stuff 'n other stuff

Back in August I wrote about how the payout from the emancipation of slaves in West Indies may have financed the development of the squatocracy and their landholdings in Australia.

I’ve just come across an interesting discussion paper that argues that a similar thing may have happened in Scotland.

The argument goes something like this: a number of owners of sugar estates (many of whom let us not forget, were Scottish), suddenly found themselves cash rich from their emancipation compensation payments, and saddled with suddenly unprofitable sugar estates.

The sugar estates were disposed of, and the cash used to buy land in Scotland, and where there was a crofting population that had not been cleared in the first wave of the Clearances, they were ‘encouraged’ to migrate, to free the land for the more profitable sheep.

It’s an interesting, and somewhat provocative idea …

Back in 2018, I wrote how there was still an early Victorian short door mailbox still in use in Port Fairy.

At the time the mailbox was looking a bit faded and unloved, and in need of a coat of paint.

Well I was back in Port Fairy a few days ago and can report that the mailbox has a bright new coat of paint, including a touch of gold on the crown, rim, and door handle:

and that it is still in use.

If you look round the back at the base you can clearly see the manufacturer’s name – G Couch, Engineer, Alliance Iron works, Melbourne

as there is on all short door and long door mailboxes, as in the example in the Flagstaff Hill collection in Warnnambool

Humphry Davy, the noted chemist, and technology evangelist (satirized by Rowlandson above) was a friend of William Godwin, and was also known for his experiments with electricity, including building a truly ginormous voltaic pile around 1806.

Remarkably, Davy was also friends with both Robert Southey and Simon Taylor Coleridge through Davy’s work with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Davy, as well as conducting scientific work on its properties would also invite friends round for a sniff and then ask them what they experienced, something vaguely reminiscent of the twentieth century experiments with psychedelic drugs.

Mary must have heard talk of his experiments and demonstrations and may even have seen some of them, including perhaps the jumping frogs leg experiment pioneered by Galvani.

What’s interesting and less well known is that Shelley was also fascinated by galvinism and had his own voltaic pile in his rooms at Oxford.

Whether Davy ever met Shelley and Mary together is unknown, but he certainly knew of them and perhaps a little of their scandalous lives.

It would seem unlikely if they didn’t cross paths, as Davy was a regular visitor to northern Italy and what is now Slovenia, as evidenced by this plaque on a house in Podkoren on the Sava river that I was surprised to come across when we were on holiday in 2015 …

(There’s a story about this plaque: It was originally put up in the 1890’s and the inscription was in German as Podkoren – or Wurzen as was – was part of the German speaking part of Austria Hungary. Come the end of the first world war and the dissolution of Austria Hungary, Podkoren ended up in Yugoslavia. At some point in the 1920’s, someone took down the original plaque, flipped it over, and recarved the inscription in Slovenian … )

In among other things, I’ve been continuing to delve into Mary Shelley’s time in Dundee.

It’s all taken longer than I meant it to, in part because I bought a couple of books on the subject and one of them took nine weeks to arrive. However I’m finding the exercise quietly fascinating.

We often talk about social networks, but in both Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and Mary’s escapades, we can see them at work.

For example, William Godwin knew Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary would have heard Coleridge read or recite the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, including the journey south to the south pole. That combined with the stories of the Dundee whalers, and the sight of the whale ships towing their catch up the Tay, must have had a powerful effect on Mary, who of course had never seen arctic or antarctic ice.

When she saw the Mer de Glace glacier on Mont Blanc, it must have seemed like the site of her gothic imaginings of the polar ice fields.

The other interesting thing I’ve come across is that Shelley was a vegetarian. That itself is not exactly news, nor is the fact that Cornelia Turner gave Shelley Italian lessons, and perhaps something more, before her husband abruptly terminated the relationship in mid July 1814, shortly before Shelley eloped with Mary.

Given Shelley’s promiscuity, his proclaimed belief in free love and his often expressed wish to live in a sort of Romantic hippy commune, it wouldn’t be surprising if he had had a relationship with Cornelia.

However, what interested me was the social network aspect of this. Cornelia’s father was a friend of William Godwin, and it was William Godwin who introduced Cornelia to her husband.

Cornelia’s parents were both members of the politically radically Bracknell group of vegetarians, and it’s not difficult to surmise that Shelley’s espousal of vegetarianism would have given him an entree into the group, after his failure to obtain the lease of Nantgwyllt in the Elan valley.

