“Hang Together” on the Restoration Stage

Yesterday I alluded to a Professor Buzzkill podcast as my spur to look for the statement “We must hang together or separately” in a letter by the Virginia politician Carter Braxton.

That same episode from 2022 stated that the “hang together” wordplay can be traced further back to “John Dryden’s 1717 book, The Spanish Fryar, where it is referred to as a ‘Flemish proverb.’”

Dryden (1631–1700) produced his play The Spanish Fryar, or The Double Discovery in 1681, and it was reprinted often after that. In Act IV, Scene 1, one character says, “I’ll not hang alone, Fryar,” and Friar Dominick eventually replies, “in the Common Cause we are all of a Piece; we hang together.”

Dryden wasn’t the only playwright to play on the phrase “hang together” in 1681, however. Aphra Benn (1640–1689, shown here) wrote this exchange in The Round-Heads; Or, The Good Old Cause (Act III, Scene 1):

Fleet. My Lords and Gentlemen, we are here met together in the Name of the Lard———

Duc. Yea, and I hope we shall hang together as one Man—a Pox upon your Preaching. [Aside.

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Samuel Johnson chose Dryden over Benn to demonstrate the use of “hang together” in his dictionary.

As for Professor Buzzkill’s remark about a “Flemish proverb,” I can’t find any mention of that phrase in three early editions of Dryden’s Spanish Fryar. Perhaps that was an annotation by the editor of a later edition based on the 1717 text. Or perhaps separate references to a “hang together” saying got muddled together.

It would be striking if the “hang together” witticism came from another language because double meanings of that sort are often hard to translate. Indeed, the Rev. E. O. Haven’s 1869 textbook on Rhetoric uses Edouard Laboulaye’s unsuccessful attempt to render the saying (credited to Benjamin Franklin) in French as evidence for his warning “Puns usually Untranslatable.”

Be that as it may, the idea that a “Flemish proverb” was the seed of this American quotation has taken hold and now appears several places—all apparently after 2022. I welcome any earlier reference.

TOMMOROW: A post-Revolutionary reference.

“A Fire broke out on board the fine large Store-Ship”

While looking at the diary of Thomas Newell this spring, I was struck by this dramatic entry for 29 May 1773, 252 years ago today:

King’s store-ship burnt in this harbor. The inhabitants greatly surprised, fearing there was a great quantity of gunpowder on board. Thousands retired to the back part of the town, and over to Charlestown, &c.; but no powder happened to be on board.

John Rowe mentioned the same event in his diary, but he was out of town fishing during the panic, so his entry doesn’t preserve the same excitement.

For more detail I turned to the newspapers. Here’s the straightforward report in the 3 June Boston News-Letter:

at Noon, a Fire broke out on board the fine large Store-Ship, (which had been laying in this Harbour for several Months past commanded by Capt. [John] Walker, having Stores for the Navy) which soon communicated to the Masts, Rigging and Turpentine on the Deck, and before any Assistance came, her upper Works were almost wholly in a Blaze; so that little or no Attempt was made to extinguish it:—

The Boats from the Men of War, with some from the Town, towed the Ship over to Noddle’s Island, where, after scuttling her, she was left to burn to the Water’s Edge.—

The Fire, it is said, was occasioned by some Coals falling from the Hearth of the Cabouse on to the Deck, which had lately been pay’d over with Turpentine, and spread with such Rapidity that nothing could be taken out of her:—

The Captain, with his Wife and two Children, who usually kept on board, likewise a Boy (the other People belonging to her being ashore) were obliged to be taken out of the Cabin Windows, without being able to save the least Thing but what they had on:—

A report prevailing at the Time of the Fire, that a large Quantity of Powder was on board, put the Inhabitants in general into great Consternation, for fear of the Consequences that might arise from an Explosion thereof; but being afterwards assured that none was in her, they became perfectly easy, and the Hills and Wharfs were covered with Spectators to view so uncommon a Sight.

Some of the Stores in the Hold, such as Cordage, Cables, and Anchors, which were under Water before the Fire could reach them, will be saved.

A “caboose” was originally a ship’s galley, Merriam-Webster says. Advertisements from eighteenth-century America indicate a “caboose” could be sold separately from a ship, and in 1768 New York a man named Thomas Hempsted was killed by “the Caboose falling on him” as a ship keeled over. So I suspect it also meant the stove and other cooking equipment designed for a ship but not necessarily installed in a dedicated cabin.

The first documented use of the word “caboose” in English was in 1732, and Samuel Johnson didn’t include it in his 1755 dictionary. But everyone reading the Boston newspapers was expected to know what that meant.

TOMORROW: The conspiracy theories.

Dr. Johnson, Miss M’Queen, and a “book of science”

At the Scilicet blog, James Fox wrote about a gift from Dr. Samuel Johnson:

In 1773, during their now famous tour of the Western Isles of Scotland, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made a pit stop at a settlement called Aonach in Glen Moriston, near Inverness. As Johnson later recalled, a girl who served them tea ‘engaged me so much’ that he decided to give her a present. Having only what he could source in Inverness to hand, the gift was a copy of the highly popular maths textbook, Cocker’s Arithmetick.

Despite Boswell’s surprise, Johnson justified his giving of a practical gift. ‘When you have read through a book of entertainment’, he said, ‘you know it, and it can do no more for you; but a book of science is inexhaustible’. . . .

On the surface, Cocker’s Arithmetick was hardly riveting stuff. It taught the basics of arithmetic – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – presented as a set of ‘rules’ to be memorised with many worked examples that began with very basic problems that became increasinging difficult. Yet its popularity is remarkable by any standards. Written by Edward Cocker, a London-based teacher of writing and arithmetic, the book was first published posthumously in 1678. It was then reissued continually for decades after, not only in London, but also Dublin, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Its final edition appeared over a century later, in 1787, and by my own (conservative) estimate, it saw at least seventy editions. . . .

Chapters on commercial arithmetic skills in the second half of the text hinted at its target audience: aspiring businesspeople. It was this facet of Cocker’s appeal that ensured its enormous popularity. The book appeared at just the moment when the currency of arithmetic was exploding thanks to rising literacy and the emergence of a society oriented around commerce, consumerism and sociability. Buying Cocker’s Arithmetick represented a ticket to this new world.

Fox’s article is framed around Boswell’s report that “Several ladies” later found this gift laughable. He concludes that those women laughed because it had become almost cliché to recommend this “humble textbook.”

I suspect at least part of that laughter came from how the scholar had given this book to “a young woman,” as opposed to an ambitious young man. Even a young woman who “had been a year at Inverness, and learnt reading and writing, sewing, knotting, working lace, and pastry”?

Plus, there’s the class issue. Johnson and Boswell were visiting “a village…of three huts, one of which is distinguished by a chimney.” Fortunately for them, the owner of that one hut with a chimney, a man named M’Queen, accommodated them for the night.

M’Queen’s daughter was the young woman who served these visitors. Johnson later described her as “not inelegant either in mien or dress”; “Her conversation, like her appearance, was gentle and pleasing.” He insisted that in Highlander society she was a “gentlewoman.” But clearly he and Boswell (perhaps especially Boswell) were surprised by some of the family’s claim to gentility:

There were some books here: a Treatise against Drunkenness, translated from the French; a volume of the Spectator; a volume of Prideaux’s Connection, and Cyrus’s Travels. M’Queen said he had more volumes; and his pride seemed to be much piqued that we were surprised at his having books.

Dr. Johnson himself would protest that the Scilicet article’s phrase “Having only what he could source in Inverness to hand” might be misleading. He didn’t pop down to the Inverness shops to find the best available book to give as a present. Instead, the men had already passed through Inverness, and Johnson had bought Cocker’s Arithmetic for his own reading. Then when he wanted to give Miss M’Queen a present, “I presented her with a book which I happened to have about me.”

To Boswell, it was “singular” that Johnson “should happen to have Cocker’s Arithmetick.” That prompted the scholar’s observation that “if you are to have but one book with you upon a Journey, let it be a book of science.” His remark about exhausting “a book of entertainment” wasn’t a comment on what a young woman like Miss M’Queen would most benefit from; it was a comment on what kept his own interest.

New Light on the Portrait of Francis Williams

Last month Artnet and the Guardian reported on historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s findings about a painting I discussed in 2009.

The painting shows Francis Williams (1697–1762), a Jamaican of African ancestry. Born into a free and prospering family with special legal status, he went to London for education and then returned to the family estate.

The painting is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and fifteen years ago I quoted its webpage as saying:

Some writers have suggested that the painting is a caricature of Francis as he has been depicted with a large head and skinny legs. . . . Other critics have considered that the ‘unnaturalistic’ depiction may have been intended to emphasise the subject’s intellectual skills over his physical stature (Francis was alive at the time of the painting’s creation and may even have commissioned it). It may, more simply, be a reflection of the artist’s limited skills.

The new research connects the creation of the painting to a specific historical, and astronomical event.

The Guardian report explains:

Dabhoiwala…discovered the significance of the page number carefully inscribed on the book Williams is reading: it is the page in the third edition of Newton’s Principia that discusses how to calculate the trajectory of a comet by reference to the constellations around it.

An X-ray of the window scene depicted in the background of the painting showed lines intersecting what appears to be a luminous white comet, streaking through the sky at dusk, and connecting – with stunning accuracy – to constellations of stars. These stars would have been visible in that position in the firmament when Halley’s comet was in the sky over Jamaica in 1759, according to research by Dabhoiwala.

In other words, this picture shows a particular moment when Halley’s comet appeared over Williams’s estate, and it shows him as an educated gentleman who knew how to calculate the path of that comet.

Artnet adds:

As for the painting’s creator, Dabhoiwala is confident it’s the work of William Williams, an English-American artist who traveled to Jamaica in the 1760s. The comet together with the appearance [in the bookcase] of [Dr. Samuel] Johnson’s Dictionary, which was first published in 1755, align with this timing and the painting’s style is similar to other early Williams portraits of Benjamin Lay, a Quaker abolitionist, and Hendrick Theyanoguin, a Mohawk Indian.

The Lay portrait, now at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, also shows a man “with a large head and skinny legs.” Like Williams, Lay (c. 1681–1759) was notable for standing out in British-American society rather than fitting in. Williams (1727–1791) might have specialized in such subjects.

TOMORROw: More on William Williams’s work.

Who Was the “person out of Boston last Night”?

The Pennsylvania Packet article describing the flag on Prospect Hill in January 1776 also reported that the British inside besieged Boston had misinterpreted it:

…the Boston gentry supposed it to be a token of the deep impression the [king’s] Speech had made, and a signal of submission—That they were much disappointed at finding several days elapse without some formal measure leading to a surrender, with which they had begun to flatter themselves.——

This is bunk. According to the article’s own timing, the flag went up on 2 January and the latest news from Cambridge was written on 4 January, so “several days” had not elapsed.

This newspaper anecdote is thus too good to be true. Joseph Reed, who most likely supplied the article, must have been tickled with the idea of the royalists falsely thinking the Continental Army was ready to give up.

In fact, no sources created inside Boston show the royal authorities thinking the rebels were about to surrender. The two British mentions of the flag later that January correctly interpreted it as a signal of colonial unity. So where did the story come from?

The first version appeared in Gen. George Washington’s 4 January letter to Reed:

we had hoisted the Union Flag in compliment to the United Colonies, but behold! it was receivd in Boston as a token of the deep Impression the Speech had made upon Us, and as a signal of Submission—so we learn by a person out of Boston last Night

That person might have had an idiosyncratic interpretation of the flag. More likely, I suspect that person described initial perplexity inside the town on seeing the new flag, which Washington preferred to interpret in the way that made his enemy seem most foolish.

So who was that person who arrived at Cambridge headquarters on 3 January?

On the same day that Washington wrote to Reed, he sent a more formal letter to John Hancock as chairman of the Continental Congress. In that report the general wrote:

By a very Intelligent Gentleman, a Mr Hutchinson from Boston, I learn that it was Admiral [Molyneux] Shuldhum that came into the harbour on Saturday last . . .

We also learn from this Gentleman & others, that the Troops embarked for Hallifax, as mentioned in my Letter of the 16—were really designed for that place . . . 

I am also Informed of a Fleet now getting ready under the Convoy of the Scarborough & Fowey Men of War, consisting of 5 Transports & 2 Bomb Vessels, with about 300 marines & Several Flat bottom’d Boats—It is whispered that they are designed for Newport, but generally thought in Boston, that it is meant for Long-Island . . .

Washington sent that same information to Reed, and it went into the newspaper.

Also, at “8 o’clock at night” on “the 3d.” of January, Washington’s aide Stephen Moylan wrote to Reed:

a very inteligent man got out of Boston this day, says, two of the Regiments of the Irish embarkation pushed for the River of St. Lawrence . . .

he allso says that it was generally thought in Boston that Nova Scotia was in our possession——

Reed didn’t include that last tidbit in his digest for the newspaper—probably because he knew it was false.

Thus, although Gen. Washington mentioned “others,” his headquarters’ main source for information from inside Boston in those two days was “Mr Hutchinson.” Both letters called him “intelligent,” which Dr. Samuel Johnson described as meaning both “knowing” and “giving intelligence.”

A footnote in the Washington Papers says, “Mr. Hutchinson has not been identified.” So let’s do something about that.

On Tuesday, 9 January, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper wrote in his diary:

I din’d at Mr. [Edward] Payne’s with Mr. Shrimpton Hutchinson, Deacon [Ebenezer] Storer, [Joseph] Barrell &c.

The transcription of Cooper’s diary published in the American Historical Review in 1901 doesn’t identify the men Cooper dined with. But at this time Cooper and his family were living in Waltham, and Edward Payne’s son later wrote that during the siege his father “lived at Medford and at Waltham.” Payne, Storer, and Barrell all came from the top echelon of Boston businessmen, and they all appeared several times in Cooper’s diary before this date.

Shrimpton Hutchinson (1719–1811, gravestone shown above) was another well established Boston merchant. As an Anglican and a cousin of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, he had reasons to become a Loyalist. But instead he kept out of politics, even as a justice of the peace. We know he lived in Boston after the war, becoming one of the leaders of the King’s Chapel congregation.

I’ve looked for other signs of Shrimpton Hutchinson’s movements during 1775 and 1776 without success. Therefore, I can’t say for sure that he had left Boston just a few days before his dinner at Payne’s, which was the first time Cooper mentioned him. But he was the sort of older, upper-class, well-connected man that Gen. Washington and his aides would have respected as a valuable intelligence source.

TOMORROW: The missing copies of the king’s speech.

Onuphrio Muralto, Ossian, and Thomas Rowley

Last week I elaborated on a news story from Britain about the rediscovery of a detail in an eighteenth-century painting that everyone knew about from documentary sources but no one had seen for many decades. Here’s a similar story about historic letters.

I think this story begins in 1764 when The Castle of Otranto appeared, described on its title page as “Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto.” Some early reviews hailed the book as an important discovery in medieval literature.

In 1765, however, a second edition was printed, and the author came forward: the Hon. Horace Walpole, M.P. (shown here). He declared this little novel was his “attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.” Literary scholars now credit Walpole with writing the first gothic novel, a precursor to Romanticism.

Meanwhile, the British literary world was debating the poems of Ossian, the first published in 1761. James MacPherson presented these verses as his translations of ancient Gaelic ballads from Scotland.

The Ossian poems attracted many devoted admirers, including Thomas Jefferson. Other people dismissed the verses on artistic and historic grounds; Samuel Johnson declared that Macpherson was “a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud.”

MacPherson produced none of the manuscripts he was supposedly translating, and in 1764 went off to Florida as the governor’s secretary before returning to Britain for a political career. He never admitted creating the poems himself, as most scholars now believe. Those same scholars credit “Ossian” with inspiring both genuine Gaelic scholarship and early Romanticism.

Into that literary atmosphere came a teenager named Thomas Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney in Bristol. He was a literary prodigy, having seen one of his poems published at age eleven.

Son of a widow who taught school, Chatterton started seeking out literary patrons, first in Bristol. He played the same game that MacPherson and Walpole had, claiming to have found manuscripts from centuries earlier. These poems, Chatterton declared, came from a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley.

In March 1769 Chatterton sent “The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wrote bie T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge” to Horace Walpole, knowing the wealthy man had an interest in painting and publishing connections. Indeed, Walpole had his own printing press and staff of printers.

Walpole replied, “Give me leave to ask you where Rowley’s poems are to be found. I should not be sorry to print them, or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed.”

TOMORROW: It all goes horribly wrong.

Scrounging for Clues about Dr. Samuel Prescott

In 1835, as quoted yesterday, Lemuel Shattuck wrote that Dr. Samuel Prescott was captured on a privateer and died as a prisoner of war in Halifax.

After Henry W. Longfellow’s 1860 poem made Paul Revere an American icon, authors look for more information about his fellow riders, including Prescott.

Or at least confirmation of what Shattuck wrote.

Anything, really.

And almost nothing came to light.

As I said earlier this month in answering a question at an online presentation, we knew little about Prescott. Since Shattuck’s writing, only two additional sources had surfaced, and they both bring a lot of questions.

One is an entry in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, a monumental state-funded listing of all the names in surviving records, extracted from the original documents and alphabetized. The pertinent entry is:

PRESCOT, “SALL.” Lists of men appearing under the heading “Hartwell Brook the first Everidge;” said Prescot appears among men in service at Ticonderoga in 1776; name preceded by “Dr.”

Was “Dr. Sall Prescot” also the alarm rider Dr. Samuel Prescott?

Searching those volumes for the phrase “Hartwell Brook the first Everidge” shows that document (or documents?) listed many other men who served in many places and times. Those listings rarely include the usual helpful information about commanding officers, dates of service, and so on.

Which Hartwell Brook does this document refer to? What does “the first Everidge” mean? Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary offers this first definition of “average”: “In law, that duty or service which the tenant is to pay to the king, or other lord, by his beasts and carriages.” Was “the first Everidge” thus a record of how men had served their duty to the state of Massachusetts?

In this case, it seems likely “Dr. Sall. Prescot” was among some short-term Massachusetts troops sent out to Fort Ticonderoga to hold that position in 1776. (Not, as some writers assumed, part of Henry Knox’s mission there, which actually started in 1775.) Then he could have returned to eastern Massachusetts and enlisted on a privateer. If in fact this was Dr. Samuel Prescott.

Another tantalizing statement appears in D. Michael Ryan’s Concord and the Dawn of Revolution in 2007. Ryan wrote:

Among family papers of a Jacob Winter (Windrow) of Ashburnham, Massachusetts, was found a letter claiming that he had been a prison mate of a Dr. Prescott from Concord who apparently died in miserable conditions in 1777.

Alas, there’s no other information: who wrote this letter, when, where it is now, and what exactly it says. (A slightly different statement appeared in Ryan’s original magazine article from 2001, but no additional citation.)

Ezra S. Stearns’s 1887 history of Ashburnham lists Jacob Winter among that town’s casualties in the Revolutionary War, saying he died a prisoner at Halifax in the fall of 1777. So it’s conceivable Winter overlapped with Dr. Prescott there and wrote home about it. But other scenarios are all too conceivable as well.

Joseph Ross’s Continental Navy site offers a primary source mentioning Jacob Winter. His name appears on a list apparently compiled by Dr. Samuel Curtis as he treated fellow prisoners from the Continental Navy’s frigate Hancock. That document even gives an exact date for Jacob Winter’s demise: 29 Aug 1777.

Fortunately, following Jacob Winter’s trail led me to a new, and contemporaneous, source about Prescott.

TOMORROW: Where and when the doctor died.

“Not only relishing the sociable but actively contriving it”

Like the Georgian Papers Programme, Digit.En.S is a study of eighteenth-century Britain funded by the E.U. and based at a continental university.

Digit.En.S hosts the Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century, designed to “Explore the wide range of topics related to British Sociability from 1650 to 1850 and learn about the circulation of models of sociability that shaped European and colonial societies.”

Be that as it may, I enjoyed Allen Ingram’s profile of James Boswell:

…he was, quite simply, good company – attentive, amusing, intelligent and above all lively. [Samuel] Johnson, most clearly, and [Pasquale] Paoli, once exiled in England, became lifelong friends and were pleased to see him often during his annual spring visits to London from Edinburgh. Through Johnson in particular, Boswell became friends with a set of men he might not otherwise have met, or met so soon and so favourably. These included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith; but other friends, like John Wilkes, and various members of the Scottish nobility, were already part of Boswell’s circle, and would remain so – indeed, he even contrived a dinner in London in May 1776 that brought Johnson and Wilkes, the bitterest of political rivals, together in an atmosphere of sociability and mutual good humour, though the good humour found its focus in making jokes at Boswell’s expense.

But this was part of Boswell’s talent, not only relishing the sociable but actively contriving it. He could be immensely self-promoting, often in a highly embarrassing way, as at the annual dinner of the Company of Grocers in London in November 1790, in the presence of Prime Minister William Pitt, an honorary member of the Company, when Boswell sang the semi-satirical ballad, ‘William Pitt, The Grocer of London’, six times, apparently by popular acclaim, in a misguided attempt to curry favour from Pitt in his political ambitions. But Boswell seems to have been utterly beyond embarrassment, especially at large social occasions, and especially after consuming alcohol. . . .

Drinking for Boswell almost always took place within a social context. He was not particularly choosey, though, about the nature of that context, or about the location of his drinking. As long as there was company, he would drink: with lords and ladies, as at Northumberland House, where Trafalgar Square now is, where the set surrounding the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland congregated, as he did in London during his visit of 1762-1763; or with politicians and genteel tradesmen, as at the Grocers’ dinner cited above; or with his legal friends and acquaintances back in Edinburgh, as he did all his life; or with prostitutes in London, or Edinburgh, or anywhere, as he also did all his life; or, as he did returning to Edinburgh from Auchinleck in March 1777 with an old friend, Richard Montgomery, ‘at some low ale-house’, where ‘I drank outrageously’ and ‘arrived at Edinburgh very drunk’.

Boswell’s taste in women and in female society was if anything even wider than his taste in alcohol and his expectations of the kind of sociability that was possible from it changed the further down the social scale he went. Few if any of his sexual relationships were with women of the highest social class. With such women his expectations were similar to the sociability he enjoyed with men, with the bonus of their being female: he enjoyed their company and was able to flirt as an amusement rather than as a preliminary to anything. . . . [In contrast,] His relationship with the actress ‘Louisa’ (Anne Lewis) in London in 1762-1763…observes all the polite social niceties, with a mix of gallantry, wit and deference:

‘Madam, I was very happy to find you. From the first time that I saw you, I admired you.’ ‘O, Sir.’ ‘I did, indeed. What I like beyond everything is an agreeable female companion, where I can be at home and have tea and genteel conversation. I was quite happy to be here. ‘Sir, you are welcome here as often as you please.’ (London Journal 115)

The pay-off, however, when it comes is a level of physical reality far beyond ‘tea and genteel conversation’: ‘A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy.’

Boswell published essays, travel accounts, and his biography of Johnson in his lifetime, but he came back to life only in the 1900s when his private diaries were discovered and put into print.

Four Decades of “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector”

I’ve been discussing the historical background behind Lillian de la Torre’s mystery short story, “The Great Seal of England.”

In 1943 De la Torre was in her forties and known around Colorado Springs as Lillian McCue, wife of a Colorado College professor. Then she sold that story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

That launched De la Torre’s career as a writer. She was an Ellery Queen favorite for the next four decades. A couple of years after that first sale, she even visited Hollywood to consult on some movies. Eventually she served a year as president of the Mystery Writers of America.

With her “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” stories, Lillian De la Torre invented a new subgenre of whodunnits. Although Melville Davisson Post had written Uncle Abner mysteries set in the ante-bellum past starting in 1911, De le Torre innovated by basing her “detector” and the characters around him on actual historical figures, and crafting her plots around real events.

De la Torre’s first published book was a fictionalized analysis of what happened to Elizabeth Canning in 1753, called Elizabeth Is Missing. She wrote other books in this vein, such as The Heir of Douglas. Though these were originally published as fiction, De la Torre believed she had identified the correct solutions to those historical enigmas, and they’re now presented as “definitive accounts” of the underlying events. (Other authors would differ.)

For her stories about Dr. Johnson, De la Torre had the advantage of James Boswell’s extensive writings about the man. She produced an entertaining pastiche of Boswell’s voice, including not only his language and details but even dialogue structure.

To her credit, De la Torre also recognized the limitations of that narrative approach, as when Johnson’s other and closer biographer, Hester Thrale Piozzi, makes an appearance. “Boswell did not like Mrs. Thrale,” the author noted in an afterword; “he considered her his rival for ‘that great man.’” (Adam Gopnik wrote about Johnson and Thrale for the New Yorker.)

The stories jump around in time to take advantage of different events in George III’s realm. Some involve figures from the American Revolution, such as waxwork artist and spy Patience Wright and scientist and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Mike Grost noted that De la Torre wrote about thefts as often as murders.

In some ways, De la Torre’s stories show the biases of her own time. Dr. Johnson had a servant and heir named Francis Barber (shown above), who had been freed from slavery in Jamaica. De la Torre brought Barber onto the scene in her first published story, but gave him no more life than a piece of furniture. Not until “The Blackamoor Unchain’d” (1974) did he become a full character, and then only for one tale. These days I’m sure authors would see much more potential in Barber’s own life.

There were four collections of De la Torre’s “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” stories, and the Mysterious Press has reissued them in digital form:

• Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector (1946)
• The Detections of Dr Sam Johnson (1960)
• The Return of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector (1985)
• The Exploits of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector (1987)

As of this writing, they’re on sale at a discounted price on the major ebook platforms.

“The tantalizingly respectable reticence of contemporary chroniclers”

In addition to the theft of the Great Seal of Britain, discussed yesterday, the writer Lillian de la Torre took inspiration from two other details of the life of Baron Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor in 1784.

One was this fact, as De la Torre noted it at the start of her mystery story:

In August of that year, Lord Chancellor Thurlow very graciously intimated to the friends of Dr. [Samuel] Johnson that that learned philosopher might draw against him at need for as much as £600.

James Boswell mentioned that offer of credit in his Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. In an 1831 edition John Wilson Croker discussed it at more length, printing documents and his own acerbic commentary (“It is strange that Sir John Hawkins should have related… The editor cannot guess why Mr. Boswell did not print his own letter…”).

The circumstances were not actually that mysterious. In early 1784 Dr. Johnson, aged seventy-five, had a serious health crisis. His friends wanted him to take a trip to Italy to recover. Money was tight. Boswell and others hoped the government would increase the pension granted to Johnson for his work as a lexicographer and propagandist during the American war.

In July Boswell wrote to Thurlow, asking for that favor. Thurlow responded positively. In a conversation with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Lord Chancellor offered to personally loan Johnson the money, based on a mortgage against his future pension. Thurlow later said he was trying to get the lexicographer money quickly rather than wait through the uncertain pension process.

Dr. Johnson declined the offer when he learned about it. He never set out for Italy. He died on 13 December.

The other detail of Thurlow’s life that De La Torre used involved his household. The Lord Chancellor lived with a woman called “Mrs. Hervey” and had children by her, all illegitimate. This didn’t seem to affect his government career, social standing, or visits from his brother, an Anglican bishop. Thurlow did have to pass on one of his baronies to a nephew.

Because Thurlow’s children weren’t legitimate, it’s hard to find vital information about them. De la Torre wrote:

The tantalizingly respectable reticence of contemporary chroniclers about Thurlow’s irregular household has forced me to invent his daughters, known to me by name alone, out of whole cloth.

Her story’s characters include Catharine, aged eighteen, and Caroline, “not more than fifteen,” while a younger sister is off with her mother at Bath.

Genealogists have since nailed down when those daughters were born:

• Caroline in 1772.
• Catherine in 1776.
• Maria in 1781.

That accords with a picture George Romney painted of the two older girls around 1783, shown above courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

However, it doesn’t accord with De la Torre’s story, set in 1784. Her mystery depends on the two oldest girls being adolescent at the time of the Great Seal theft with Dr. Johnson still alive. Such is the challenge of writing historical fiction with imperfect historical sources.

Had De la Torre but known the actual ages of Thurlow’s daughters, she may never have imagined her debut story “The Great Seal of England” as she did. Or she might have proceeded with the same plot and added a note informing readers about how she’d shifted from strict historical accuracy, as she did in this very story in regard to the last hanging at Tyburn. Such is the freedom of writing historical fiction.

TOMORROW: De la Torre’s books.

Lillian de la Torre and “the ‘detector’ possibilities”

Lillian de la Torre Bueno (1902–1993) grew up in Manhattan reading mystery stories. After teaching in the New York schools for a few years, she earned master’s degrees from two Ivy League universities. At the age of thirty she appears to have put aside her own academic aspirations to marry a fellow graduate student, George McCue.

The McCues moved west to Colorado College, where George became a professor of English. Lillian took on the no-longer-current role of faculty wife. With no children to look after, she helped to found a local choir and joined an amateur theater company. Over time she taught some courses and helped other professors with their research—for example, she worked with Prof. Lewis Knapp on the life of Tobias Smollett, identifying some forged letters.

Around the time she turned forty, Lillian McCue embarked on a writing career that combined her interests in mystery stories and British history. She later told the scholar Douglas G. Greene that one early inspiration was John Dickson Carr’s book The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1931), a nonfiction account using the structure of Carr’s whodunnits. Another impetus was a conversation with one of her husband’s colleagues, Prof. Frank Krutzke, about “the ‘detector’ possibilities of Dr. Sam: Johnson.”

Lillian McCue had evidently noticed the parallel between the classic detective and sidekick/narrator model, as established by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. by James Boswell. Dr. Samuel Johnson was prodigiously smart, given to cutting remarks and paradoxical advice, and full of quirks, both physical and social. Boswell was an admirer, sometimes exasperated but always loyal, with an eye for detail and a strong prose style. (Boswell’s diaries also disclose enough of his own habits, such as womanizing, to make him more than a mere observer.)

McCue used portions of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides to fashion a tale in Boswell’s voice about Johnson detecting and foiling an exotic Scottish murderer. In 1943 she made her first sale to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, using the nom de plume Lillian de la Torre. This was a more successful story about “Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector,” titled “The Great Seal of England.” That story begins:

On the night of March 23, 1784, the Great Seal of England was stolen out of Lord Chancellor Thurlow’s house in Great Ormonde Street, and was never seen again.

And indeed that was an actual mystery of the eighteenth century.

TOMORROW: The fate of the great seal.

“Rising up in oppugnation to the powers of government”

In the interest of equal time, I’m going to quote from former governor Thomas Hutchinson’s public response to the Declaration of Independence.

He called his booklet Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia.

Samuel Johnson gave this as one definition of “stricture”: “A slight touch upon a subject; not a set discourse.” Soon, however, the word came to have the meaning of “an adverse criticism.”

In sending around copies of the booklet, Hutchinson called it a “bagatelle,” so he probably had the first meaning of the word “strictures” in mind. Nonetheless, he definitely offered adverse criticism of the American document.

The exiled governor’s essay took the form of a letter to an unnamed earl (in fact the Earl of Hardwicke, a Rockinghamite) explaining what the Americans were on about. That meant analyzing, and dismissing, all the grievances in the Declaration, some of which Hutchinson knew were about him.

As for the opening paragraph that we focus more on today, Hutchinson said only this:

They begin my Lord, with a false hypothesis, that the colonies are one distinct people, and the kingdom another, connected by political bands. The Colonies, politically considered, never were a distinct people from the kingdom. There never has been but one political band, and that was just the same before the first Colonists emigrated as it has been ever since, the Supreme Legislative Authority, which hath essential right, and is indispensably bound to keep all parts of the Empire entire, until there may be a separation consistent with the general good of the Empire, of which good, from the nature of government, this authority must be the sole judge.

I should therefore be impertinent, if I attempted to shew in what case a whole people may be justified in rising up in oppugnation to the powers of government, altering or abolishing them, and substituting, in whole or in part, new powers in their stead; or in what sense all men are created equal; or how far life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may be said to be unalienable; only I could wish to ask the Delegates of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, how their Constituents justify the depriving more than an hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives, if these rights are so absolutely unalienable; nor shall I attempt to confute the absurd notions of government, or to expose the equivocal or inconclusive expressions contained in this Declaration…

It’s interesting that Hutchinson was able to envision a time when Britain’s “Supreme Legislative Authority,” the Parliament, might make the North American colonies independent. But only for “the general good of the Empire.”

Digitizing Dr. Johnson

For a long time I’ve been fond of the online version of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. I even recommended it in a Journal of the American Revolution roundup.

And then the original site, which offered page images and highlights, turned into a completely searchable database. Even better! (Though I do miss the page images.)

Public Books has just published an essay by Carmen Faye Mathes, who was a “Co-Principal Investigator” in the total digitization effort, about the peculiar challenges of that work.

How you go about bringing a historical dictionary online is that, first, you stop really reading the entries. You have other work to do, like adding XML tags; comparing modern transcriptions against page images of Johnson’s original; and digitally cropping each entry so as to include an original image next to each transcribed entry—before concluding that, with at least 41,684 unique words, there must be a way to automate this.

The result is that even when I would exclaim over a new-to-me word (“Did you know that ‘pulverulence’ means an ‘abundance of dust’?”), it was never in the context of actually using the word—only proofing it, rendering it, clipping it, highlighting it, making it findable. Johnson defines lexicographer—a writer of dictionaries—as “a harmless drudge.” But I have come to relate to Johnson as more of a long-distance runner: an athlete whose particular facility lies in the way he marathons forth even as it pains him.

And then there’s the question of Johnson’s prodigious memory—how fallible was it?

When it comes to tracing the provenance of Johnson’s literary quotations—there are approximately 115,000 of them—the thing that felt most like a discovery was catching the lexicographer in a mistake. We wanted our online dictionary to make it possible to search for all the times Johnson cites particular authors or sources. So, we needed to ask, when Johnson says these lines belong to Shakespeare, do they?

Sometimes quotations would be followed by the title of the play, including act and scene, and sometimes merely by “Sh.” Johnson likes to condense longer quotations to save space. How close is his adumbrated version to the original? These and other, similar questions motivated our investigations. We needed to make the quotations discoverable by first discovering them ourselves.

Why don’t you start checking the accuracy of all the times Johnson quotes John Milton? seemed like as good a place as any to begin. When a spreadsheet with 12,000 supposed Milton quotations arrived in my inbox, my heart sank, but my ego accepted the challenge. I hit the jackpot almost immediately. In the entry for Autumnal, Johnson quotes Milton: “Thou shalt not long / Rule in the clouds; like an autumnal star, / Or light’ning, thou shalt fall.” He gives the source: “Milt. Par. Lost, b. iv. l. 620.” A few seconds later, the internet revealed the error: this is a quotation from Paradise Regained (1671), not the more famous Paradise Lost (1667).

And finally there’s that citation of Pamela that’s still floating out there, untethered to a text.

A Pyrrhic Victory in the Printers’ Case

In Parliament, 250 years ago this season, there was a big step forward in press freedom to report about how English-speaking governments worked.

Back in 1731, Edward Cave launched the Gentleman’s Magazine, which among its features included detailed reporting on the debates in Parliament, going beyond the official House Journals record of motions and whether or not they were adopted. Cave had actually been jailed a few years earlier for publishing such reports. This time he issued his proceedings only during parliamentary recesses, which provided legal cover.

According to James Boswell, Cave passed “scanty notes” on the debates to a young writer named Samuel Johnson to turn into oratorical arguments. It’s not that surprising, therefore, that these reports were often distorted—or so the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, complained.

In 1738, the House of Commons resolved:

That it is a high indignity to, and a notorious breach of the privilege of, this House for any news-writer in letters or other papers…to give therein any account of the doings or other proceedings of this House, or any Committee thereof, as well during the recess as the sitting of Parliament, and this House will proceed with the utmost severity against such offenders.

