A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Daphne Du Maurier’s Vanishing Cornwall, a book that is part memories about Cornwall during Du Maurier’s youth, partly a history of Cornwall, and partly a series of colorful local legends about smugglers and tinners and eccentric vicars etc. My favorite was the tale of the most recent eccentric vicar, who installed ten foot walls around the vicarage, bought about a dozen savage dogs, and installed a box at the end of his drive so all deliveries could be made at a distance.

The locals begged the church to appoint a vicar who might occasionally do vicar-y things like “visiting the sick and dying,” but as the vicar was still giving the Sunday service every week (in a church with pews filled with cardboard cutouts, as his parishioners had fled), the Church pled that its hands were tied.

I also finished Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, which is fine, but not as detailed as I’d hoped about the actual work that servants did.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Vanity Fair! Does anyone care about spoilers for a book that is over 150 years old? If you do, they are upcoming so please look away.

My Waterloo predictions were exactly backwards: Rawdon Crawley survived, while George Osborne died with a bullet in his heart, too swiftly even for Amelia to rush to his bedside to weep.

Amelia has now spent the last SEVEN YEARS in mourning. Mr. Thackeray, Amelia is so boring. Mr. Thackeray has foreseen this complaint and assures us all that female readers who think Amelia is boring are just JEALOUS because the men LIKE HER SO MUCH, but Mr. Thackeray, this is not jealousy-inducing when the character in question is all, “I could never return your feelings, for I remain in deep mourning for the husband who barely give two pins about me.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Feeling a yen to continue on with the George Smiley books. Next up is The Secret Pilgrim.

As with Mary Stolz, so with Rosemary Sutcliff: another prolific mid-twentieth-century writer whose books are now unevenly available in public libraries. Of course I had to raid the Indianapolis Public Library for her works, too.

I started with Beowulf, which is - wait for it - a retelling of Beowulf. It’s a straight-up retelling, without twists, simply an attempt to render the story into modern prose. And what beautiful prose it is - like this passage about a man, the last of his once-mighty kin, hiding away in a sea cave the treasures that they gathered in happier days.

And there, little by little, he carried all his treasures and hid them within sounding of the sea, and made a death-song over them as over slain warriors, lamenting for the thanes who would drink from the golden cups and wield the mighty swords no more, for the hearths grown cold and the harps fallen silent and the halls abandoned to the foxes and the ravens.

Then I continued with more retellings! Black Ships Before Troy is a retelling not just of the Iliad, but of a number of stories around the Iliad, including the tale (which I had never heard before) that before the war, Achilles’ mother tried to keep him away from the fighting by disguising him as one of the daughters of King Lycomedes.

I had also never before heard the tale about how Paris died before the end of the Trojan War, and the Trojans STILL didn’t give Helen back to the Greeks. You guys! You guys! WHY. Why not at least TRY to give her back and end the whole thing? It’s inexplicable enough when Paris is still alive to say “But Daddy I love her!”, but once he’s dead you’d think SURELY… But no. Every time I read any version of this story I hope against hope that maybe THIS TIME someone will send Helen right back to Menelaus and avert the whole damn tragedy, but they never do.

Then onward with The Wanderings of Odysseus! This is a pretty straight-up retelling of the Odyssey, so no surprises like cross-dressing Achilles (fascinated that Achilles went along with his mother’s plan on that, to be honest), but a good solid retelling if you feel the need for a bit more Odyssey in your life, as who among us does not at times? (This reminds me that I still haven’t gotten around to Emily Wilson’s Odyssey.) Sutcliff leaves out the bit where Odysseus hangs the twelve maids.

Moving on from retellings, at long last I’ve read Warrior Scarlet. I really enjoyed the Bronze Age setting and Drem’s blood brotherhood with Vortrix (“My brother - oh, my brother - we have hunted the same trails and eaten from the same bowl and slept in the same bed when the hunting was over. How shall I go on or you turn back alone?”), but damn, this book also has one of Sutcliff’s least convincing heterosexual romances.

After an entire book of near-total indifference to Blai, his foster-sister, who is obviously secretly in love with Drem, “Suddenly he was aware of her as he had been only once before, but more strongly and clearly now, out of a new compassion… For a moment it was only compassion, and then quite suddenly and simply he understood that he and Blai belonged together, like to like.”

