Trips - City Wall at Vine Street, Portraits of Dogs and The Postal Museum

 During the summer holidays, I discovered that I could get an Art Pass for £25 a year because I work at a school. I was very excited about this, because I’ve long fancied having an Art Pass. It allows a person to get into some museums for free and to see big exhibitions for half price. When I got back to London, I used it as much as I could.. and here is what I saw.

City Wall at Vine Street

My first visit wasn’t actually to an Art Pass venue. It’s a chunk of London’s Roman wall underneath a new student housing block. It’s free to visit, but booking helps.

The centrepiece is a chunk of Roman wall. It’s a lot like the other pieces of Roman wall dotted around the Tower of London; neat, solid and separated by bands of red tiles. Jutting out the front is a later addition to the wall, the foundations of a Roman bastion. However, that is not all. The Roman wall was incorporated into the mediaeval wall, and that included in 17th and 18th century houses, which was then included into Victorian and 20th century warehouses. Elements of all these time periods are visible on the wall, making it not only a remarkable existing piece of archeology, but a microcosm of the whole 2,000 year history of London.

Around the wall are display cases that show objects dug up around the wall. These include roman pots and tiles with cat footprints on, the usual stash of broken pipes and a lot of green glass bottles. All of these things are simple, quotidian, largely pretty smashed up. They aren’t particularly awe-inspiring to look at. But the write-ups are really good, there’s always a way of putting the objects in their everyday context and encouraging the visitor to reflect. Some of the best exhibition labelling I’ve seen.

There are also two focus cases that have a handful of objects found in the rubbish pits of two eighteenth century houses. The housing records are used to give the people who owned them a name and there are reflections on how the different things the two families threw away reflected on the families. Included in these cases was a rabbit skeleton, not butchered but thrown whole, it may have been a family pet and the rubbish pit was its last resting place.

City Wall at Vine Street is a great example of how to do a lot with relatively little and is very recommended.

Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney

This was an Art Pass venue. I’d visited to the Wallace Collection at the beginning of the summer and enjoyed it very much. I did, however, balk at visiting this special exhibition because as fun as it seemed, I wasn’t sure it would be £18 worth of fine. It was definitely worth the discounted price though.

Starting with some Roman greyhounds and a page of Da Vinci dog’s paw sketches, it then went to pictures by eighteenth century painter, George Stubbs. He actually painted 15 full length portraits of dogs, more then he did of horses. It’s fascinating how his pictures are of specific dogs, they live such relatively short lives, but are here mounted and present forever. There was Ringwood, the foxhound and Turk, a wonderfully floofy beast.

My favourite room was of Landseer dogs. He used them in allegorical and comical settings. Unfortunately, none of these dogs were playing cards (they missed a trick there) but there was a dog court, presided over by a poodle with ears like a judge’s wig. My favourite of these was titled, Dignity and Impudence, with dignity played by a bloodhound called Gryphon and impudence played by Scratch, who was, of course, a Westie.

There was a room devoted to toy dogs, which included two stuffed ones. Marie Antoinette was found of toy dogs, calling them names like Bebe and Mimi. There was a story (probably apocryphal) of a French farmer who came to Paris and learnt that the tiny, useless beasts were being sold for twenty-seven livres, and so rocked up to the city with a bunch of large dogs that he was shocked he couldn’t give away. I also learnt that Pekinese dogs were originally bred for the Imperial Chinese family, that no-one else was to own one and that it was protocol to bow to them as they scampered around the Forbidden City. I also learnt that the British came and nicked them, the first Pekinese in Britain being named Looty.

There was a Gainsborough picture, Tristram and Fox, which looked more alive than his human paintings. There was a portrait of one of Byron’s massive dogs, which he loved more than most people. There was a room of portraits of Victoria’s dogs, including many pictures by Victoria herself. This lead to Hockney’s cosy pictures of sausage dogs, which I felt looked slightly more sausage then dog.

Portraits of Dogs is probably not a sublime or grand experience, but it left me with a smile on my face. If I had a tail, it would have wagged.

The Postal Museum

This was another half price deal with the Art Pass. I mainly picked it because I’d never been before and it was close to the Unforgotten Lives at the London Metropolitan Archives. It also meant I could go to Grimaldi Park and visit the grave of Joseph Grimaldi.

