The “Editor’s Table” in The Knickerbocker is full of well, this and that. Lots of editorializing, some jokes, correspondence (including from contributors), reviews of other magazines… and it is so densely printed it is really hard to read. When you go read a Knickerbocker (like this one, perhaps?), be sure to enlarge your font. Your eyes will thank you.¹

One of the other magazines they read (and report on) frequently is Punch, or the London Charivari, usually to laugh at its jokes. For instance, from the February 1844 “Editor’s Table”:

Punch’s ‘Literary Intelligence’ is very full. From it we gather that the author of the ‘Mothers,’ ‘Wives,’ ‘Maids,’ and ‘Daughters’ of England has another work in press, entitled ‘The Grandmothers of England.’ ‘No grandmother’s education will be complete till she has read and re-read ‘The Grandmothers of England.’ The book is the very best guide to oval suction extant.’

I’m wondering, though, why do grandmothers know how to suck eggs? Do you have to be a grandmother to do it?

1. Too bad for the original readers — they didn’t have the same opportunity to spare their sight and had to read the tiny (Agate?) print by candlelight.[back]

(1813)

I have in my possession a curious volume of Latin verses, which I believe to be unique. It is entitled Alexandri Fultoni Scoti Epigrammatorum libri quinque. It purports to be printed at Perth, and bears date 1679. By the appellation which the author gives himself in the preface, hypodidasculus, I suppose him to have been usher at some school. It is no uncommon thing now a days for persons concerned in academies to affect a literary reputation in the way of their trade. The “master of a seminary for a limited number of pupils at Islington,” lately put forth an edition of that scarce tract, the Elegy in a Country Churchyard (to use his own words), with notes and head-lines!–But to our author. These epigrams of Alexander Fulton, Scotchman, have little remarkable in them besides extreme dulness and insipidity; but there is one, which, by its being marshalled in the front of the volume, seems to have been the darling of its parent, and for its exquisite flatness, and the surprising stroke of anachronism with which it is pointed, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. It is addressed, like many of the others, to a fair one:–

Which, in humble imitation of mine author’s peculiar poverty of stile, I have ventured thus to render into English:–

The happy idea of an American war undertaken in the cause of beauty ought certainly to recommend the author’s memory to the countrymen of Madison and Jefferson; and the bold anticipation of the discovery of that Continent in the time of the Trojan War is a flight beyond the Sibyll’s books.

(more from Charles Lamb, from “Table-Talk from The Examiner“)

How far the very custom of hearing any thing spouted, withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the Fifth, &c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to be found in Enfield Speakers, and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning “To be or not to be,” or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.

(From “On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation” (1811, text of 1818), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 1, Miscellaneous Prose.)

The real problem that stands in the way of poetry in machinery is not literary, nor æsthetic. It is sociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.

from: Gerald Stanley Lee, The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century, Mount Tom Press, 1906.

I have been spending a lot of time proofing an Old English grammar¹ (published in the early 20th century), and while I still can’t read King Alfred’s writings or Beowulf, I have learned something by working through the glossary.

The Old English speakers were obviously secret minimalists.

fāg (fāh), hostile.
fāh (fāg), variegated, ornamented.

And perhaps a bit confused (m. means what you think it does: masculine).

mægðhād, m., maidenhood, virginity.

1. C. Alphonso Smith, Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book; with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary, Fourth Edition.[back]

[David, on his fourth birthday, wants to ride on the street-sprinkler, which passes by without noticing him]

Do you call that any way for the street-sprinkler man to act? But of course there might be some good reason for such criminal behavior. David remembered that he hadn’t consulted any fairy godmother about it; long since he would have done so, only he could never catch any fairy godmothers hanging around. They were always busy somewhere else. Even Mother herself had failed to introduce him to any competent, respectable fairy godmothers. She was all right on telling about them; she was strong on that, but somehow they never seemed to know when they were wanted. That is their great fault; they are so unreliable. Once let them get loose from a Cinderella book, and their business system is always defective.

To judge at least by the treatment of such men as Henry Clay, and others of his stamp, it would appear as if real merit were a hindrance rather than a help to the attainment of the highest offices in America.((It is not meant here to obtrude special views of politics, or to maintain that democratic principles have naturally this tendency; but it may help to explain why so little is heard or known in England of the better class of Americans. Their unobtrusive mode of life entirely accounts for this, and it is to be regretted that it is the noisy demagogue who forms the type of the American as known to the generality of the European public.))

So one of them accepted six or seven observations that were in agreement, except that they could not be regularized, upon a world–planet–satellite–and he gave it a name. He named it “Neith.”

Monstrator and Elvera and Azuria and Super-Romanimus–

Or heresy and orthodoxy and the oneness of all quasiness, and our ways and means and methods are the very same. Or, if we name things that may not be, we are not of lonely guilt in the nomenclature of absences–

But now Leverrier and “Vulcan.”

Leverrier again.

Or to demonstrate the collapsibility of a froth, stick a pin in the largest bubble of it. Astronomy and inflation: and by inflation we mean expansion of the attenuated. Or that the science of Astronomy is a phantom-film distended with myth-stuff–but always our acceptance that it approximates higher to substantiality than did the system that preceded it.

So Leverrier and the “planet Vulcan.”

And we repeat, and it will do us small good to repeat. If you be of the masses that the astronomers have hypnotized–being themselves hypnotized, or they could not hypnotize others–or that the hypnotist’s control is not the masterful power that it is popularly supposed to be, but only transference of state from one hypnotic to another–

If you be of the masses that the astronomers have hypnotized, you will not be able even to remember. Ten pages from here, and Leverrier and the “planet Vulcan” will have fallen from your mind, like beans from a magnet, or like data of cold meteorites from the mind of a Thomson.

Leverrier and the “planet Vulcan.”

And much the good it will do us to repeat.

But at least temporarily we shall have an impression of a historic fiasco, such as, in our acceptance, could occur only in a quasi-existence.