This is such a Mary Renault move, this movement from compassion to “we belong together,” and here is in Mary Renault it’s the beloved realizing the strength of the lover’s feelings and basically acquiescing to this state of affairs: you adore me, and I love you I guess. I’m not mad keen on this dynamic ever, and I like it even less when the lover is the woman in a heterosexual romance: she’s already so disadvantaged by society, she ought at least to have the advantage of a husband who adores her rather than one who allows himself to be adored.

AND FINALLY we have Heroes and History, a collection of short biographies of heroes in British history, including King Arthur and Robin Hood, notwithstanding that the historical evidence that these two heroes ever existed is a bit rickety. Sutcliff argues that Arthur shows up in enough chronicles to have some basis in historical fact (even if the legends that have accreted around him are largely embroidery), whereas Robin Hood seems far more doubtful… “But in any case, no Book of British Heroes could possibly be complete without Robin Hood.”

This is so delightfully characteristic of an older way of doing history - shades of James Ford Rhodes, who kicked off his 1899 inaugural address to the newly founded American Historical Association by saying, “let us at once agree that it were better that all the histories ever written were burned than for the world to lose Homer and Shakespeare,” then follows with an impassioned paean to Shakespeare-as-historian. Yes, Shakespeare absolutely made up the speeches, but like Thucydides, he captures “the essential—not the literal—truth” of the times!

I first read this speech in my history-of-history class in grad school. Later on, when we got to the postmodernists grumping away about the shackles of attempting “objectivity” in history, I wondered if they realized that they were merely retreading the paths set down by James Ford Rhodes, only tiptoeing timidly where he strode brashly forth. Objectivity shmobjectivity! Burn all the histories and keep your Shakespeare!

Ruth Goodman’s The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything is saddled with one of those maddening subtitles that is directly contrary to the actual point of the book. Goodman’s whole point is that coal became the dominant fuel in London homes at the end of the Elizabethan Era, and this domestic coal usage spurred the use of coal for industrial purposes which, in turn, helped spark the Industrial Revolution, all of which occurred long before the Victorian era!

The subtitle issue is especially exasperating because it obscures the truly revolutionary nature of this book: in placing the home squarely at the center of the adoption of coal, it upends the traditional history of the industrial revolution.

Goodman’s day job is as a hardcore historical reenactor, using old advice books to recreate daily life in the past, so like all her books, this book is full of fascinating tidbits about daily life. Often Goodman discovers that advice that seems bizarre today makes good sense in context: one bit that sticks with me from a previous book is that brushing your hair one hundred strokes each night actually does keep your hair clean and shining if you do it with a natural bristle brush.

In The Domestic Revolution, Goodman answers a lot of questions that I had only vaguely formulated before. For instance:

Coal is responsible for the fact that British food is so different from food across Europe: coal fires are perfect for things like puddings that boil for hours and hours, while wood is better suited for things that need a long slow simmer, like stews. (This also explains why things like roly-poly pudding never caught on in America: American homes continued to be wood-based long after most of England had switched to coal, and it’s very hard to keep a wood fire at the pitch of heat necessary to boil a pudding for hours.)

The rise of coal-burning homes coincides with the fall of tapestries, because sticky coal smuts are almost impossible to clean off an expensive, difficult-to-launder tapestry. It’s much easier to wash them off a painted wall or that fashionable new wallpaper.

Wood-burning houses are generally easier to keep clean than coal-burning ones, and require very little soap, because wood ash is itself a natural cleaner. As you may recall, wood ash is one of the ingredients in soap: you pour water through ash to get lye. In a wood-burning house with plenty of ash, you can simply use that lye directly in the laundry, for instance. In a coal-burning house, however, only soap can clean away the oily coal smuts. In time, soap came to be seen as the only way to clean, a link that has only strengthened over time, so that when people today see ye olde cleaning advice that doesn’t feature soap, they assume it can’t possibly work and that people in the past and/or faraway places where this advice is still used must be filthy.

(Goodman notes that soap advertisements basically manufactured the “dirty native” trope: it became much more common after it was employed in massive ad campaigns that linked soap and civilization.)