The Postal Museum is in two parts, I think I accidentally went to the second part first. It was a ride on the mail rail, a narrow-gauge underground railway which used to zoom letters under the city. It was a little odd getting into the headspace of a package as I squeezed into the carriage and was whisked on a little loop. The audio commentary was really good, and there were projections at various stops telling the history of the service. Essentially, nearly all post found its way into London before being sent out to various directions - they’ve reorganised the system so it doesn’t work like that any more and the Rail Mail became defunct. I was surprised to find that Mail Rail boasts its appearance in the film Hudson Hawk, I didn’t mind that film but it’s not much to boast about.

The little museum afterwards has one of the pneumatic railway cars from 1869 (there’a a chapter about it in Barnvard’s Folly, the book that introduced me to Robert ‘Romeo’ Coates). I also learnt that it was illegal to post copies of Ulysses, and any copies found were burnt. Did you know that at one point there were railway sorting offices? They zoomed around the country, picking up letters with ingenious bag/hook apparatus and then passed them onto local stations by lobbing them into waiting nets. It’s a system that ended in the 1970s. Why is modern life so much more boring?

The Postal Museum itself is in a building a little further along. I learnt the post service was set up by Henry VIII and originally only took the King’s mail. However, later monarchs learnt they could make money by having other people to pay to use the service and so a regular postal system was set up. By the 18th century, they made more money by carrying passengers as well.

There was a good selection of stuff from the Georgian postal service, including guard uniforms and an 18th century mail coach. The best part was a section telling the story of a coach in 1816 which was attacked by an escaped lioness, which took out one of the horses before being shot. The post was only 45 minutes late.

The rest of the museum tells the more modern story of the postal service. There’s stuff about the development of stamps, post boxes, uniforms and different vehicles. My favourite being the ridiculous 5-wheeled cycles. The have the large ‘penny’ wheel of the penny-farthing, supported by four stabilising ‘farthings’. Another nickname for the ridiculous contraption was the ‘hen and chickens’. They were really only popular in Horsham, where they were invented.

It’s a museum very well set up for younger visitors, with lots of interactive elements and things to do at a more suitable height.

Unforgotten Lives: Rediscovering Londoners of African, Caribbean Asian and Indigenous Heritage 1560-1860.

Another freebie without the Art Pass. I talked about this and a matching lecture last week.

Trip: Unforgotten Lives at the London Metropolitan Archives

 

The London Metropolitan Archive has a brilliant free exhibition called Unforgotten Lives: Rediscovering Londoners of African, Caribbean Asian and Indigenous Heritage 1560-1860. The title is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s a detailed and fascinating look at (essentially non-white) Londoners as revealed by London’s archives, including parish records, voting records, court cases and business records. 

It’s wonderfully nuanced, catching snippets of lives and telling a whole range of stories and emphasising that, by being in the city’s voluminous records, these stories can be seen for brief flashes. The exhibition shows how integrated people of colour were in London’s history, existing as real, striving individuals and not just an abstract mass - and that, although many are invisible to history, it’s more because most ordinary people were. 

Very few records even mention the colour of a person, because society was organised around parishes and place of origin. This means a record may note a person originally came from St Vincent, or Jamaica, or wherever, but doesn’t distinguish between a white or black person who came from these places. For simple administrative purposes, race was unimportant and not worth noting. As such, their invisibleness comes largely from integration. 

Of course, I was most interested in the lives of those who lived in the eighteenth century, and the exhibition doesn’t disappoint. I also watched a lecture by Kathleen Chater which was specifically about these Black Georgians. Taking the lecture and exhibition together, there were more stories then I can cover, but I’d like to talk about some of my favourites. 

 

Chater pointed out that for most people of a poorer background, life in service was a good entry position, which could be turned into a successful business. Many former servants, especially on marriage, were given money to set up a shop, inn or some other business and many did well out of it. This included black servants.

Any Johnsonian knows how Francis Barber recieved the bulk of his will and invested that into future projects, but he wasn’t the only person set up that way. There was Ignatius Sancho, a servant turned businessman who voted in a Westminster election because of his status of property holder. Were it not for a biography written about him after his death, it wouldn’t have been known that he was black, because the records simply don’t mention it.