The London Magazine and Gentleman’s Magazine then started to report on the debates as if they had taken place in ancient Rome, Lilliput, or the Robin Hood Society, thinly disguising legislators’ names. Another trick was to replace some letters of the Members’ names with asterisks or dashes. Because of the magazines’ slow publishing schedule and upper-class audience, it appears, the government didn’t press its objections.

In the 1760s, however, John Wilkes brought more populist politics to London, with the business community and big crowds behind him. The capital’s newspapers increased their coverage of Parliament’s debates. That meant quicker reporting to a larger and closer readership.

The Houses responded by clearing all spectators out during debates, sometimes by force. At the end of 1770 the Whig M.P. Isaac Barré complained about how he’d been pushed out of the House of Lords as if by “a very extraordinary mob” headed by two earls.

On 5 Feb 1771, a Member named George Onslow asked for Parliament’s old rule against printing the proceedings to be read again. Onslow had started in Parliament as a Rockingham Whig, opposing the prosecution of Wilkes and the Stamp Act, but he’d become a strong supporter of Lord North’s government, and he didn’t like how printers were representing it.

Opposition members of the House disagreed with Onslow’s proposal. Charles Turner argued that “not only the debates ought to be printed, but a list of the divisions [i.e., votes] likewise.” Edmund Burke said he wished all debates were fully recorded in the House Journals.

Naturally, the press reported on that debate. John Horne, a radical clergyman, prefaced the coverage in the Middlesex Journal for 7 February with this line:

It was reported, that a scheme was at last hit upon by the ministry to prevent the public from being informed of their iniquity; accordingly, on Tuesday last, little cocking George Onslow made a motion, that an order against printing debates should be read.

Onslow took the bait on 8 February, rising solemnly to complain that the Middlesex Journal and another paper, the London Gazetteer, had misrepresented Parliament and brought it into poor repute. He demanded that the printers Roger Thompson and John Wheble be summoned to explain themselves. By a vote of 90 to 50, the House adopted Onslow’s resolution.

But those printers didn’t show up. They didn’t come to their front doors to accept warrants. On 8 March the Crown issued a proclamation offering £50 for apprehending the two men. Meanwhile, newspapers heaped more criticism on Onslow: “That little insignificant insect, George Onslow, was the first mover of all this mighty disturbance.”

On 12 March, Onslow demanded to hear from six more publishers who continued to run parliamentary reports. On the first vote the House supported him, 140 to 43. Another member suggested summoning not only the proprietor of each newspaper but “all his compositors, pressmen, correctors, blackers and devils,” which produced more argument over both legalities and language. The Whigs kept moving to cancel the discussion and adjourn; the majority kept voting to proceed.

One account said, “There were so many divisions, and such strong and personally offensive expressions used during the course of this debate, that the Speaker [Fletcher Norton, shown above] said, ‘This motion will go into the Journals—what will posterity say?’” After more votes Norton declared, “I am heartily tired of this business.” Barré spoke up: “I will have compassion on you, sir; I will move the adjournment of the House.” That motion produced another round of debate.

Of all the printers Onslow had named, two appeared in the House, ritually knelt in penance, and paid fines. The rest made excuses to stay away or just lay low. Some replied that they would come when the legal situation was resolved.

Wilkes orchestrated the next move. Wheble and Thompson let themselves be apprehended by fellow printers and brought before the aldermen of London—namely Wilkes and his political allies. Those officials demanded to know under what authority the printers had been seized. When the captors pointed to the proclamation, Wilkes declared such an order “contrary to the chartered rights of this city, and of Englishmen.”

The conflict between levels of government grew. The Crown arrested Alderman Richard Oliver and the Lord Mayor, Brass Crosby, for defying parliamentary authority. They remained in the Tower of London until the end of the legislative session, then came out to a twenty-one gun salute and a parade of carriages. Crowds hanged Onslow and Norton in effigy on Tower Hill.

Legally the “printers’ case” of 1771, as it was called, ended in a victory for the House of Commons. Courts upheld its authority to determine how its proceedings would be published. But politically everyone realized that the press and society were operating under new rules. British citizens now expected to read full reports of what their legislators were saying. Parliament never tried to exercise its authority so strictly again.

The only way legislative houses could regain control of the reporting process was to issue their own official or semi-official transcriptions of debates. John Almon and John Debrett launched the Parliamentary Register in 1775. William Cobbett began publishing more detailed Parliamentary Debates in 1802, and that became the modern standard Hansard Debates. That tradition transferred over to the U.S. of A., with the Congressional Record, the Capitol press galleries, and C-SPAN as the offshoots.

Peter Faneuil’s Disability and What It Might Mean

In my recent discussion of Peter Faneuil and the meeting hall still named after him, I referred to him as disabled. That produced some questions. So here’s more on what Faneuil’s contemporaries wrote about his body.

On 3 Mar 1743, Benjamin Walker put in his journal:

Peter Faneuil Esqr, between 2 & 3 o’clock in ye afternoon dyed of a dropsical complyca[tion], he was a fat, squat, Lame, hip short, went with high heeled shoe (In my opinion a great loss too This Town, aged 42, 8m.) & I think by what I have heard has done more charitable deeds than any man yt, ever liv’d in this Town & for whom I am very sorry.

A week later, William Nadir wrote in his almanac:

Thursday 10 [March], buried Peter Faneuil, Esqr., in 43th. year of age, a fatt, corpulent, brown, squat man, hip short, lame from childhood, a very large funeral went round ye Town house; gave no gloves at ye funeral, but sent ye gloves on ye II day, his Cofin cover with black velvet, & plated with yellow plates.

These quotations appear in Abram English Brown’s Faneuil Hall and Faneuil Hall Market, or, Peter Faneuil and His Gift, published in 1900. [I took it upon myself to edit “gave us gloves” to “gave no gloves” because that makes more sense in context.]

I couldn’t find the term “hip short” anywhere else, but it must be the Boston spelling of the eighteenth-century term “hipshot,” defined in different dictionaries as:

• “is said of a Horse, when he had a wrung or sprain’d his Haunch or Hip, so as to relax the Ligaments that keep the Bone in its due Place.” 
• “when the hip bone of a horse is moved out of its right place.” 
• “Sprained or dislocated in the hip.”

The last definition comes from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and is the only one not explicitly equine.

Thus, putting together the two diary entries (and assuming those men knew what they were writing about), Peter Faneuil was born with one leg shorter than the other. His family was wealthy enough to have shoes made for him with a higher heel for the shorter leg, and for him to go into an office job rather than one that required physical labor. 

Brown and other nineteenth-century authors suggested that Faneuil remained unmarried into his forties because he was “lame,” as well as squat and swarthy (an interpretation of “brown”). There’s also a story that his uncle Andrew Faneuil insisted that his two nephews and heirs remain unmarried. Peter’s brother Benjamin Faneuil definitely married around 1730, and Uncle Andrew definitely left Benjamin all of five shillings in his will. But that story didn’t appear in print until a century and a half after Peter Faneuil’s death as authors tried to arrange the known facts into a meaningful narrative.

It’s quite possible that Peter Faneuil didn’t marry because he just wasn’t interested in marrying. His uncle died in 1738, and he quickly started spending money on himself (wine, chariot, latest London cookbook) and his community (the market building, unspecified other charitable giving). At that point he was one of the richest men in North America. But he was still a bachelor five years later when he died. 

“Tom Gage’s Proclamation” Parodied

The Readex newspaper database I use offers this page from the 28 June 1775 issue of the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser.

