Mars Movies, and Sherlock Holmes and the Gnostic Gospels

Wormwood and Faunus contributor Thos. Kent Miller has a few recent books that deserve some notice.

First is Mars in the Movies: A History, published by McFarland as an oversize trade paperback in November.  Basically it's a personal account of something around one hundred films that have something to do with Mars.  This ranges chronologically from A Trip to Mars (1910), through The Martian (2015), though the entries in the book are for the most part not arranged chronologically.  It covers high quality entries such as Quatermass and the Pit (1967), and terrible ones such as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).  Some cartoons are covered, including the first (and later) appearances of Marvin the Martian in Bugs Bunny's Haredevil Hare (1948). I've enjoyed reading up on films that I've seen, as well as learning of new titles to look out for (and ones I should probably avoid).  Ordering information here.

Also, the three volumes of Miller's trilogy about Sherlock Holmes and his interest in the Gnostic Gospels have been combined into one volume titled Sherlock Holmes in the Fullness of Time.  Read more about it here.

 

'Taliessin Reborn' - Anne Ridler

‘Taliessin Reborn’ is a poem in three sections by Anne Ridler, first published in Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1942) and later in her collection The Nine Bright Shiners (1943). It was influenced by the first of two long Arthurian narrative poems of Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres (1938), continued in The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), which she may well have seen in manuscript.

In my late teens and early twenties I searched for books about the mystical elements in the Arthurian stories, and these two titles alone were enough to beguile my imagination. They suggested journeys in strange domains of the spirit.

Anne Ridler describes her poem as “a supplement” to the Charles Williams cycle, and in its phrasings and its modernist response to myth, it also echoes the work of T S Eliot, particularly in ‘The Waste Land’. Written in war-time, when the fate of Britain was still in the balance, it is in one sense a consolation for the times and a call to the continuing resonance of ancient archetypes. But it is not limited to its particular historic moment.

The first section of her poem depicts a country that has sometimes been glimpsed by those on the coast, “Moving from the horizon”, “sea-coming”, over the waves, heading for the shore. But it can never be fully seen: "...in the bright and blinding mist of its approaching/It disappeared from sight.”

In the second section we learn that the country “had long been visible” inland too, for those who could see, sometimes from towers, sometimes from hill-tops: “Some thought it a mirage and looked no more”. Others, however, recognised it for what it was: “the real map of England”, a spiritual and symbolic chart of which the Arthurian myths are only a dim remembrance (“jumble for poets, play for children, a spring of endless ink for scholars, and still lacked full meaning”).

The third and final part brings the poem to the then present day: “So it was time that we saw it again,/And remembered that our footsteps echo in another world.” That need had been met, the poem suggests, by certain poems (those of Williams are meant but not named), “the mesh that drew the loud myth so close”. They cannot alone in themselves bring the great domain into being: “If any art could change us, or the strangeness of a myth/We should have altered long ago.” But because of them the presence of the kingdom is stronger among us, an “Invisible Knight”, a “holy ghost” even during a time of “seemingly wasteful and unforgivable pain.” And the poem concludes with a note of defiance and affirmation.

This symbol and idea is also seen in Mary Butts’ vision of the Grail as a descent upon a tract of land, felt, known, if not fully seen, and in the glimpses of paradise in Arthur Machen’s stories such as ‘The Holy Things’, ‘A Fragment of Life’, ‘Opening the Door’ and ‘N’, as well as in the Grail novels The Secret Glory and The Great Return.

And, to make now a great descent, as Machen once remarked, the idea has also been haunting my own recent stories.

Not so long ago, I contributed a long story, not quite a novella, to Romances of the White Day (Sarob, 2015), alongside fine stories by John Howard and Ron Weighell. ‘Except Seven’, my piece, begins with a phrase from Anne Ridler’s poem: ‘Our footsteps echo in another world’, and it might be said the poem haunts the whole story. The work was inspired by a journey through certain quiet roads of the English-Welsh borderland, which led to an old stone church sheltering inside it a Roman altar to an otherwise unknown god.