Other businesses people include the Cranbrook family, who were greengrocers in Clapham. Their children has a varied careers; including a hairdresser who married a rich client, a porter, a presbyterian minister and an anglican vicar. Cesar Picton was in service before becoming a coaldealer. He had a house in Richmond and another in Thames Ditton. He once got in trouble for poaching in someone else’s land with an unlicensed gun, but his wealth and status got him off with a fine. 

There was a shopkeeper with the wonderful name of William Precious, but all is known about him are the deeds to his shop. The even more peculiarly named, Reasonable Blackman was a silk weaver. 

There were many black sailors, with every stereotypical group of sailors including at least one black face, there’s even a black sailor represented on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Black sailors were pensioners at the Greenwich Hospital, but only ones that had served in the Royal Navy. Injured merchant sailors were far more unlucky.  Joseph Johnson lost his leg on a merchant ship and became a beggar, particularly notable because he used to wear a model of The Victory on his head. 

There were many black soldiers and many of them were involved in regimental bands. It was a particularity in the army that flogging, for internal discipline, was often carried out by the drummers. As a result, it was noted that there was often an occasion where a person called see a black man flogging a white one, something deemed ‘extremely disagreeable’ to an American visitor, but a normal occurrence in the British Army. As promotion in the army mainly came from buying a position, there wasn’t a lot of promotion, yet James Goodwin, originally from Barbados did reach the rank of Trumpet-Major. 

Many mixed-race children of the West-Indian slavers were sent to England for education and a number became heirs. One of these was Nathaniel Wells, who became a Justice of the Peace, a Lieutenant in the local Yeomanry, a high sheriff and a master of the local hunt. As ‘respectable’ and integrated in the country hoity-toity set as anyone could be.

There were also black people with less salubrious claims to fame. Anne Duck is the person in the exhibition with the most appearances at the Old Bailey. She targeted lawyers, and was let off during her first four appearances but sentenced to hang on her fifth appearance. She was also brought before the caught and sentenced to another crime while she was awaiting her sentence to be carried out for the one before. Her brother was part of a flotilla that circumnavigated the globe but his ship was driven off course near Chile and he was never seen again.

It would be extremely silly to say that Georgian London was a haven or utterly safe place for people of colour. However, it would seem that most of their difficulties stemmed from the same class and financial difficulties experienced by the majority of Londoners. Racism was to come, especially with the growth of ‘scientific racism’ as the colonial activities of the United Kingdom grow ever more voracious. Yet, Georgian London, for all it’s bigotry and ignorance, does seem to have been (at least) not institutionally racist. People of colour could succeed in the same narrow ways any of the London poor could. 

There are so many other stories though; from the famous names like Oludiah Equiano and Dido

Elizabeth Belle, to people like Phillis Wheatley, a woman enslaved in America who came to Britain because nobody there would publish her poetry.

I recommend visiting, it runs until 27th March 2024.

A Trip to Tattershall

 A few weeks ago, I visited the pretty Lincolnshire village of Tattershall, primarily to visit the castle there. It was a beautiful summer day and rather bucolic in its way. Cows mooched about a river like a Constable painting, we sat in the sun eating sandwiches near the shade of the castle as a Spitfire flew round the village from one of the neighbouring air fields. At other times, Typhoons from another airbase launched with resounding booms and flew straight up into the clouds. 

The castle itself is an interesting one. The original stone one being built without a keep in the pattern of Bolingbroke, birthplace of usurper king, Henry IV.  However, a few kings later, by Henry VI’s time, it was home to Ralph Cromwell, his Lord High Treasurer (and quite a successful one, considering his time in office and the fact he ended it both alive and not in disgrace). To reflect his new power, he built a keep in Tattershall, but built it out of brick. It took thousands of bricks, shipped down through an altered river. As such it’s quite an impressive sight. 

The castle’s history becomes quite checkered with Cromwell not having any children (he’s not related to any of the more famous Cromwells). The castle was passed about and was actually besieged during the civil war, with cannonballs demolishing the older stone parts of the castle but bouncing off the brick one. 

It was then left empty and the insides rotted out. It become a day out in the 18th and 19th century and the stairwells (which survived) were absolutely covered in graffiti - alas, no Merry-Thought style poems, just names and dates. In 1910, it was bought by Lord Curzon, who spent a great deal in doing it up and restoring the fireplaces, which had been sold to an American buyer. The fate of these fireplaces actually prompted improvements in legal protection to old buildings. He then gave it to the National Trust.

Near the Castle sits a large church. There was originally a large college around it, which was later dissolved. The church was started by Ralph Cromwell and looks huge, considering the small village it serves. It’s home to over a thousand bats, which flock around the cathedral at night, and even a little in the day. Everything in the church is covered up due to the batshit, which is everywhere. There aren’t only bats in the belfry, there are bats in every crevice. The church is also home to Tom Thumb’s gave.

Not a short person nicknamed Tom Thumb, but the actual fairy-tale figure of Tom Thumb. Reputedly 47cms tall and dying at the age of 101, his gravestone is one small paving slab. Nearby Lincoln Cathedral also used to have a Tom Thumb grave, but it has since gone missing - Tattershall’s is still there. It would seem that Lincolnshire really took the Tom Thumb story to heart. Interestingly, the date on the grave, 1620, is also about the time the character started appearing in chapbooks and the like. The town also claims to have Tom Thumb’s house, a small house-like structure on the top of a building in the market square. 

It’s actually something called a louvre or louver, a 14th century architectural feature designed to let in air and light but not rain (or evil spirits). Apparently, it used to belong on a different building before it was on the one it is currently.

Now the eighteenth century bit…and it’s something of an mystery, or possibly just an odd coincidence. In scrobbling around on the net, reading about Tattershall, I didn’t see anyone making the connection.

One of Henry Fielding’s most successful dramatic works, before he turned magistrate and novelist, was The Tragedy of Tragedies. That play was, in itself, a reworked version of an earlier play, Tom Thumb. It tells a version of the Tom Thumb story, with him going to King Arthur’s court and killing giants and being given the hand of the princess, Huncamunca. He is later reported dead, but it’s actually a monkey before being killed by being eaten by a cow. His ghost returns and is then killed by a court member, then everyone kills each other. Apart from being an important part of his development as a playwright, the play caused Jonathan Swift to laugh, a man who was known for never laughing.

I said earlier, that Tattershall Castle was left empty. Villagers kept their cows in the downstairs parts, people painted watercolours of it and more daring visitors climbed the stairs in the decaying structure and carved their names in the walls. On the third floor, above an archway, carved deeply and neatly, is the name Henry Fielding. Was it that Henry Fielding? Did he take a trip to Tattershall, carve his name in the castle and visit the church? Did he see Tom Thumb’s minuscule grave and decide to write a play where the character dies three times? There’s no way of proving it, of course, but I’d like to think so.

Review: John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman by Thomas Cogan

 

After 750 pages of The Life of John Buncle, Esq, I thought I was Buncled out. Even the temptation of DE Stevenson’s Miss Buncle’s Book would not draw me to Buncle again. But then I saw John Buncle Junior, Gentleman by Thomas Cogan - maybe I can stretch to a little more Buncle.

Despite claiming to be written by a son of the original Buncle (of Miss Dunk, if you were wondering), it’s a very different book, rather more like one of Richard Griffith’s books, one of which is named in John Buncle Jr. Rather than being a meandering mix of religious screed, encyclopaedia and romance, it’s a fairly typical set of light eighteenth-century essays with a loose theming around sending letters back to a fancy—bit while taking a trip. Personally, I love this kind of thing and many eighteenth-century authors were so good at creating a likeable, conversational personality on the page.

But how? Older Buncle made it clear that his children were losers.  “They never were concerned in any extraordinary affairs, nor ever did any remarkable things that I heard of; only rise and breakfast, read and saunter, drink and eat, it would not be fair, in my opinion, to make anyone pay for their history.” Younger Buncle says that his esteemed father, though a very good man, is too argumentative in his views and lost contact with all his children as they become less vehement than he. 