In fact, it offers two images of this page, apparently identical.

Obviously, someone clipped an item out of the copy of that newspaper which was photographed decades ago for a microfilm publication and then digitized for this database. I hope there’s an intact copy of this printed sheet somewhere.

Fortunately, through other sources I confirmed what was missing (on this side). It was a response to the preceding item in that same newspaper, Gen. Thomas Gage’s 12 June proclamation of amnesty to anyone in arms against the Crown government except Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

Somebody went to great pains to parody the general’s announcement in rhymed verse:

TOM. GAGE’S PROCLAMATION,
Or blustering DENUNCIATION,
(Replete with Defamation,)
Threatning Devastation,
And speedy Jugulation,
Of the New-English Nation.---
Who shall his pious ways shun?

WHEREAS the Rebels hereabout,
Are stubborn still, and still hold out;
Refusing yet to drink their Tea,
In spite of Parliament and Me;
And to maintain their bubble, Right,
Prognosticate a real fight;
Preparing flints, and guns, and ball,
My army and the fleet to maul;
Mounting their guilt to such a pitch,
As to let fly at soldier’s breech;
Pretending they design’d a trick,
Tho’ order’d not to hurt a chick;
But peaceably, without alarm,
The men of Concord to disarm;
Or, if resisting, to annoy,
And ev’ry magazine destroy:---

All which, tho’ long oblig’d to bear,
Thro’ want of men, and not of fear;
I’m able now by augmentation,
To give a proper castigation;
For since th’ addition to the troops,
Now re-inforc’d as thick as hops;
I can, like Jemmy and the Boyne,
Look safely on---Fight you Burgoyne;
And mowe, like grass, the rebel Yankees.
I fancy not these doodle dances:---

Yet e’er I draw the vengeful sword,
I have thought fit to send abroad,
This present gracious Proclamation
Of purpose mild the demonstration,
That whosoe’er keeps gun or pistol,
I’ll spoil the motion of his systole;
Or, whip his breech, or cut his weason,
As haps the measure of his Treason:---

But every one that will lay down
His hanger bright, and musket brown,
Shall not be beat, nor bruis’d, nor bang’d,
Much less for past offences, hang’d;
But on surrendering his toledo,
Go to and fro unhurt as we do:---

But then I must, out of this plan, lock
Both SAMUEL ADAMS and JOHN HANCOCK;
For those vile traitors (like debentures)
Must be tuck’d up at all adventures;
As any proffer of a pardon,
Would only tend those rogues to harden:---
But every other mother’s son,
The instant he destroys his gun,
(For thus doth run the King’s command)
May, if he will, come kiss my hand.---

And to prevent such wicked game, as
Pleading the plea of ignoramus;
Be this my proclamation spread
To every reader that can read:---
And as nor law nor right was known
Since my arrival in this town;
To remedy this fatal flaw,
I hereby publish Martial Law.
Mean while let all, and every one
Who loves his life, forsake his gun;
And all the Council, by mandamus,
Who have been reckoned so infamous,
Return unto their habitation
Without or let or molestation.---

Thus, graciously, the war I wage,
As witnesseth my hand,---------TOM. GAGE.
By command of MOTHER CARY,
THOMAS FLUCKER, Secretary.

That’s the text as it was reprinted in the 10 July 1775 Norwich Packet. Many other American newspapers also picked up the poem. It was anthologized in the 1800s, often in rewritten forms. So far as I can tell, no one ever identified the poet.

Now for translations and annotations:

• “Jugulation”: killing by cutting the throat.
• “bubble”: a “false show,” one of several contemporaneous meanings provided by Dr. Samuel Johnson.
• “Jemmy and the Boyne”: the 1690 battle where the forces of William and Mary defeated James II.
• “doodle”: “A trifler; an idler,” wrote Dr. Johnson.
• “systole”: heartbeat. 
• “weason”: an old Scottish word for the throat or gullet. 
• “toledo”: a well made Spanish sword. 
• “debentures”: financial bonds. 
• “Mother Cary”: a supernatural personification of the dangerous ocean. 

“The Committee reserve all the printed Copies”

On Monday, 26 Mar 1770, 250 years ago today, the inhabitants of Boston once again gathered in Faneuil Hall for a town meeting. Technically, this was a continuation of the meeting they had adjourned the week before.

To discourage various sorts of bad behavior, the town elected twelve men, one from each ward, to the office of “Tything Men.” In his dictionary Samuel Johnson defined a tithingman as “A petty police office; an under-constable.”

The town already had a warden and a constable from each ward, enforcing the Sabbath, delivering writs, and otherwise policing public morals. But in this month they apparently needed help.

Notably, colonial Boston never elected tithingmen again. The town had done without them since 1727. Yet the town felt they were important in 1770—perhaps as a belated response to the presence of soldiers, perhaps because with the Massacre people felt a renewed need for the town to look proper.

The committee on how “to strengthen the Non Importation Agreement; discountenance the Consumption of Tea and for employing the Poor by encouraging Home Manufactures” reported that three new ships would be built in town. Those vessels would of course provide for more employment, but how they affected tea and imports is unclear. Nonetheless, that committee’s report “passed in the affermative by a unanimous Vote.”

Later, another committee reported that 212 sellers of tea had signed an agreement “not to sell any more Teas, till the late Revenue Acts are repealed,” and others were willing to agree “if its general.” Bostonians had no way of knowing that over in London the Parliament was already moving to repeal the Townshend duties—except the one that produced the most revenue, the tax on tea.

At this meeting James Bowdoin, Dr. Joseph Warren, and Samuel Pemberton reported that their analysis of “the execrable Massacre perpetrated on the Evening of the 5” was ready for printing. The town responded with an important vote:

whereas the publishing said Narrative with the Depositions accompanying it in this County, may be supposed by the unhappy Persons now in custody for tryal as tending to give an undue Byass to the minds of the Jury who are to try the same—

therefore Voted, that the Committee reserve all the printed Copies in their Hands excepting those to be sent to Great Britain ’till the further orders of the Town

Voted, that the Town Clerk [William Cooper] be directed not to give out Copies or deliver any of the Original Papers respecting the late horred Massacre; till the special order of the Town, or the direction of the Selectmen

The town would send copies of the report to advocates in London and sympathetic British politicians. As this letter shows, William Molineux sent a copy to Robert Treat Paine so he could prepare to prosecute the case. But the town meeting officially kept those books under wraps in America.

On this same date, Josiah Quincy, Jr., told his father why he had agreed to defend Capt. Thomas Preston in court:

I at first declined being engaged; that after the best advice, and most mature deliberation had determined my judgment, I waited on Captain Preston, and told him I would afford him my assistance; but, prior to this, in presence of two of his friends, I made the most explicit declaration to him, of my real opinion, on the contests (as I expressed it to him) of the times, and that my heart and hand were indissolubly attached to the cause of my country; and finally, that I refused all engagement, until advised and urged to undertake it, by an Adams, a Hancock, a Molineux, a Cushing, a Henshaw, a Pemberton, a Warren, a Cooper, and a Phillips.

Two of the three Short Narrative authors had urged Quincy to represent Preston, along with several of the town’s other leading politicians. Molineux, who had worked to build the case against Customs officer Edward Manwaring as being one of the shooters, nonetheless told Quincy to speak for the defense.

