were cum in ageyn, for I have ate non other but salt fysh this Lent, and it hat engendyrde so moch flewme within me that it stoppith my pyps and I can unneth speke nother brethe.

Sim illustrated the book herself, and I like her somewhat stumpy people. Here’s a sixteenth-century marriage ceremony: