Mini-Review An Entertainment for Angels by Patricia Fara

 An Entertainment for Angels is a bit of a cheat. It looks like a full account of electricity in the enlightenment age but if you look carefully, the text is a little larger and spaced out than usual and the pages are on thicker paper, almost as if the book is a shorter one trying to look like a larger one.

So, it’s not as deep an experience as could be hoped for but it is an enjoyable romp through several decades of electrical history, with a particular emphasis on the showmanship of early electrical research, the piecemeal nature of scientific advance and the odd way in which advances in equipment came first and theory had to catch up.

One of the most enjoyable elements of the book was how knowledge of electricity and discovery of its effects grew up from a sense of play. The first battery (so named because like a battery of guns, the effect was increased by grouping them together) was discovered by accident. It was then used to attract objects to suspended orphans, or electrocute 400 monks. I particularly liked the story when the trick didn’t work and the current kept dying at one particular monk. They started to suspect the monk might be a woman in secret (though why that should break the current, I’ve no idea) but it turned out to be because they were standing on a wet patch of ground.

I loved all the talk of pranks and tricks, the cutlery that shocked the dinner guests, the hidden electric ‘mines’ in one person’s house. I loved how silliness built up phenomena to see and evidence which then led to electrical theories. I followed the description of the electrical theories pretty well but now I think I understand the false ways that eighteenth century scientists thought electricity works more than I understand how electricity actually works.

I very much enjoyed this book as a run through of electrical science in the 18th century, it told its story well, was very entertaining and gave me a few new ideas to play with. It wasn't enough to write the full article I was hoping for though.

Review: Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre by Jacqueline Riding

 

I read Jacqueline Riding’s book Jacobites with the Dr Johnson Reading Circle and was excited to receive a copy of Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre in a ‘name-that-Hogarth-from-the-detail’ competition and, seeing as the 203rd anniversary anniversary occurs on the 16th of August, I’d read it.

In Jacobites, Jacqueline Riding shows how skilled she is at taking a complicated series of events with many players and shaping them into a text that is both engaging and coherent and she does the same with the story of the Peterloo massacre. I knew a little about it from ‘Victorians’ text books from school and I’ve seen the Sharpe episode with the Peterloo equivalent but beyond the headlines, I didn’t know the details. Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre told me a little more than I needed to know, gave me  a feel for the times, the tone of the language, the arguments in the pub and kept clarity and narrative momentum.

We begin with the rise of Hampden Clubs, meetings of working men sharing ideas of political reform - particularly about changing electoral constituencies to get rid of rotten boroughs and a desire for a vote per man (there wasn’t yet discussion of women’s suffrage, but it was considered a vote per man was one per household). These clubs were boosted by solid Sunday-school education and inspired by thinkers like Tom Paine as well as reading and sharing cheap newspapers. With waves of soldiers returning from Waterloo, a distant volcanic eruption that killed harvest and the Corn Laws which brought food prices up but did nothing to bring wages up with it  - the government were scared. It wasn’t helped that the official government position seems to have been ‘it’s not our fault’.

After multiple petitions were ignored, the reform groups decided to increase their pressure, one tactic was the ‘blanket protest’. Reading that it was a crime to present a petition in groups more than ten, it was decided to send a mass petition but to take it in multiple copies in small groups - all of them walking from Manchester to London and carrying a blanket to sleep outdoors. With Habeus Corpus suspended, the ‘blanketeers’ were arrested as they left the city, with the urban myth that only one man made it.

The next idea were ‘monster’ meetings, huge rallies with popular speakers designed to show how strong support for reform was. The plan was a series of huge meetings, culminating in a large Manchester one for the north, and a large Kennington one for the south. The magistrates of Manchester started getting nervous, organising a volunteer cavalry called the Yeoman and drafting volunteer constables. It wasn’t helped that the government were sending agent provocateurs to stir up trouble, nor that some speakers were appealing to audiences with more violent rhetoric. What’s more, bodies of men were training on the moors, learning to march in formation. Was this a way of ensuring calm and orderly movement en masse, or was this the training of working class fighting bands?

It wasn’t only men involved in the movement to reform, for the first time women formed organised groups. The first was in Blackburn, followed shortly by the Manchester Female Reform Society, led by Mary Fildes - one of those people in history that ought to be better known. I loved the moment dramatised in the book where the women are asked to vote for something for the first time and the atmosphere of nervous laughter grows to one of pride.

This moment comes from the autobiography of Samuel Bamford, as do many other sparkling and vivid descriptions. A poet as well as a radical, Samuel has a sharp (and sometimes withering) eye for describing other people. Riding hits a motherlode with his descriptions, whether it’s Sidmouth with his 'cavernous orbs' of eyes or Nadin with his 'full-size head'. There’s also a wonderful moment where he describes his beloved wife 'as fresh as Hebe'.

Other interesting people in this book include Dr Healy, whose accent is so thick he can’t be understood by his interrogators and who hands his proscriptions out with pro-forma cards that he fills numbers in because he’s illiterate. He tempers this with an excessive dignity which has him trying to act the gentleman even as he’s being arrested. He also created the most peculiar banner to take to the meeting - stark black and white, threatening looking even as the text read ‘love’. I was also drawn to Joseph Nadin, the Deputy-Constable. He struck me as a prot-Gene Hunt, fond of catching ‘his guy’ and certainly not afraid of violence. Despite originally being a thief-taker and having corrupt habits carry on after his more formal appointment, he redeemed himself a little in my eyes as using himself as a human shield against the voluntary constables when they tried to beat up the man he was arresting.

I may seem to be avoiding the actual massacre, it is the climax of the book after all. Throughout, Jacqueline Riding ratchets up the tension, discussing preparations on both sides and the growing paranoia of the authorities. Like the greatest tragedies, the massacre at St Peter’s field could have been easily avoided. As the size of the crowd grew, the authorities got nervous and sent for the Yeoman, the volunteer cavalry, who were drunk, clumsy and unskilled. The killed a 2 year old on the way to the field and then proceeded to wade into the crowd, trying to clear them with the blades of their swords. As one eyewitness said, “At Waterloo there was man to man but at Manchester it was downright murder.”

Review: Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in other Lands by Mary Seacole

Mary Seacole is buried down the road from me and a famous figure in the area so when I found she’d written a book I was interested in picking it up. I was also pleased how Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in other Lands has echos of Gulliver’s Travels.

Apparently there was some debate over whether this book was ghost written or not, if it was the ghost writer would have stuck very close to her narrative because this book has such a strong, individual voice to it, and very much the kind of voice that someone would have if they did the things Mary Seacole did. It’s tough and folksy, with a strong optimistic streak tempered by a will of iron. Mary believes that “We were born to be happy” but is fully aware of the obstacles to that and wants to do what she can to alleviate them. 

Born in Jamaica to a Jamaican mother and Scottish father, Mary Seacole would have considered it rather presumptuous to be grouped into black history as she saw herself as ‘that yellow woman’. There was a Jamaican tradition of hotel/club/shop/hospital run by women with traditional healing methods and Mary grew up in it, her dolly being her first and most suffering patient. She took this tradition, first to towns in Panama thrown up during the Gold Rush, then outside Sebastopol during the Crimean War. 

Although famous for her work in the Crimea, the sections of this book dealing with her running a ‘hotel’ in Panama are possibly more entertaining. She talks about the difficulty of her journey, that her dress got all ‘clayey’, that when she arrived at her brother’s place and he had nowhere private for her, she was grumpy and made her own bed under a table. She talks about how the porters ‘had not neglected the glorious opportunity to rob a woman’ and how porters and lawyers were thieves everywhere. She describes how she got a cheap rent on a run down shack with no roof, which she describes as ‘a charming residence - very openly situated and well ventilated’. Her voice is funny, colloquial and a tad sarcastic and she makes brilliant company.

When it comes to the usual mainstay of books about ‘other lands’, geographical description, she calls it, ‘information uninteresting enough, I have little doubt, to all but few of my readers.’ Instead she talks about scaring away a thief by pretending to prime a non-working gun with coffee powder, or about how she stole the body of a dead orphan to dissect and learn more about the medical arts than she already did. Another source of amusement is her characterisation of Americans as dirty, rude, spitting, pretentious thieves. She admits she’s prejudiced against Americans but only because most of the ones she’s met were vile and because they still held people who looked some-what like her as slaves.

Then we get to the Crimea. Mary Seacole tried to get through legitimate means, but Florence Nightingale’s agents turned her down so she gathered investors and set off by herself. It was probably a good thing, for both her and the soldiers on the front. Mary Seacole had a years of experience and a personality disinclined to take instruction, she and Nightingale would not have made happy colleagues although they did get on when they met. It also meant that Seacole could set up her British Hotel closer to the front lines, providing more direct medical aid and a source of comfort and dignity. A lot of the work of the hotel was providing home comforts, and she was very proud of her sponge cakes and rice pudding particularly.

Thieves were again a problem, the Zouaves, professional French soldiers, were known as being fierce in battle and light-fingered when not fighting. They were large, red pantaloons which served as very useful shoplifting aids, with one Zouave managing to take a whole cooked chicken. One time, Mary Seacole got hold of a pig and everyone was looking forward to some pork and pre-ordering the cuts they were after. Then someone stole the pig and she sent ‘her boys’ out with the words;

  “Go my sons and save my bacon!” 

There seems to have almost been a Muppet Show vibe to Seacole’s British Hotel, a fun and ramshackle club with lots of laughter and chaos. It wasn’t all fun and games though, Mary Seacole also went out into the front line with bags of sandwiches and bandages to help as she could. When Sevastopol finally fell, she found herself the first woman in the captured city, again with her bag of sandwiches and bandages, occasionally needing to duck from shots from the last of the Russian defenders. One of the first things she saw, was a group of English soldiers who had looted a house of women’s clothes and were wandering around in drag - of course. The Hotel kept going as the camp broke up until she had a building full of stock but no one to buy it. In the end she had to sell what she had at a massive loss and returned to England bankrupt, where she wrote the book. There is an element in the book of Seacole justifying her actions, especially the fact that she charged for her services at the British Hotel. She was loved though and by the time she died she was a revered and comfortable figure.

I don’t think Mary Seacole is unfairly forgotten, she may have been of more practical benefit in the Crimea but she took her fame and used it to set up a massage business and live a comfortable life amongst friends - which is a very good thing to do but does mean her significance was to those alive at the time and faded as those people died. If anything, her being mixed race has not made her unfairly forgotten by history but has encouraged her remembrance where she may not have been after all. Which is not to denigrate Mary Seacole in any way, she was an amazing woman with an amazing story and she tells it in an entertaining and forthright voice.

Review 'On Happiness' at the Wellcome Museum

A wise philosopher once said, ‘happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess’ but what is happiness? Where does it come from? Are there ways of living a happier life? I went with all these questions and more to the Wellcome’s exhibition ‘On Happiness’, hugely happy to be going to an exhibition after so long.

The exhibition was split into two parts, ‘tranquillity’ and ‘joy’, I also picked up an audio guide to hear extra details. It started with the interesting reminder that the concept of emotion is a relatively new one and springs from increased scientific way of conceptualising people that developed in the nineteenth century. Before then, what we know as emotions were known as passions or sensibilities and had a certain moral weight. I’d have liked more about the transition in the relationship between people and their own feelings but it wasn’t really developed.

The first main room in an installation. At first glance it is tranquil, there are people doing yoga projected around, a fake fire burning in a log and a large glowing crystal. Listening to the commentary, however, and the peacefulness is built on exploitation. The yoga takes an Indian tradition but has no time for brown skin, the log represents South American forests being destroyed for incense and the big gem represents the unfair conditions they are mined in. The whole piece is called ‘My Body is a Temple of Gloom’ (great title) and it doesn’t really say anything about tranquility, more about the abuses of the wellness industry.

The next room contained a range of ways people feel tranquil, from meditation, to gardening, to noticing small pleasures, to.. fixing socks? There were also audio clips on the guide about how vitamin d aids happiness. There was also a beautiful almanac and a family medical textbook.. and a picture of a redwood tree. There were definitely interesting things in this section, but they were desperate and didn’t really come together to say much about tranquility. Indeed, the descriptions spent far longer talking about anxiety, and how things like gardening or sunlight can restrain anxiety that it said very little about tranquility at all. Unless it was to say that anxiety is our natural state and we have to do unusual things (or exploitative things, in terms of the first room) to avoid it and gain tranquility. Personally, I think tranquility is probably a goal in itself and is more important than merely avoiding anxiety. In a position of tranquility we can make better decisions, act kinder and fairer and wiser, which is worthwhile in itself.

The last room was my favourite and was inspired by the Japanese idea of ‘tree-bathing’. There’s research to say that simply being in nature is good for a person’s mental health - which is where I find the whole mental health language so anaemic, hanging around woods is not simply good for mental health, but for the spirit, the soul even. The room had huge photos of forests with nature sounds and (apparently) smells seeping into the room also. It was a very peaceful experience but mainly made me want to get out into some real woods.

The next part of ‘On Happiness’ was about joy. It started with a picture of someone laughing at someone else and the quote ‘Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.’ The first installation showed people in black and white ‘dancing’ but there was no happiness on their faces, the movements looked like they were being told to move and the music was scary more than it was joyful. Far from dancing for joy, it looked like they were being forced into it. 

There was another piece by the same artist who tries to smile through the Nat King Cole version of the song ‘Smile’. For one thing, the song is not a song of joy, it’s about smiling though your heart is breaking. For another, the artist can’t maintain his smile through the song and it becomes a frightening grimace. It would seem the artist doesn’t understand the concept of joy.

The next room had a range of things including the fun doodles of David Shrigley. I like his pictures but they have a self-conscious, awkward quality that while making me smile do not summon up the notion of joy. There were pictures of a tarantella, a dance supposed to heal spider bits, not an expression of joy. Indeed, the joy part of the exhibition not only lacked joy but seemed to suck it out. The only joy in the room came from two children running about and playing. Where were the kids games or football celebrations or wedding dances or the birth of a child? 

I think the ultimate message of the exhibition was that we are not solitary figures, that happiness requires us to function in society and with nature though I think it rather fudged it.

Review: A Visit from Voltaire by Dinah Lee Küng

 

A Visit from Voltaire is a book that makes absolutely no sense. The cover proclaims it a novel but it seems to be anything but. If the blurb is to believed, it’s about an American woman who moves to Switzerland with her family and finds it difficult to acclimatise to the new culture, she’s helped along the way by a man who turns up, claiming to be Voltaire. The blurb is not to be believed.

For a start, the main character and her family may be fictionalised but they are not fictional. The husband in the book is the author’s husband, with the same name and job; the children are her children and the main character is the author herself. If anything, it seems more like diary extracts of her move and the feeling of alienation she has with Wikipedia articles of Voltaire dropped in. I couldn’t find a description of how this book came about but I imagined that she’d moved to Switzerland, felt cut off from her old role as a foreign reporter in Hong Kong and trapped by the Swiss expectations of motherhood which led her to reading a life of Voltaire, creating imaginary conversations with him as she performed her daily chores. What’s more, a detail at the beginning, where her mother’s books on history were sent to her rather than her own was, I think, the secret catalyst that sparked her interest in Voltaire. 

Not only does my little supposition seem to fit, it’s the only reason I can think of that the character that follows her around is Voltaire rather than anyone else, there is no answer to the question, ‘why Voltaire?’ It’s doesn’t even adopt the playful notion that the person coming around her house is a person from the village who thinks he’s Voltaire but is straight up Voltaire’s ghost who simply pops up, much as an imaginary Voltaire might to a bored woman wandering about her cut-off Swiss house.

There’s not a plot to the book exactly, the book goes through Voltaire’s life chronologically, with the ghost ageing as it continues. In each chapter, Voltaire’s life throws up some theme in which the daily Swiss life or in her memories of being a reporter in Hong Kong are awkwardly made to reflect. Early in his life, Voltaire was put in prison, so her son accidentally commits a crime and is hard in front of the town council. At another time Voltaire uncovered a scandal, so she remembers uncovering a scandal during her reporter days. Voltaire spent some time in England, so the main character suddenly has some English friends she has to visit. The book never makes a convincing case that Voltaire’s memories of the eighteenth century, the memories of 90s China and the modern experience in Switzerland ever match up convincingly. The whole book creaks with contrivance. 

I can’t say I liked the narrating character very much. Compared with Voltaire, her spirit seemed so petty and she never seemed to learn much. There was a definite whiff of racism; from her broad grouping national stereotypes (even in places she’d lived), to her distaste of Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and other non-Christian winter festivals and her seeming hatred of the Swiss as conservative and small-minded. She didn’t seem a great mother, seeming rather uninterested in her children and finding them a hinderance to her own interests, resenting her daughter for fitting in more successfully than her and the odd thing that she made them only watch old videos - leading to her children playing ‘I, Claudius’ for fun. (Really - why be so strict about what they watch that they only have access to pre-approved things and then giving them something as adult at that?)

The part which solidified my dislike for the narrator was a chapter themed around Voltaire’s time in the French court under the patronage of Madame de Pompadour. The narrator declares her own marriage as a bit tired and Voltaire agrees it is a little ‘sombre’, suggesting that she liven things up with a party the way Madame de Pompadour used to. The two proceed to plan a party, he in his royal eighteenth century opulence, she toning him down. Already the party is not being held for honest social reasons but to liven up her sex-life, the guests she invites are not really her friends (and if they are, why does she have such rude friends?) and the gathering has no real connection. Because the people in the party all seem like they’d rather not be with each other, it feels like an episode of ‘Come Dine With Me’ where everything relies on the food and entertainment rather than the enjoyment of company. It summed the narrator up for me, obsessing over the details and missing the main point.

I found most of her friendships hard to believe in, either coming about because they were useful to her work or because they had access to someone who might be useful. In a chapter that was supposed to be sad, a friend of hers comes over to Switzerland to recuperate after a car accident that has caused her to lose an arm and an eye. Maybe it’s the Brit in me, but it seemed completely strange that neither of them made pirate jokes - it didn’t feel like real friendship at all. 

Yet - as much as the book seemed like a strange bashing together of elements that didn’t work, I peculiarly liked it. The real Voltaire was an interesting person, with an interesting life and even this slightly weak-sauce ghost version of him made interesting company. Also, while her relationships with her family and her supposed friends didn’t ring very true (or if true, not very warm), the relationship with the Voltaire ghost was peculiarly charming. My own fantasised origin story for this book, that the author imagined her own Voltaire when she was wandering about at home, comes from my own experiences of internally talking to an imaginary Samuel Johnson when I’m doing my own boring chores. Through this, I saw a vulnerability in the narrator that got me to like her and feel for her, lost in the Swiss winter.

At the end of the book, she and Voltaire take a visit to his last home where a ‘well fed college girl’ gives a tour of his house. She knows all the facts of his life but none of the flavour. I finished reading this book in a Dr Johnson’s House, a museum where I (myself rather well fed) talk to people about Samuel Johnson. It got me thinking about how much my own discussion of him is related to my imaginings of what he’d be like if he saw the world now. Ultimately, I concluded that both my imaginary Samuel Johnson and the Samuel Johnson of facts are not the historical one and it’s impossible to get to know him - this book concluded that the narrator knew Voltaire better than anyone else ever could. I’m done with this book.

Journal of the Plague Year 2020 ( Entry Ten: 2021, so far.)

 Entry Ten: 2021, so far.

While it could be hoped that this ‘Journal of the Plague Year’ would only have to cover one year, as we entered 2021, it was clear that covid would not go away. After much umming, awwing, threatening and u-turning, the government decided on another national lockdown and to this time include schools.

Our school responded to this by going online but drawing on past experience, it managed to create a far more comprehensive coverage, with a full day of teacher-led stuff through video chats and other trickery. I was given the children who find it hard to access stuff in class, it was no surprise that they couldn’t access anything at home. For the first few days, whatever I did they simply stared at me with blank faces - except for the one who bounced on his couch. I’m no quitter though and the level of satisfaction I received when just one of the kids managed to turn in a piece of work was immense.

Then the lockdown ended, the children came back and things carried on much as they had been. I caught a cold in May but we were over panicking about things like that. One Wednesday in mid-June, I was feeling a bit off and began to resign myself to another cold. I carried on going to work as the cold centred in my chest, being a ball of phlegm, which I would occasionally cough up. On Saturday I had my second covid jab at the Science Museum and walked through Hyde Park. 

Sunday I felt rather rough and booked a lateral flow test first thing the next morning. I did this for two reasons; I could find myself missing a morning of work and with covid ruled out, I could go to my GP for some antibiotics to quell the rapidly worsening chest infection. To my surprise it turned positive for covid, what’s more, I was one of 7 people at school who had caught it.

I thought the next thing was to hibernate and home and wait it out but first I needed to have a PCR test, which they did in a different bit of London, which I had to walk to. All-in-all, on my first day of a positive covid diagnosis, I walked eight miles round London taking various tests. With that all done, I finally hibernated.

I wasn’t allowed to hibernate quietly though, friends from work, outside work, family were pouring in offers of assistance and of comfort. I probably could have filled a supermarket with all the people who offered to pick me up a few bits and pieces. I was reminded that people are quite nice really and I’ve been very lucky to meet some good ones. Of special note is my landlord, who was the one who actually did pick up some of my shopping and his wife who made me a lovely salmon meal and a number of tofu and miso soups. 

Less welcome were the track and trace people who texted me every two days and told me to stay at home. They also rang a number of times, reading from a script and never really listening to my answers. Who knew catching covid involved so many customer service feedback forms?

As for the sickness itself, the phlegm-ball that had been the main feature as the illness ramped up (and had confused me it was not covid) disappeared and was replaced with the classic dry-continuous cough. I burned for five days, every single joint hurt, even the little ones at the tops of my fingers, everything hurt. By some miracle, I still managed to sleep at night so I had some energy to deal with the pain and do the little I had to do in the morning before being kiboshed by fever and aches again. 

The next three days were the worst, not pain but a word semi-nauseous fog, punctuated by moments of confusion.. After that, it was done, the main thing I had left was exhaustion but that didn’t matter all that much to work who swept me right in, expecting me to do double because other staff were off with covid.

As much as I would have preferred a gentler return, I think the full-throttle back at work has probably done me better than sitting about. Three weeks afterwards, my cough has gone and my energy is mostly regained. The only long-term effects I’ve had from covid are the occasional blank mind when searching for a word, and a soul-deep hatred of our corrupt and murderous government.

The Belle's Stratagem with the Dr Johnson's Reading Circle (Part 3)

 

The Dr Johnson’s Reading Circle runs alongside the school/university year and so our performance of the last chunk of Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem was our last meeting of yet another strange year. Big thanks are owed to Jane Darcey, not only for carrying the meetings on but for making them more frequent, complete with special guests and involved discussions. Having a Reading Circle to look forward to each month was a real highlight for the members and it’s been a real pleasure to attend. Next year’s programme has already been finalised and it promises to be as good as the others. 

We meet back with our characters processing the consequences of the grand masquerade. First catching up with Courtall, who feels he has easily got the Lady Francis in his grasp, although we know she’s a decoy. He congratulates himself on being irresistible and looks forward to writing an illustrious name on his list. When Saville, Flutter and a group of revellers burst in to see which particular fish he’s caught, the decoy Lady Francis is revealed to be Kitty and he is roundly laughed at, being so embarrassed he flees to Paris. Later, Sir George thanks Saville for protecting his wife by giving him his sister’s hand. We never discover the sister’s opinion of this idea but Sir George is convinced they’ll hit it off.

Schemes escalate at the Hardy’s, where the family plan to twist the  knife into Doricourt a little more by tricking him into marrying Letitia before she reveals herself as the mysterious ball-guest and he still thinks her an idiot. As part of this plot, Letitia’s father must pretend to be sick, something he is proud he has never been. He also fears that feigning sickness might invite it but despite his fears, he agrees. Doricourt is also going forth with ill-conceived schemes, deciding to go ahead with his plan to feign madness to get out of marrying Letitia. He tells his friend Villiers to spread the word. Naturally, when Flutter gets hold of this story it loses much of its reality and becomes a tale of his being poisoned by an Italian countess with drugged sweets.

The two plans come into collision when Doricourt is summoned to see the ‘sick’ Hardy. He tries his best and playing the madman, demanding that Flutter returns his soul, much to the confusion of the poor gossip who promises he’s never even seen it. There is one flaw in Doricourt’s plan, he is a ham and everyone sees straight through it. Mrs Rackett also shows him how he should have done it. He is, however, distraught that he’s been tricked into marriage with the (he believes) gormless Letitia. He feels even worse when the mysterious, masked figure from the previous night turns up and is not the kept woman Flutter thought she was. Then the woman reveals herself to be Letitia to his (and no-one else’s) surprise. She declares that she has the potential to be any kind of wife Doricourt wants, but he says he only wants her to be herself, it’s very sweet.

The characters then try to outdo each other for who deserves the most congratulations and we are left with the epilogue. It reminds us that we all wear masks and that behind the genial face may lay a domestic tyrant… it then makes the dubious claim that only actors show the truth which, whether true or not, is something actors like to tell themselves.

As well as the likeable characters, the smart dialogue and the fun plotting, Hannah Cowley makes great use of contemporary details. Whether it’s slipping in references to popular plays; John Monro, the keeper of Bedlam, known coffee houses or Langfords, the auctioneers  - she has an ability in presenting her contemporary world as a lived in and real place, rather than the clear stage-world that’s often evoked.

I also nominate Mrs Rackett as the player of the match (I’m writing this the day of the Euro finals, maybe it’s affected me). Whether she was teleporting around the city, playing the madman with great skill or defending the honour of the term ‘gentlewoman’, she was always entertaining. I particularly like how she made romance with her sound like a threat;

   “He holds women in contempt, I should like to have the opportunity of breaking his heart for that.” She also notes that when she does re-marry, young men throughout London will hang themselves. I’d like her confidence.

And so we came to the end of a very enjoyable play and a very enjoyable year at the Dr Johnson Reading Circle, and look forward to another enjoyable year to come.