To make the town look good, to make any pardons seem unjust, and simply to be fair, the Boston Whigs wanted Capt. Preston, his soldiers, Manwaring, and even Ebenezer Richardson to have fair trials in Massachusetts courts.

And then to be hanged.

“A grand funeral” for Christopher Seider

Young Christopher Seider was shot and killed on Thursday, 22 Feb 1770. His funeral was held the following Monday, 26 February—250 years ago today.

Monday was also when the Whig newspapers published, so they ran their detailed, almost incendiary accounts of the killing over announcements of the funeral. The Boston Evening-Post and other papers told the public:

The general Sympathy and Concern for the Murder of the Lad by the base and infamous Richardson on the 22d Instant, will be a sufficient Reason for your Notifying the Publick that he was be buried from his Father’s House in Frogg-Lane, opposite Liberty-Tree, on Monday next, when all the Friends of Liberty may have an Opportunity of paying their last Respects to the Remains of this little Hero and first Martyr to the noble Cause.

The Boston Gazette offered further advance spin on the event:

It is said that the Funeral of the young Victim THIS AFTERNOON at Four o’Clock, will be attended by as numerous a Train as ever was known here.—It is hoped that none will be in the Procession but the Friends of Liberty, and then undoubtedly all will be hearty Mourners.

Acting governor Thomas Hutchinson thought the Whigs’ preparations were a little much. In the continuation of his history of Massachusetts, never published in his lifetime, he wrote: “The boy that was killed was the son of a poor German. A grand funeral was, however, judged very proper for him.”

There was a ceremony in King’s Chapel, the Anglican church where Christopher’s younger sister had been baptized and his employer owned a good pew. Ironically, that was also where the boy’s killer, Ebenezer Richardson, had married his second wife in 1754.

Then came the procession. The Boston Gazette stated, “The little Corpse was set down under the Tree of Liberty, whence the Procession began.” The Whigs published detailed descriptions of some aspects of the event and nothing about others, probably because readers were already familiar with standard funerals.

Some of the following description is therefore based on general British and New England customs of the time rather than specific statements. Furthermore, some of the customs for well documented upper-class funerals in London might not have been followed in Boston, even when the local gentry were trying to provide a “grand funeral.”

Four to six young men hired to be “under-bearers” probably lifted the small coffin onto their shoulders. It was draped in a black velvet pall that mostly hid those men from view. Some British pictures of funeral processions don’t show the under-bearers at all while a French picture of a British funeral (above, courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg) shows two of them peeking out from holes in the front of the pall.

All the honor of escorting the corpse went to the pall-bearers, who grasped the sides of the pall cloth but didn’t do the heavy lifting. As Samuel Johnson wrote in his dictionary, underbearers were, “In funerals, those that sustain the weight of the body, distinct from those who are bearers of ceremony, and only hold up the pall.”

For the funeral of Christopher Seider, the Boston Gazette said:

The Pall was supported by six Youths, chosen by the Parents of the Deceased. Upon the Foot of the Coffin was an Inscription in silver’d Letters, Latet Anguis in Herba! Intimating that in the gayest Season of Life amidst the most flattering Scenes, and without the least Apprehension of an evil Hour, we are continually expos’d to the unseen Arrows of Death: The Serpent is lurking in the Grass, ready to infuse his deadly Poison!—

Upon each Side Haeret Lateri lethalis arundo! In English, the fatal Dart is fix’d in the Side!

And on the Head was another Inscription, Innocentia nusquam tuta! The original Sentiment revers’d; and denoting that we are fallen into the most unhappy Times, when even Innocence itself is no where safe!

The first two phrases came from one of Virgil’s Eclogues and from his Aeneid. The last phrase was a variation on another phrase Virgil used in the Aeneid, Nusquam tuta fides, “confidence is nowhere safe.”

The Sons of Liberty who guarded Liberty Tree had fixed a board to its trunk with more quotations:

• “Thou shall take no Satisfaction for the Life of a MURDERER;—He shall surely be put to Death.” (Numbers 35)
• “Though Hand join in Hand, the Wicked shall not pass unpunish’d.” (Proverbs 16)
• “The Memory of the Just is Blessed.” (Proverbs 10)

More New Englanders could recognize those words since they came from the English Bible.

At about three o’clock in the afternoon, the procession moved out from Liberty Tree.

TOMORROW: The turnout.

Vampire Reports in Colonial American Newspapers

The March 1732 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine in London carried this news in its Foreign Advices section: “From Medreyga in Hungary, That certain dead Bodies called Vampyres, had kill’d several Persons by sucking out all their Blood.”

The ensuing paragraph described a man named Arnold Paul who had felt himself tormented by vampires, then after his death was deemed to have become a vampire himself.

Having found the man’s body too well preserved in the grave, his neighbors, “according to Custom, drove a Stake thro’ his Heart; at which he gave a horrid Groan. They burnt his Body to Ashes, and threw them into his Grave.” And to be safe, the people “served several other dead Bodies in the same manner.”

That article was widely reprinted and discussed in Europe. I’ve found only two American periodicals that picked it up, however: the Weekly Rehearsal of Boston on 5 June 1732 and the American Weekly Mercury in Philadelphia on 15 June 1732. Both stories ran on page 2, and no follow-up discussions appeared on this side of the Atlantic.

In October 1736 the French magazine Mercure Historique et Politique published a vampire report from Moldavia in eastern Europe. That news was translated into English within months, but it took another year before the New-England Weekly Journal of 14 Mar 1738 reprinted the tale. That two-page periodical promised “the Most Remarkable Occurrences Foreign and Domestick,” and its printers ran this story at the top of page 1.

In this incident, after several deaths a village came to suspect a vampire was lurking nearby. Imperial authorities exhumed several bodies and found one unusually well preserved. They “drove a Stake through his Heart, which done, a great Fire was kindled, and the Carcase reduced to Ashes.” Again, there was no follow-up in the Boston press.

On 21 Jan 1765, the Connecticut Courant of Hartford published a front-page article headed “The surprizing Account of those Spectres called VAMPYRES.” That newspaper stated:

These Vampyres are supposed to be the bodies of deceased persons animated by evil spirits, which come out of their graves in the night-time, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them. Such a notion will probably, be look’d upon as fabulous: but it is related and maintained by authors of great authority.

The item then quoted “M. J. Henr Zopfius” as saying that a stake through the heart and a bonfire could solve the problem. The article noted a number of examples from 1693 through 1738 before closing with citations of Biblical verses.

That whole passage came right from The Travels of three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, being the grand Tour of Germany, in the Year 1734. It was inspired by a conversation those three travelers had in Laubach, Hesse, followed by some library research. This anonymous text was first published in the fourth volume of The Harleian Miscellany, a collection of manuscripts, pamphlets, and tracts from the Earl of Oxford’s library edited by Dr. Samuel Johnson and published in 1745.

In other words, this report wasn’t timely, useful information. Printer Thomas Green used a sensational old story to attract eyeballs. The next item in that issue of the Courant was “A comical MIRACLE” about a dug-up skull that fooled some French Catholics.

I’ve found only one American newspaper picking up the “surprizing Account” from the Connecticut Courant (or a common source). That was the 1 Apr 1765 Boston Evening-Post, and that date might be significant. Again, the Fleet brothers chose to run the as the first item in the issue. But this publication attracted a quick pushback.

TOMORROW: Wonders of the invisible world indeed.