There was another element that went into it, allusively, which was the idea of a ‘lineage of the Grail-Keepers’. I did not know then, but have since found, that in the ancient Welsh Triads, so wonderfully researched and translated by Rachel Bromwich, there is one that speaks of a ‘lineage of the saints’ in Britain, the first of whom is Joseph of Arimathea – a very early appearance of this tradition. But the particular focus of the story is that mysterious, never to be unravelled, poem by Taliessin, ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, and so the tale makes its own dim, shaded way alongside the ideas in ‘Taliessin Reborn’.

In the following year, I contributed another long story to a second shared volume with John and Ron, Pagan Triptych (Sarob, 2016). This, too, is haunted by Anne Ridler’s poem. ‘The Fig Garden’ includes a character who wants to catalogue and conserve places where, again as Machen put it, ‘the veil is thin’ between the worlds. “The real map of England would be worth reading, don’t you think?” suggests Anthony Scamander. The first five words are a phrase from the poem.

The main burden of the story, though, is to indicate the utter otherness of any world impinging upon our own. Scamander says: “We know that there are other realities and that sometimes they overlap with where we are here. We don’t know and can’t understand why they do this. But one thing seems fairly clear. Potentially every single thing we do here has a resonance somewhere else, in ways we simply cannot grasp. And it isn’t necessarily anything to do with whatever is considered virtuous here, or the reverse. We just don’t know the rules. Awful really, isn’t it?”

There is a subtly strange passage in the journals of Mary Butts, when she was living at Sennen, in the far west of Cornwall. She talks about Sancreed, a village not far from her, as a place prepared for the presence of the Grail. She senses that something powerful is struggling to be born there. This jolted me when I read it, because I still carried the remembrance of when I walked there one hot day in my twenties, and felt, and could not forget, a definite sense of otherness. And another mystical author, Ithell Colquhoun,in her The Living Stones of Land’s End, had also noticed this. “It is difficult to describe the subdued weirdness of Brane,” (a hamlet next to Sancreed) she says, and devotes several pages to its strangeness.

We should not over-rarefy the place. It is still fully in our usual world. Indeed, I was amused and delighted to find, when I consulted a book about its local history, that it was chiefly known for its inhabitants' keen interest in pigs, and in cricket: both very excellent things. Even so, to take only one instance, its church has a carved rood screen of distinctly interesting mythic figures. There is to come a story, not in the series of longer pieces but standing at an angle to them, in which I try to explore some element of the mysteries of Sancreed, and these figures make their appearance.

There is also to be, if all goes well, a third longer story, not yet ready to be announced. This one does not consciously contain a quotation from Anne Ridler’s poem, nor is it quite so clearly linked to her themes there. But they still do haunt the writing, and throughout the tale, though they are never directly cited, there are echoes of the last words of her beautiful and mysterious poem: “nothing in the end is lost.”

Mark Valentine

Jessie Douglas Kerruish

Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1884-1949) is best known for her splendid occult detective and werewolf yarn The Undying Monster (1922). She had earlier won a prize leading to publication of her first major book, Miss Haroun-Al-Raschid (1917) and was the author of other fantasy-inflected fiction.

There does not seem to be very much biographical information about her, but some time ago I found a couple of interesting references from an online version of the 1916 issue of a journal devoted to Manx history. This was ‘Mannin, a Journal of Matters Past and Present relating to Mann (sic). Published by Yn Cheshaght Gailckagh, the Manx Language Society.Editor: Miss Sophia Morrison. Printer: L. G. Meyer, Douglas.’ The two notes give some insight into the Manx origins of her family, and the inspiration behind her fiction.

The first was an editorial note:

“Miss Jessie Douglas Kerruish (see correspondence p. 433) writes an interesting little note on her own life in The Weekly Tale-Teller (January 8th). Miss Kerruish is the daughter of Captain Kerruish; her family, she says, have been travellers and sea-farers. She herself was born at Seaton Carew in Durham, and was brought up ‘on the smuggler and slaver tales, wrecks and legends of witches, warlocks, ghosts, submerged forests and sea-swallowed lands that colour the mental atmosphere of the wild North Coast.’ She served her apprenticeship to literature by writing for Stead’s Books for the Bairns and The Weekly Tale-Teller introduced her to a grown up audience.”