(Nantgwyllt is now underwater, having been submerged when the Elan valley dams were built to supply Birmingham with water. Nantgwyllt Anglican church, while worth a visit on its own account, is a late Victorian confection built to replace the medieval church which was also submerged beneath the Elan valley reservoir).

So, wheels within wheels …

Yesterday I was puzzling over the rise in the use of the word collodion as a term for early photographs. The term derives from the collodion process (or wet plate process) which allowed photographs to be made using glass plates rather than the metal plates used in daguerreotypes.

The collodion process meant that multiple images could be made from a single negative, rather than daguerreotypes which only allowed you to make a single image at a time.

Not surprisingly, the invention of the collodion process in 1851 took the world by storm and rapidly displaced the daguerreotype as the preferred photographic process. As can be seen from the advert above (from the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian on 10 November 1854), people who continued to style themselves as daguerreotypists (because people knew what than meant) advertised that they in fact used the newer collodion process in their work.

The collodion process was what Lewis Carroll, an enthusiastic amateur photographer used to take his pictures of Alice Liddell.

So, in what contexts was the word collodion used?

I looked at Welsh Newspapers Online between 1850 and 1860 to look and see what word followed collodion. I only looked at the English language newspapers – the Welsh language newspapers are a confusing mixture of Welsh editorial and mixed English and Welsh language adverts.

And this is what I found

Most of the uses of collodion referred the mechanics of the process, plate, process, and so on, but quite a number referred to the use it was being put to, eg Collodion Portraits, to emphasise that the images were being taken with this new technique …

So I then used the Google Ngram viewer with the British English Corpus for the period 1850-60 to compare the use of the terms collodion, collodion portrait and collodion plate with the terms daguerreotype and photograph

Which basically shows that the change was from daguerreotype to photograph. While collodion in combination with various words was used, this was in contexts to emphasise that the new process was used, rather then for the images themselves …

Following on from my trying to work out when we started calling photographs photographs, I though I’d use the Google Ngram viewer one more type to look at the relative usage of the following terms for photographs over the period 1840 to 1880:

The terms I checked were:

• daguerreotype
• calotype
• ambrotype
• tintype
• collodion (the name of the wet plate process)
• photograph

The results were a little surprising

while daguerreotype was indeed the most common term before 1855, the term collodion, as in collodion process was a pretty common term.

I then checked to see if the term collodion process was the term actually in use

which it clearly wasn’t.

What this means I’m not sure, I’ll have to go and look at usages of collodion in context …

The first photographic images widely used were known as daguerreotypes after the technique used.  (There were other techniques and names in the 1840s and 50s, eg calotype, ambrotype, but daguerreotype was the first.)

Later on we started calling them the more generic term photograph, but exactly when did we start doing that?

For example Beard, the first commercial daguerreotypist in Britain, was still calling them daguerreotypes as late as 1855, but the diarist Francis Kilvert, writing in 1870, refers only to photographs.

Well to find out I did some very simple investigations – first of all I used the Google Ngram viewer to look at the yearly occurrence of the term daguerreotype in the English corpus:

which gives us a peak usage of the term around 1853 or 1854.

Again using the Google Ngram viewer I compared the occurrence of the term daguerreotype versus photograph over the period 1840 to 1860:

and we can see that the crossover occurred around 1855.

To sanity check this I then checked the relative occurrence of the two terms in both Welsh Newspapers online and the NLA’ s Trove. As the Trove dataset is richer I graphed the two of them separately to stop the Welsh data being drowned out the Trove data.

So, in the Welsh data we see that the data more or less matches the Google Ngram data with the crossover occurring about 1855. Interestingly, the Trove data shows something else, with both terms being used equally in the first few years of the 1850’s, with use of the term photograph taking off in 1856.

1855 of course was the date of Roger Fenton’s seminal Crimean War images, and in reports of the exhibition of his photographs, reporters use the term photograph, rather than referring to the particular technique used, suggesting perhaps that this helped drive the initial adoption of the term in preference to daguerreotype …

I’d fed the cat, and it wasn’t quite time to start cooking dinner, so I thought I’d trawl Trove for the earliest advert I could find for someone offering to take your daguerreotype

from the Australian of 18 January 1843. The text of the advert suggests that he was in business before then, perhaps in 1842, but I was not been able to find earlier mention of him in Trove. 

