If You Love Jane Austen…
Allow me to introduce Emily Eden--aristocratic spinster, political hostess, accomplished painter, and talented novelist.
I first discovered Emily Eden through her connection to India. Her brother George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, was appointed Governor-General of India in 1835. Emily accompanied him to India and served as his Burra Lady Sahib (the rough equivalent of an American First Lady) for the six years of his tenure.*
For the first twenty months of their stay, the Edens stayed in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. Emily was miserable. She didn't like India--or more accurately, she didn't like Anglo-Indian society in Calcutta, which she viewed with all the snobbery of an aristocrat accustomed to moving in the highest political circles. She felt herself exiled in what she described as a "second-rate society".
Things got better when Emily accompanied her brother on a two-year-long tour of the country, though her first response to their extravagant camps was "I thought I had never seen such squalid, melancholy discomfort." Her diary and letters, published in 1866 as Up The Country, offer a witty and carefully observed account of a specific moment in Indian history as seen from a very specific viewpoint. I read Up The Country for work, but found it an absolute pleasure.
Several years later, I was delighted to stumble across two novels by Eden in which she observes her own society with the same sharp-eyed wit that she brought to India: The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House.** Although Eden's experience of the world was much broader than Austen's, their novels are similar in scale. Instead of writing about her experience of India or political London, Eden wrote comedies of manners that drew on the same social mores and concerns as Austen's novels. Both Eden and her characters live higher up the social ladder than Austen, but they too are concerned with the intersection between money, manners, and marriage.
I don't claim that Eden is Austen's equal. (No one who writes the kind of thing Austen writes comes even close.) Her novels are a good read in the same general vein by an author with a distinctive voice. Her writing on India is even better.
* Lord Auckland doesn't fare well in history He is best remembered for the paranoid decisions that resulted in the debacle of the First Anglo-Afghan War.
**Amazon is convenient, but there is no replacement for browsing with serendipity at a real life bookstore. Use them or lose them.
The Love of Maps
I will tell you with no apology (and only a slight wiggle of nerdy embarrassment) that I love maps. I suppose it is theoretically possible to love history and not love maps. I just can't imagine how that would work.* After all, history happens in both time and space. A quick look at the right map can illustrate a culture's cosmography, the relationship between a region's topography and its political history, or how trade in a single commodity** can drive history.
Pulling books off the shelf nearest to hand, I find maps of:
- Possible Stone Age migrations through the Middle East based on the dispersal of blade tool technology
- Changes in the course of the Missouri River
- Railroads in India in 1857
- The movement of capital throughout the world between 1875 and 1914***
- The relationship between opera and nationalism in the same period
- Pilgrimage routes and shrines in the medieval Islamic world
Each of them adds a new layer of understanding to an historical moment. (Well, maybe not the relationship between opera and nationalism.)
Given my penchant for maps, I was delighted to find this blog post on the curatorial site Twisted Sifter: 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense Of The World . Each map conveys information clearly. Some are merely curious. A couple made me sad. Many gave me an "aha" moment.
Enjoy!
* If you're a map-hating history lover, could you please share your experience with the group? I'd love to get a little point-counterpoint going here.
** Tin, salt, gold, silk, pepper, petroleum--to name a few
*** For those worried about the influx of Asian capital into the United States today, it's worth pointing out that the US was an importer of capital prior to WWI.
Image credit: miluxian / 123RF Stock Photo
History, Myth, and the Gettysburg Address
Recently I've been working on a piece about the Gettysburg Address.* As always, I've done more research than required,** wandered down some interesting by-ways that were not relevant to the project, and had my preconceptions about the topic turned upside down and shaken. As always, My Own True Love has convinced me to remove some bits that caught my imagination, but didn't belong in the article.
I came away with new ideas about battlefield cemeteries (apparently a Civil War innovation), Lincoln's reputation as a speaker, and the difficulty of finding saddle horses in a war-torn region. But the piece of information that knocked me off my metaphorical seat was finding out that the one thing everyone "knows" about the Gettysburg Address isn't true.*** Lincoln didn't write the speech at the last minute on the back of an envelope. He apparently wrote several careful drafts over a matter of weeks--a process that Lincoln scholars have unraveled with careful textual exegesis, though they don't always agree on the details.
I don't know why I'm surprised. It sometimes seems as if none of the historical stories that appear in our elementary school textbooks--and that find a permanent home in our collective consciousness--are factually true, thought they are often emotionally satisfying. The first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock was certainly not the first Thanksgiving in the New World and probably didn't happen quite the way we learn the story. People will get into shouting matches (or at least pissy written exchanges) over whether Richard III murdered the Princes in the Tower, but the story still appears in history books as if it were unquestionably true. The Black Hole of Calcutta was a PR creation from the first.
I would argue that these stories survive and thrive because they are simple--something historical "truth"**** rarely is--and because they are, in fact, stories. We use story to understand the world. Just like traditional fairy tales give us a framework for a moral universe, historical tales give us a framework for the past. The fact that sometimes the framework needs to be rebuilt, doesn't make the need for stories less real.
What do you think about the gap between historical tale and the moving target of historical truth? What are some of your favorite examples?
*Coming soon to a copy of History Channel magazine near you.
**If you're interested in Lincoln's thought and use of language, I highly recommend The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words by Ronald C. White, Jr. and Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words by Douglas L. Wilson. Both of them seduced me into reading far more than the chapters on the Gettysburg Address and reminded me of what a complicated man Lincoln was.
***Okay, the second thing everyone knows. Lincoln did, in fact, give the speech. Thank you, Amy Sue Nathan, for catching me on this.
**** A tricky concept at best since at some level all history is revisionist history.