The correspondence from her was as follows:

“MANNIN has quite opened a new world to me, for I had no idea of how the Manx abroad kept so closely in touch through your Society, or how strenuously the Society is preserving everything connected with Mann that it can save. As to the paper itself, it is admirable, both as to its form and contents. We are very much interested in the paper by Mr. Kerruish, of Cleveland, Ohio, some of our people emigrated to America about that time (1827) and later.

You ask to what branches of the Kerruishes I belong. To one of the too numerous to mention, I fear! My father died when I was a girl, and all that I recollect of his family information was that he came from Lonan, and that his grandfather protected John Wesley from a hostile mob and entertained him during his stay on the Island. Some one ought to write about John Wesley and the Island — and might link it up with smuggling.

Your remarks about smuggling amused me very much; down here they used to be great runners — see Kipling. They were rather more open about it than at most places ; and an anecdote is cherished to the effect that the clerk waited on the parson one Sunday with the announcement, ‘There won’t be no service on Sunday, sir, there’s no room for the people, the church is full of brandy and the pulpit full of tea.’”

The reference to "down here" is to Sussex, where she had made her home, and where The Undying Monster is set. Jessie Douglas Kerruish died at Hove in 1949. As the above brief letter shows, she seems to have had a spirited and vivid character, reflected in her exuberant books.

Image: Furrowed Middlebrow blog.

Epiphany at Seacliff - Brian Lavelle

“A singular way to ensure you have the Scottish coastline to yourself is to venture there on a wet and windswept weekday at ‘just the worst time of the year’; more so if you visit a part of the shore of which few are aware…”

A wonderfully evocative account of a wintry visit to a remote, ruin-haunted shore, by Edinburgh sound and place explorer Brian Lavelle, with reflections on Epiphany and the lore of the magi, and an encounter made chillier still by memories of “'Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad'”.

Image: © Brian Lavelle 2017

Colonel Stodare - The Summoner of the Sphinx

The hall was in darkness, the stage dimly lit. Colonel Stodare, a study in black and white in his formal evening suit, a spare and austere figure with a pale, whittled face, held up one hand and waited. The murmurs amongst the audience soon died down. In a soft voice, so that his listeners had to crane to hear, he announced that this was his 200th performance at the Egyptian Hall. He gestured around the walls, which were carved with scrolled columns and decorated with hieroglyphics.

In honour of the occasion, the Colonel went on, it seemed to him appropriate to invite into the Hall the greatest of the many mysteries of Egypt, the very symbol of that ancient land. Tonight, ladies and gentleman, he announced, his gentle voice rising almost to an invocation, we shall summon the Sphinx. As he snapped his fingers in the air, the stage was plunged momentarily into darkness. When the lights rose again, the audience saw, residing upon a small table, the disembodied face of that enigmatic being, guardian of the Pyramids, impassive oracle, dangerous enchanter, the Sphinx.

There were incredulous gasps. Even the cynical, who had come to the performance merely for a lively diversion, were shocked. Before their gaze the living Sphinx appeared, its forehead and cheeks draped in the headdress of the divine Pharaohs. It was contained in a square casket: yet the table where it rested was hollow beneath: all of its elegant curved legs could be seen. Below the head, there was nothing. Was it simply some cunning mask or sculpture?

And then the Sphinx spoke. The eyes glinted. The lips in the unearthly face moved. They uttered some lines of sibylline poetry, impressive and sonorous. But the audience barely attended to what it said. They were so completely astonished that the head had spoken that they seemed united in one vast indrawn breath, soon followed by an excited hubbub and bursts of applause.

The lean form of Colonel Stodare retained his cool poise, with a slightly weary air, as if summoning the Sphinx was a matter of no great moment. He held up a hand once more and the consternation subsided a little. “We shall ask the Sphinx to share some of its secrets,” he said. And he proceeded to question the head that glimmered beside him on the table, just as if he were having a conversation with some worldly sage, some well-informed friend in his club. What he asked, and what were the answers, are alas not recorded.

After the audience had heard the solemn responses from the Sphinx, and watched transfixed its clay lips moving and its dark eyes opening and closing, the stark figure on the stage remained silent for a few more moments. “It is dangerous to invoke the Sphinx, ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests,” he announced. “I put myself in peril gladly, to demonstrate to you tonight the infinite mysteries of the East, the strange secrets of Egypt. But I must not put you in peril also. It is time the Sphinx was banished.”

Then Colonel Stodare uttered a single incomprehensible word, which might have been some magical formula. And with that last word, he raised his arm impressively in a great sweeping arc. He stepped forward and closed the lid and sides of the casket. The lights flickered briefly once again. The box was opened: the head of the Sphinx had gone.

The Colonel stooped with a quiet grace and placed his hand in the empty space where the Sphinx had been. He straightened and turned to the audience. “Ashes,” he murmured, and let fall from his fingers a few fragile flakes. As they drifted away, the Egyptian Hall erupted into a surge of acclaim such as it had never heard before. The dark and rather melancholy figure on the stage bowed his head.

The Sphinx Illusion was performed at the Egyptian Hall for the first time on October 16th 1865. The summoner of the Sphinx himself remains a man of some mysteries. He was probably born Joseph Stoddart on 28 June, 1831 in Liverpool, although other origins, names and dates of birth have been proposed for him. “Colonel Stodare” was his stage name: he is not known to have held military rank, and he probably thought “Stodare” had a slightly more exotic and dignified air to it than his original name.

He had toured provincial theatres, and published a handbook of magic in 1862. He gave his first performance at the Egyptian Hall in April, 1865, using some illusions of his own devising, and was soon one of the venue’s most popular attractions. The Sphinx Illusion, considered his masterpiece, was not in fact his own invention. It had been developed by Thomas Tobin, a scientist and engineer who had also conjured up the Cabinet of Proteus, the Oracle of Delphi, and, most daring of all, the Palingenesia, in which a volunteer from the audience was dissected on stage and then returned whole.

Colonel Stodare’s brief career was so successful that he was commanded to appear before Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in the November of that year of the Sphinx. Alas, he was not to enjoy the fruits of his fame for very much longer. Always in delicate health, he died on 22 October, 1866 in London of consumption. He is buried at Highgate Cemetery. For a while his widow and brother carried on his act, with the aid of some of his apprentices and assistants.

It is in the nature of stage performances that they are transitory and survive only as long as the memories of those that saw them. But Colonel Stodare’s Sphinx Illusion lived longer than most, for few who saw it forgot the effect of that strange head of myth speaking to them from out of a casket, uttering its omens and riddles. And it has passed into the history of magic as a major new illusion.

What, you want to know how the Colonel did it? Well: "The conjurer demonstrates that things are not always what they seem. Therein lies his philosophy," the Colonel himself said. Suffice to say, that like many of the best magical tricks, what the Colonel achieved in summoning the Sphinx onto the stage, and tantalising our persistent quest for mystery, holds up a mirror to ourselves.

© Mark Valentine, 2016

Lost Souls and Murder in the Closet

A couple of interesting essay collections recently published by McFarland:

Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy, Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic: Fifty Four Neglected Authors, Actors, Artists and Others

Foreward: “Welcome to the Island of Lost Souls” (Sir Christopher Frayling)

Introduction (Bernice Murphy and Elizabeth McCarthy

Evelyn Ankers (Elizabeth McCarthy)

Morris Ankrum (Bill Warren)

Theda Bara (Maria Parsons)

Ralph Bates (Peter Hutchings)

Charles Beaumont (Edward O’Hare)

Ingrid Bergman (Mark Jankovich)

Guy Boothby (Ailise Bulfin)

John Buchan (Anna Powell)