The first essay is about the title. The publisher doesn’t think that John Buncle Jr, Gentleman is not a very catchy title, that he could at least prop his name up with a ‘learned’ or ‘renowned’. The publisher says that he likes a teasing, vague title, as, “Our business is to catch attention and the less we reveal, the better chance for a sale.” He says these vague titles are especially good for scrappily written, miscellaneous works and he cites the name Something New, one of Richard Griffith’s books under the name of Automathes. He also has a list of sellable book titles to slap onto future books. These include;

“The mental Don-Quixote

The spiritual light-horseman

The moral hussar”

 - I just found those funny.

The first few chapters poke light fun and play with many different parts of the book, the title, the pitfalls of a dedication and the throat-clearing of the preface. They have that wonderfully light, snarky and direct tone often found in these kind of pieces. The sort of writing that shows how readable older works can be, that verbose and stiff writing is not a necessary feature of old writing.

The next chapters purport to be letters from Buncle to Masie, the woman he loves, as he takes a little saunter around the home counties. He says that he is travelling sentimentally, meaning that he is travelling with his eyes open to the little moments and stories as he goes. The rest of the book are these little events and thoughts he has to himself.

The first goes a bit Wonder Woman, as he possesses a ‘whip of truth’, a device that allows him to see beyond the outward impression and into the reality of people’s lives. At other times he refers to it as his ‘rod of intelligence’ and his ‘mystic instrument’. He touches people with this device, sees the seemingly innocent maiden who yearns for her lover again, the pious vicar who is simply totting up his tithes and other stock hypocritical figures. Of course, the only person who is straightforward, and is not kidding himself about his qualities or happiness, is the poor street sweeper. He was press-ganged away from his family, lost a leg and returned to find his wife dead and his children scattered to the winds. To be fair, his happiness mostly consists in the knowledge he has nothing to lose, and the appreciation of the things he has. 

There’s one pair, an old man with a young schoolgirl, which prompt a little more investigation. He is an aged family man, who takes the girl for a little fling in return for presents. She is the daughter of honest farming people who has been sent to school to improve her prospects but which has essentially corrupted her by false promises of her eligibility in fancy circles. Her preferred lover is the school dancing master, but she’ll fool around with the old man because he has better gifts. Buncle notes;  “One incident made me smile. In the ardor of his caresses, the upper set of the gentleman’s teeth fell into her lap.” I laughed at that.

As they get closer to London, the chapters discuss that city. He talks about the hypocritical poets, who write about the better moral purity of the countryside when they couldn’t exist outside of the metropolis. He tries to set a case for London, describing the kind of people who might get something out of the place. These include pleasure seekers, men of business, criminals, single men who enjoy the freedom and those who are “able to embrace a thousand miseries if they appear but happy” - i.e influencers. He doesn’t exactly succeed at selling London, not with the certainty of Johnson’s overused quote. He says that true Londoners think they are wiser and sharper than everyone else but would be useless anywhere else. He also defines those Londoners as those “born within the sound of Bow Bells”, which is the earliest version of the classic Cockney definition that I’ve read.

On the way, he finds himself in a manky inn. They climb up to the central dining are where the naked spaces of the room let the imagination work at will”. I like the idea of him seeing faces in the cracks of the walls. I also wonder of there’s any graffiti there. The landlady has an amazing ability to talk all the time and Buncle wonders how she does it.

  “I will not say she thought aloud; that would be paying her too great a compliment; but every drifting idea that slightly touched upon the fibres of her Censorium, immediately ran by something of an electrical conductor, to her tongue, and set it into motion.” It’s a neat little character sketch.

Then there’s a chapter which describes a series of people taking offence at small trifles, then the book simple stops. There is no conclusion, no reunion with Maisie, no sequel. That’s it. So that’s also the end of this write-up.

Review: The Life of John Buncle Esq by Thomas Amory

 I’ve taken myself into the country for the summer and to save on space (so I can bring Clarissa with me) I brought my kindle. Honestly, I usually forget about it in my usual reading diet and I’ve had fun exploring the odd things I’ve accumulated on there. One of these is The Life of John Buncle Esq by Thomas Amory and first published in 1756.  Bibliophile, Edmund Gosse  said, “To lovers of odd books, John Buncle will always have a genuine attraction.”

Written by an eccentric shut-in, who’d only leave his house at night, John Buncle is a strange, unclassifiable work. Purporting to be an autobiography, it blends travel literature, amatory tale, general encyclopaedia and religious tract in peculiar ways. The young John Buncle has thrilling journeys through untamed wildernesses, where he finds highly intelligent women, frequently living in hermitages with their fathers, or in communes with other women. These women tend to be very knowledgable about some aspect of religion and lecture out hero for many pages before John Buncle moves on. Sometimes he marries these women, sometimes he doesn’t. If he does, their lifespan is precariously short.

The book begins with a very off-putting chapter where Buncle/Amory lays out his educational and dogmatic positions. He is an ardent Christian but a unitarian, he believes that the concept of the trinity was invented to by logic-chopping monks. He believes that there is a singular and all powerful God, who can reveal himself miraculously but does so more often through reason - that knowledge of the world and nature reveal more and more the existence and nature of this supreme being. He is ardently ant-catholic, seeing it as a religion based on man-made nonsense like saints and magic bread. Lucky for him, most people he meet already hold these views, or are easily convinced of them.

I wrote so many notes about this book, 24 pages in total, more than I have for the 1300 pages of Clarissa I have read so far. However, so many of those read the same, it’s quite a repetitive book.. 

After describing his educational positions, Buncle has a little wander around the countryside where he meets Miss Noel. She’s in a green, shell-lined grotto where she’s studying Hebrew. She invites him to see “the curiosities of my grot”, lectures him for many pages about shells and then many pages about the Hebrew language. She’s funny, clever, well read and incredibly hot. She was black hair. It’s something of his type. Alas, she does of smallpox before he can marry her.

After his wander round the countryside, he returns home to find, horror of horrors.. his dad has married the help. This evil stepmother, and his father’s dislike of Buncle’s Unitarianism, means he leaves home and goes wandering, practically a beggar (except for the £500 his dad gives him.. not exactly stingy). On the boat over, he meets Miss Melmoth. She’s extremely intelligent, funny and attractive, with long black hair. He also gets to save her in a storm - she’s sleeping in her bed naked when a wave sweeps in her cabin and he gets to pick her up, naked and save her, naked and hold her, naked - the book very much wants her nudity to be known.

Then Buncle wanders ‘Stanemore’. While I am aware there are peaks and fells up north, Amory describes the landscape like it consists of a huge mountain range and huge unexplored areas. He climbs mountains, pole vaults over cracks, journeys inside mountains, often describing them as alps. This allows for picturesque descriptions of landscape, especially the mountainous landscapes described by Burke as ‘the sublime’ in a publication the year after. It also allows him to talk about theories of geology - particularly a theory of underground seas that was described by Athanasius Kircher and a plot point in Simplicius Simplicissimus. 

It also allows Buncle to stumble across various grottos, hermitages and other countryside retreats where he meets, smart, funny, sexy women with black hair who can lecture him about religion. This happens so often, that it starts to feel like something of a fetish. One behaviour of people with specific fetishes is the need to perform, either in reality or role-play, the same set of actions again and again, and that seems to be what Amory is doing here. Despite being a book that is never-knowingly funny, when Buncle meets yet another of these women, it grows funnier each time.

One woman who does stand out is Azora. Described as being one of the most fascinating talkers, she lectures Buncle about fish for several pages, then moves on to the usual religious lectures. She is, however, the leader of a commune of fifteen intelligent, religious women, all with black hair, between the ages of 19-25 - you can almost hear Amory’s breech buttons ping off. Her father was a chemist who got sucked down an alchemist black hole, he made the mistake of thinking some men were ‘spagyrists’ but they unfortunately turned out to be ‘enigmatistinubiuagi’. (The first meaning alchemist, the second… a cheat, I suppose). Azora runs her commune along strict religious lines and the reader is treated to a nine page prayer and “because some readers may be pleased with a sight of another of Azora’s religious compositions, I have set it down,” so there follows another nine pages. 

As well as meeting hot, intelligent, witty women in their mid-twenties, Buncle also meets a group of male hermit-mathematicians who have a microscope that projects onto the wall. They treat him to a show, a fight between a louse and a flea, which is told anthropomorphically as a tough, personal battle where “the gallant louse did with a frown behold the flea”. Another thing he comes across is a farm with a skeleton. He was a man called Orton, who has left a note explaining that he used to be a rake but had taken himself into seclusion for penance. Buncle is very respectful to Orton’s memory, he carefully buries his body but takes his head as a momento mori and steals his house.