A bit of creative Googling found him to be George Barron Goodman who arrived on the Eden on the 4^th of November 1842, and rapidly started promoting himself as a photographer

In contrast, the earliest advert I can find in Welsh Newspapers online dates from the Monmouthshire Merlin of 10 November 1841

and in New Zealand from a comparatively late 1848

To give this some context, the daguerrotype process was only invented in 1839, and the earliest mention in Welsh Newspapers online  is from 1840.

Being a daguerreotypist was a highly skilled profession, requiring a knowledge of optics and chemistry. For example the Dundee Directory for 1850 lists two daguerreotypists in a town whose population was roughly 65,000, and suppprted a reasonably sized middle class.

Prince Albert, a known geek, didn’t have his picture taken until 1842, and Queen Victoria was not photographed until 1844 …

From the February 1855 edition of Bradshaw’s guide:

interesting to see that daguerreotypes and stereoscopic images were being advertised as early as 1855 or perhaps not as J A Rochlitz was working as a daguerrotypist in Beechworth in 1857, and had previously been working, again as a daguerreotypist, in Ballarat and as we know, Madeleine Smith exchanged photographs with her lover.

None of this should surprise us – Prince Albert had his photograph taken in the early 1840’s and Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic adopter of photography, and of course this was the time of the Crimean War and Roger Fenton’s celebrated photographs.

What is also interesting about the advert is that the daguerreoptypist also advertises the use of watercolourists to add colour to the image, something that is also seen in the pornography of the time.

What it does show is how widespread the adoption of photography was by the middle classes by the 1850s …

Years of BBC adaptions of Jane Austen novels and Christmas cards showing mail coaches in the snow might have led us to expect that Mary might have travelled all the way from London to Dundee by mail coach or by a private stage coach.

In fact travelling by coach was expensive, and excruciatingly uncomfortable, especially if you could only afford an outside seat which left you exposed to the weather. It didn’t help that many of the roads in Scotland were in poor condition before Thomas Telford’s improvements in the 1810’s.

All in all this meant that the journey overland would take a week or 10 days of bonejarring discomfort.

Going by ship could be as quick, and unless the ship was caught in a storm, rather more comfortable. After all both George IV when he visited Edinburgh in 1821, and Queen Victoria, on her first trip to Scotland in 1842, went by boat.

In fact there was passenger shipping to most Scottish ports in the nineteenth century. If you look at a map showing the old Scottish burghs you will notice that most of them are on navigable waterways – even cities such as Stirling which we might now consider landlocked, had a shipping service.

As early as 1814 there was a steam powered paddle steamer service on the Forth as far upriver as Stirling. (Sixty years ago, when I was little, you could still see remains of the staithes at Riverside where the paddle steamers had tied up.)

Basically, people and goods moved by water well into the nineteenth century. In the 1840’s before the railway network was complete, Bradshaw’s guide carried adverts for coastal packet companies:

In fact, even well into the railway era, many people preferred a sea voyage between London and Scotland – in the 1870’s the Freemans went to Scotland by sea for their walking holiday. In an era before corridor trains, sleeping cars and onboard toilets, it was probably simply more comfortable to go by sea

than spend 12 hours or so crossing your legs.

Dundee, of course, sprawls across a hilly ridge on the north bank of the Tay. Before the rail bridge was built, people had no alternative but to get a ferry across the Tay.

Prior to 1815, these were open sail driven pinnaces and at the mercy of the weather. But in 1815 disaster struck and one of these ships sank with the loss of 17 people including one boatman known as Cossack Jock (Incidentally, if you like stories it’s worth spending 10 minutes watching Erin Farley of Dundee Libraries tell the story of his wake).

One consequence of this was the setting up of an orphanage in Dundee, the other was to put the ferry service on the Tay on a more formal footing with steam powered ferries running to a timetable – which they continued to do until the opening of the Tay Road bridge in 1967. (Again I can just about remember a journey on the ferry when I was little).

What is interesting is, that as with the Stirling Steamboat company, the adoption of steam powered vessels relatively early in the nineteenth century.

Before the arrival of the railway in the late 1840’s, Dundee was fundamentally a city connected by water to the rest of Scotland, and remained so even after the Tay rail bridge was built.