Susan Cabot (Tom Weaver)

Oscar Cook (Darryl Jones)

Marie Corelli (Caitriona Kirby)

Aleister Crowley (Clive Bloom)

Danielle Dax (Catherine Spooner)

Dulcie Deamer (Jim Rockhill)

Maya Deren (Wendy Haslem)

The Erkenwald Poet (Brendan O’Connell)

John Farris (Xavier Aldana Reyes)

Nicholas Fisk (Katherine Farrimond)

Charles Fort (Tania Scott)

Dion Fortune (Kristine Larson)

Charles Gemora (Mark Cofell)

Gregory of Tours (Peter Dendle)

Victor Halperin (Murray Leeder)

Edward Jerningham (Peter N. Lindfield and Dale Townshend)

Jerome K. Jerome (William Hughes)

Skelton Knaggs (John Exshaw)

Alfred Kubin (Tracy Fahey)

Francis Lathom (David Punter)

Ira Levin (Bernice M. Murphy)

Jeff Lieberman (Jon Towlson)

Stephen Mallatratt (Madelon Hoedt)

Carl Mayer (Jim Rockhill)

Robert M. McCammon (Neil McRobert)

Shinji Mikami (Eoin Murphy)

Joseph Minion (George Toles)

Paula Modersohn-Becker (Wendy Mooney)

Fitz-James O’Brien (Kevin Corstorphine)

Sandy Petersen (Rachel Mizsei Ward)

Leonora Piper (Dara Downey)

Edogawa Rampo (Colette Balmain)

Charlotte Riddell (Clare Clarke)

Philip Ridley (Douglas Keesey)

Regina Maria Roche (Christina Morin)

Vincent Schiavelli (Sorcha Ni Fhlainn)

William Buehler Seabrook (Roger Luckhurst)

Sydney Sime (Maria Beville)

Tod Slaughter (Jarlath Killeen)

Lionel Sparrow (James Doig)

Montague Summers (Frank Furedi)

Team Silent Hill (Ewan Kirkland)

Peter Van Greenaway (Edward O’Hare)

Stephen Volk (James Rose)

Tom Waits (Jenny McDonnell)

Fredric Wertham (Sarah Cleary)

Curtis Evans (ed.), Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall

Introduction (Curtis Evans)

Part One: Locked Doors

The Queer Story of Fergus Hume (Lucy Sussex)

A Redemptive Masquerade: Gender Identity in Samuel Hopkins Adams’ The Secret of Lonesome Cove (J. F. Norris)

Dropping Hairpins in Golden Age Detective Fiction: Man-Haters, Green Carnations and Gunsels (Noah Stewart)

"Queer in some ways": Gay Characters in the Fiction of Agatha Christie (John Curran)

Agatha Christie: Norms and Codes (Michael Moon)

The Unshockable Mrs. Bradley: Sex and Sexuality in the Work of Gladys Mitchell (Brittain Bright)

"Less beautiful in daylight": Josephine Tey and the Anxiety of Gender (J.C. Bernthal)

"Mutually devoted": Female Relationships in Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (Moira Redmond)

"The man with the laughing eyes": Socialism and ­Same-Sex Desire in G. D. H. Cole’s The Death of a Millionaire (Curtis Evans )

Humdrum Ecstasies: C. H. B. Kitchin and His Detective, Malcolm Warren (Michael Moon)

"Two young men who write as one": Richard Wilson Webb, Hugh Callingham Wheeler, Male Couples and The Grindle Nightmare (Curtis Evans)

Queering the Investigation: Explanation and Understanding in Todd Downing’s Detective Fiction (Charles J. Rzepka)

"A bad, bad past": Rufus King, Clifford Orr, College Drag and Detective Fiction (Curtis Evans)

Foppish, Effeminate, or "a little too handsome": Coded Character Descriptions and Masculinity in the Mystery Novels of Mignon G. Eberhart (Rick Cypert)

Part Two: Skeleton Keys

"The finest triumvirate of perversion, horror and murder written this spring": Frank Walford’s Twisted Clay (James Doig)