Because of the sticky nature of coal smuts, it takes much longer to clean a coal-burning home than a wood-burning one. Thus, the adoption of coal forced women to spend much more time cleaning their homes (and concomitantly less time working in the garden, the dairy, the poultry yard…), and Goodman suggests that this contributed to the rise of separate spheres ideology that so powerfully identified women with the domestic sphere. Coal technology forced women to spend ever more time in the home, and people moralized from the accomplished fact, as people are wont to do. Whatever is, is not merely right, but the best of all possible worlds.

Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians: What We Think We Know about Them and Why We’re Wrong is actually a reread, or at least a partial reread. At any rate, in high school I read the chapter about early motion pictures often enough to remember Sweet’s meditation about Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Thomas Hardy sitting in movie theaters in their twilight years, “eating their vanilla ice cream with little wooden spoons; feeling pleased that the movies have decided to launch a new publicity campaign for the novels they wrote thirty, forty or fifty years before; watching their work on the screen before them, transfigured into light.”

I was perfectly enchanted by the idea of eating vanilla ice cream with a little wooden spoon while watching a movie in the theater. Truly theatrical refreshments have gone downhill.

However, the real reason I got the book again was the chapter on homosexuality, which includes a reference to a passionate male friendship in a Dickens novel (Our Mutual Friend) with an exceedingly lively quote about how much they love each other - or so I thought, only I couldn’t find it in Our Mutual Friend, on account of how its actually in Wilkie Collins Armadale (quoted directly thereafter the passage about Dickens, so you can see how my memory confused the two). The eponymous Armadale’s friend cries,

“I do love him! It will come out of me; I can’t keep it back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my life—yes, the life that is precious to me now, because his kindness has made it a happy one—I tell you I would give my life—”

...I intended to read the novel once I ascertained which novel that quote came from, but Armadale is 1000+ pages long and as much as I love that kind of overheated Victorian passion, I’m not sure I’m a thousand pages interested.

I did, however, follow Sweet’s quotes from The Pearl (a Victorian porn magazine) back to their source, now helpfully archived on Wikisource, and you guys, Victorian porn is WILD. If anything Sweet undersold the wildness; he notes that the male characters occasionally have sex with each other, “as a sort of kinky side salad or anticipatory hors d’oeurve to more central acts of carnality with women,” but he did not mention that the women in these same stories are all having sex with each other, too. So you’ll have sequences where a chap who is just so overcome by the manly vigor of his friend’s erection that he just has to blow him then and there, and then they both go to have an orgy with a quartet of girls who have been fondling each other in the meantime.

(In The Sins of the City of the Plain - available on gutenberg.org - which is famous as an early example of homosexual porn, the rent boy Jack Saul occasionally has sex with women, in the same “kinky side salad/anticipatory hors d’oeurve” way that the male characters in other Victorian porn have sex with men.)

The basic assumption seems to be that you, the smutty Victorian porn reader, find everything hot - or else that each individual story needs to offer up a sort of porn smorgasbord, so that any reader can find something that appeals to them, and the readers who aren’t into incest, flagellation, ravishment, etc, are just going to skim till they get to the bits they like again.

I’ve seen a number of theories about why Victorian legislators didn’t outlaw lesbian sex - it occurs to me only as I type that this question rests on the very twentieth-century assumption that they wanted to, or at least would have wanted to if they knew lesbian sex existed, which many historians dourly assume they did not. Post-Pearl, my theory now is that at least a sizable minority of the PMs did know, and never tried to outlaw it because they thought it was super hot.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Judith Flanders’ The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London, which I’ve been dipping in and out of for months. It’s the sort of book that rewards that kind of reading; there’s not really a storyline as such, so you’re not going to lose the thread if you go slowly, and there are fascinating tidbits of information on every page. An amazing resource if you want to learn more about life in Victorian London. (Some of the information is clearly London-specific, but Flanders’ overarching thesis - that the city streets in the nineteenth century were a much livelier social space than they are today - jibes with descriptions I’ve read of other nineteenth century cities, in America as well as England.)

Conveniently, another history book that I read this week provides an echo of this fact: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair is a solid but not spectacular history of the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York, which buttresses Flanders’ assertion that large crowds would turn out to watch just about anything with its description of the crowds that came to watch the Milburn House, where President McKinley convalesced after being shot. They couldn’t even get near the house - the police cordoned off the whole block so McKinley could have quiet to rest - but people still turned out, even though there was nothing to see but the policemen patrolling the block and maybe a far-distant view of the roof.

The Buffalo fair was called the Rainbow Fair because, in contrast to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (called the White City for its dazzling white buildings), it painted its Spanish Mission-inspired buildings in many colors. It also, in a bold but perhaps misguided move, decided to focus solely on the Western Hemisphere: it only had pavilions from North and South America, not Europe. Unfortunately, Americans then (much like American now) were much more interested in Paris than, for instance, Buenos Aires, which perhaps partially accounted for the low attendance numbers: the fair didn’t make back its initial investment. (Although of course, President McKinley’s assassination may have slowed business, too.)

Onward in the Newbery Honor project: I read Patricia Reilly Giff’s Pictures of Hollis Woods, which perhaps suffered because it reminded me of a book I really didn’t like, Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers. Both books center around a girl in foster care; both are told in alternating chapters, half the chapters set Now and the other half set Sometime Before Now, when our heroine tragically messed up the only foster placement that made her feel like she really had a home, a fact to which she keeps alluding but does not explain for most of the book.

Because of this association, I kept expecting Hollis Woods to reveal that she, like the heroine in Language of Flowers, is really kind of a psychopath, but that’s entirely on me and not the book at all; if Hollis has any problems as a character, it’s the fact that the book keeps telling us she’s trouble but never actually shows her… being troublesome. Even the part where she sort of kidnaps her foster mother is really an altruistic act: her foster mother clearly has dementia or something of that nature, and Hollis is afraid that the foster care system will separate them and perhaps put her foster mother in some sort of institution.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST (I read a lot of books this week), I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax on Safari, a solid entrant in the Mrs. Pollifax series, a soothing balm of exotic espionage during these troubled times. I was a little sorry that it seems Mrs. Pollifax is going to marry not!Farrell, but I daresay her paramour will grow on me eventually, even though their emotional connection didn’t grow like a tender vine while they spend ten days trapped together in a prison cell in Albania.

What I’m Reading Now

Sarah Orne Jewett knows what I like, and what I like is HERMITS. Earlier this week, the narrator visited her landlady’s mother, an older woman in her eighties who lives on an idyllic island off the coast of Maine - with her son, though, and they always welcome visitors, so they are really only semi-hermits.

Then Jewett followed this up with the tale of Joanna, who was Crossed in Love (jilted, in fact, right before her wedding day) and thereafter resettled on small, storm-tossed Shellheap Island, on which boats can only land if the tide and the winds happen to align. Now that shows true commitment to hermithood.

What I Plan to Read Next

A friend of mine is sending me a book care package from Caveat Emptor, so I shall have many mystery books, both in the sense that I don’t know what they’ll be, and in the sense that some of them should be mystery novels.

Caveat Emptor is a Bloomington institution, which was looking down the barrel of defaulting on its May rent because of the pandemic; I was going to include a link to the book care packages, but the Bloomington book community responded with such fervor to the threat of the bookstore's death that they now have too many orders to fill! So they've temporarily shut down that deal while they catch up. A story with a happy ending!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished The Time Traveler’s Guide to Restoration Britain, which I found a bit of a slog to get through. Is it because I’m just not that interested in the Restoration period, or is it really not quite as interesting as The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England?

And I finished Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which I wanted to write about at more length - I selected a bunch of quotes and everything! - but I’ve run out of time, so for now I’m just going to share this one: “A therapist once said to me, ‘When it comes to a choice between feeling guilt or resentment, choose the guilt every time.’” (401)

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun A. A. Milne’s Once on a Time, a pleasingly arch fairy tale parody, which is also a parody of history books (Milne has invented a historian of this imaginary country, with whom he often politely disagrees). It’s fun but it’s also very clear why Milne achieved immortality for the Winnie the Pooh books instead.

I’ve also begun listening to the Iliad! Which has an entire benighted chapter just listing all the captains who fought at Troy and their lineages and hometowns, good lord, and then all the captains on the Trojan side, just for parity, although thank God there are not nearly as many of them.