While religious disputes are Buncle’s primary interest, he is willing to lecture or be lectured about all sorts of other subjects, especially the mathematical, the geographical and the medical. He’s particularly interested when a few of these areas match up, with a particular interest in medical springs. He loves exploring the mineral make-up of various springs and listing the illnesses which they will cure. I made I note of the following recommendation;

     “If you have an ulcer in your anus, or in the neck of your bladder, go to Harrowgate and drink the stinking water.”

As the book continues, the lectures die down a little and he starts having adventures in towns, including London. There he meet legendary bookseller, demonised by Pope, Edmund Curll. He’s described as being tall and ungainly, with splay feet. Not a strictly moral man, he does keep his translators “three in a bed at the pewter-platter Inn in Holborn” (near Hatton Gardens). However, he is also presented as being “acquainted with more than just the title pages of books”, having a good knowledge and some goodness - though this may be just because of his willingness to publish Unitarian works.

Also, a different running gag emerges, not that it’s intended to be one. Buncle meets twelve or so women, he marries seven of them, not one of them lasts as his wife longer than two years. A few dies of smallpox, some of fever. One dies in a coach accident and another falls of a boat they are messing about in and drowns. While the first couple of wives make the cotton anniversary, most of them barely last six months. One woman missed the chance of marrying him, she lived for another twenty-years. Admittedly, she became a homeless prostitute, once he finds her and looks after her, she barely makes a fortnight. It was hard not to imagine a secretive under-story, where Buncle is a terrible mass-murderer, poisoning wives or pushing them off pleasure craft. 

What’s more, these deaths always benefit him. Destitute after being conned by card-sharps, he marries and buries three women in quick succession, giving him a pretty fortune, especially when one of their fathers dies quickly into the marriage and his own father swiftly afterwards. One wife dies two days before he’s going to marry her, is dug up by graverobbers and accidentally revives on the surgeon’s table and marries the surgeon. He then dies shortly after meeting Buncle, she marries Buncle and then dies a few months after that - leaving him the doctor’s fortune and hers. I does become hard to escape the notion that, just under the surface of the text, Buncle is murdering everyone and it becomes extremely funny when another name joins the hit-list. I’d say he murders about twenty-eight people in the book - he also knows how to make ants strip a corpse in a week.

The deaths in the book stem from that initial fetish-like structure to the piece. For Amory, the moment of meeting and ‘winning’ the beautiful, hot, intelligent woman with black hair is the fetish. Being married to them isn’t. So he’ll use pages and pages to describe the meeting, the initial conversations and the conquest but then the marriage is described in a paragraph, the death and burial in another and the mourning in another - that way, he can go hunting for a new woman.

You’d think, with seven wives, Buncle would have a lot of children, and you’d be right. However, because they don’t exist within Amory’s particular fetish, they don’t really feature in the book. Buncle writes off his whole progeny quite resolutely;

  “They never were concerned in any extraordinary affairs, nor ever did any remarkable things that I heard of; only rise and breakfast, read and saunter, drink and eat, it would not be fair, in my opinion, to make anyone pay for their history.”

One huge disadvantage with reading the kindle version of this book was that I didn’t realise the relationship it had with it’s own footnotes. Or that it had 150 pages worth of footnotes. On the ex-classics kindle version, they’ve been put at the end and so sneak up on a reader. On the whole, they don’t add much to the text, they add citations for the opinions characters lecture about, give biographies of divines, further the same interminable religious fiddle-faddling found in the main text. Generally, if there was something a little dull in the main text, Amory finds a way of making it longer and duller in the footnotes.

The Life of John Buncle, Esq is a truly peculiar book though a long one at over seven-hundred pages. There’s actually an abridgement called The Spirit of Buncle. I’m not sure if it cuts out the amatory elements or the religious polemic - either way, to cut out any of The Life of John Buncle, Esq, is to reduce the ridiculous, amusing, sometimes very dull experience of the whole thing. I recommend it.

There’s also a sort of sequel called John Buncle Jr, Gentleman written by a different author called Thomas Cogan.. I’ve read it and will review it in due course.