Now Paris and Menelaus have attempted to end the war through single combat, only for Aphrodite to spirit Paris away to Helen’s bedchamber at the crucial moment. Oh, Aphrodite. That seems short-sighted - which I suppose love often is.

And I am continuing onward with Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure! This week, Duncan has shared a number of dry observations about travel cliches, including this gem: “somebody had told us that the proper and usual thing for strangers with a couple of hours in Hong Kong to do was to go up the Peak. Although Orthodocia reminded me that we had not come to China in search of hackneyed commonplaces, we also went up the Peak. It was one of the things that we did which convinced us that the travelling public quite understands what it is about, and that the hackneyed commonplace exists only in the minds of people who stay at home.” (186)

What I Plan to Read Next

I have hopes that the library will soon hook me up with the next Edward Eager book, The Well-Wishers.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mike Rendell’s In Bed with the Georgians: Sex, Scandal, and Satire in the 18th Century is an odd book. Some of the chapters are basically just annotated lists: here are all the most famous courtesans of the Georgian period, or all the most infamous rakes. There was one guy whose nickname was the "Rapemaster in Chief," but it took them ages to arrest him for anything because he was a high government official and rich and powerful men could do basically anything they wanted.

It was a bit sobering to read this just as Trump's sexual assault comments were coming out, because clearly Trump still believes we live in that world, although the mass public outrage from both political parties suggests that things have changed at least a little. (The Georgians clearly would have dismissed it all as boys being boys, or whatever the contemporary Georgian phrase was.)

Anyway. There's a lot of interesting and sometimes horrifying information here, if you're willing to pick through the shoddy organization to get to it.

What I’m Reading Now

Welcome to Night Vale - the novel, not the podcast - although I’ve been thinking that I might be enjoying it more if I were listening to it as an audiobook, although then again maybe not.

I've also been rereading Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. SUCH A GOOD BOOK. I'm planning to write a post about the amazingness of Sara Crewe (and also how well the book is constructed) once I'm done.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have a lot of books on my plate. I got D. E. Stevenson's The Four Graces from the library, and I've got Lisa See's The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane on my Kindle - it's from Netgalley and I'm so excited to get a sneak peak at Lisa See's next book that I've actually been putting it off just in case it doesn't live up to my expectations. See's work can be somewhat uneven, I've found.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Ben MacIntyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, which I expected to enjoy and ended up adoring. Kim Philby was the head of the MI6's Soviet spy division, MI6's liaison to the Soviet spying operation within the CIA, and also at the same time a Soviet spy himself.

Basically he sunk all MI6's and the CIA's anti-Soviet operations for a decade, and no one noticed because his fellow spies, who were also his friends, simply couldn't believe that someone of their own class, who had attended the right schools and belonged to the right clubs, could possibly by a traitor.

(It occurs to me, to take this in an MCU direction for a moment, that SHIELD might have had a meritocratic version of this mindset: they couldn't see Hydra members in their midst because they believed that people who had the innate excellence to get into the SHIELD academy could not possibly betray them. Go bad in other ways, maybe. Betray SHIELD? But it's saving the world, and it's also super cool! Why would anyone do that?)

If part of an organization's draw is that it gives its members license to keep and revel in secrets, then it will inevitably attract members who want even deeper secrets: who are addicted to secrecy, whose addiction can only be fed by having a secret of their own, like being a double agent. That way they can fool even their fellow secret-keepers.

Philby's British BFF Nicholas Elliot managed to live a happy (if occasionally wistfully puzzled) life afterward, because he concluded that Philby had used his own best qualities, his sense of honor and fair play, to bamboozle him. But Philby's American BFF James Angleton, who had hitherto believed that his best qualities were his suspicious mind and razor-sharp intelligence, was totally destroyed by Philby's betrayal (because clearly he was neither suspicious nor sharp!) and spent the next decade purging to CIA to make sure that no one could ever hurt his ego like that again.

What I'm Reading Now

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. I kind of feel that Gaiman really has one schtick, which blew me away when I first encountered it in Coraline, and has become progressively less engaging sense. (Of course it doesn't help with Neverwhere that I almost invariably prefer Gaiman's female characters to his male ones. He's like Philip Pullman that way.)

I'm also reading Jane Ridley's The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VIII, the Playboy Prince, because sartorias mentioned it and it sounded interested. And indeed, it is interesting! Although I think I would trust Ridley's analysis a little more if her dislike of Victoria and Albert were not quite so obvious. Maybe they deserve it, but it's hard to feel that Ridley's being fair when her feelings are so very clear.

What I Plan to Read Next

Gwen Raverat's Period Piece, a memoir of her childhood in Cambridge in the late nineteenth century. She was the daughter of a don and the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, so it ought to be interesting!

Best link EVER, you guys! Edwardian Street Fashion: candid photos, over one hundred years old, of women on the streets of London and Paris; a rare chance to see clothes of the period as-worn rather than in fashion plates.

(Not that I don't love Victorian and Edwardian fashion plates.)

I'm particularly fond of the London cyclist with the gigantic hat. Also the determined-looking girl at the top of the page, wearing a white skirt and hat like an extra-wide boater. Look at the set of her mouth and her clenched hands: doesn't she look like she ought to be the heroine of something?

I've basically finished my eighteenth-century history class. We have one more seminar but we've already turned in the final paper, so basically things are done.

These are my favorite books from the reading list: the ones I thought were excellent, insightful, and well-written. It's mainly for my own reference, but if anyone has a sudden hankering to read about eighteenth-century social history than I highly recommend all of these.

1, John Brewer's The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century is an exhausting, yet entertaining look at high culture in the eighteenth century. He covers music, dancing, the theater, literature, the arts (both painting and sculpture) and finishes off with short biographies of cultural figures of the time who have since been somewhat forgotten.

I meant to read a chapter. Four hours later, nearly midnight, my eyes finally gave out and I had with great regret to put the book away. It's engrossing.

2. Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter was probably my favorite book all term, and is incidentally one of the most popular books we read: it's available in a lot of public libraries. All sorts of interesting information about the lives of 18th century genteel women, drawn from scads of primary sources, with an interpretive framework that provides structure to the book without forcing the evidence into a preconceived pattern. (Writers of feminist history - or Marxist - or, indeed, anyone going into history with a sausage casing into which they wish to stuff their historical narrative - seem to be bothered when their subjects are happy, or exert some power over their lives. I suppose the historians think it weakens their argument.)

But Vickery is not just possessed of fascinating facts and a judiciously and sparingly applied interpretive framework. She's also a good writer, often quite dry and always entertaining. "We should not presume without evidence that women (or men) mindlessly absorbed a single didactic lesson like so many pieces of unresisting blotting paper"; no, we should look at as much evidence as possible from as many angles as are available, and see what it might teach us. Good history.

3. I've already written about Hitchcock and Shoemaker's Tales from the Hanging Court, which is, as it says on the tin, stories about trials at the Old Bailey. Lots of interesting insights, not just into the English justice system at the time, but into London life in general.

4. Brian Cowan's The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. The title is misleading. I think Cowan called it that because everyone loves eighteenth-century coffeehouses and no one has even heard of his real topic, the eighteenth-century virtuosi. The virtuosi were nothing to do with what we would today call virtuosos; they were instead young men, who generally had done the Grand Tour, who were curious about pretty much everything and amassed huge collections of curiosities.

Cowan's got chapters about auctions, booksellers, zoos, freak shows (they were evidently a pretty high class entertainment at the time), the dangers of foppishness, and the eighteenth-century ethic of sociability generally. The ethic of sociability ties back to the whole coffeehouse thing, the coffeehouse being, and I quote, "a key site of masculine social discipline," and there's some interesting stuff about coffee too. But really that's just the window dressing. Come for the coffee, stay for the conversation.

5. And, finally, D. Cannadine's Class in England, which actually stretches from the eighteenth century to essentially the present (the book was published in 1998, which explains why he says so many nice things about Americans. Honest to God, I almost teared up. Someone loved us once!). It more or less diagrams the eighteenth-century class structure, and also talks about the essentially artificial nature of any diagram of a class structure: the lines are arbitrary, there are always people who don't fit, don't wed yourself to your system, etc.

I think that's enough to be getting on with.