Wayne Lonergan’s Long Shadow: A Forties Murder and Its Literary Legacy (Drewey Wayne Gunn)

"Claude was doing all right": Homosexuality, ­Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Evolution of Ross Macdonald (Tom Nolan)

"Elegant stuff …⁠ of its sort": Gore Vidal’s Edgar Box Detective Novels (Curtis Evans)

"Adonis in person": Same-Sex Intimacy and Male Eroticism in the Detective Novels of Beverley Nichols (J. F. Norris)

More Than Fiction: Troublesome Themes in the Life and Writing of Nancy Spain (Bruce Shaw)

Man to Man: The ­Two-Men Theme in the Novels of Patricia Highsmith (Nick Jones)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Joseph Hansen’s Known Homosexual (Josh Lanyon)

I Am the Most! Camping It Up in George Baxt’s Pharoah Love Mystery Series (J. F. Norris)

Some Books on Tea Cup Reading

Not so long ago it occurred to me to wonder when it was that the idea of telling fortunes using tea leaves first began in Britain, and when it became popular. I decided to begin a checklist of books on the subject. There are, in fact, quite a lot of them about now, and indeed the art has been elaborated to include residues from herbal infusions and tisanes. However, as I was more interested in the origins of the practice, I decided not to continue into these latter days, but rather to look at what was published earlier.

The first reference I can find is to a chapter in a book ascribed to ‘Mother Bridget’, with the title of The Universal Dream Book, and a date supposed to be around 1816. Its full title continues, “to which is added, the art of fortune-telling by cards, or tea and coffee cups”. Now, I think it is quite possible that there were even earlier accounts of tea cup reading than this, for example in old almanacs, but for the time being this is the earliest I have identified.

The first book devoted entirely to the subject, that I have noted so far, is an anonymous publication entitled Tea-Cup Reading: Your Fate in Your Tea-Cup, which the British Library dates to 1907. No publisher or place of publication is given. The first such title from a major publisher seems to be The Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea-Leaves by 'A Highland Seer', issued by Routledge in the UK and Dutton in the USA, circa 1917, a notable attribution, since tea cup reading does not often figure among the traditional accomplishments of Scottish prophets.

The second decade of the 20th century begins to see more books on the art appear, and there is a distinct cluster in the 1920s. One of the most popular was by ‘Minetta’, possibly a house name, from the leading occult and astrological publisher, W. Foulsham. Her Tea Cup Fortune Telling: the signs illustrated and fully explained was issued in 1920 and regularly reprinted. It advises: "In the following pages you will find more than is usually known about this fascinating subject of cup tossing, as it is popularly called." The term “cup tossing” seems mysteriously not to have survived in general usage.

Another popular title from this period was The Gypsy Queen Dream Book and Fortune Teller (undated, but circa 1921), ascribed to ‘Madame Juno’ and issued by Herbert Jenkins, usually a publisher of light romances and thrillers. It was very much the thing for women working in the fortune telling field to prefix their name, usually exotic, with the title ‘Madame’: astrological journals are full of advertisements under that kind of sobriquet (and provide an interesting field of study). This book has a brief chapter on ‘How to Tell Fortunes by Tea-Leaves, or Coffee-Grounds’.

A copy of this title in my possession shows considerable signs of use. It is the “Third printing completing 19,500 copies.” The rose-madder coloured covers are marked with cup-rings and spherical stains, the spine head is frayed, and inside the front free endpaper also boasts a considerable brown ring-mark, perhaps suggestive of the tools of the trade.

Not only that, but the opening pages are covered with pencilled figures, some apparently of sums of money. I wonder whether these could be the record of the receipt of palm-crossing silver from grateful clients? On the title page, however, are different totals,under the names of the main political parties, presumably either actual or forecast General Election results. One of the figures, 277 seats for Labour, is exact to the 1955 contest, and the few seats for the Liberals is also suggestive of the 1950s.

The book also bears the purple oblong stamp mark of Lane’s Library, Broadstairs and a, perhaps later, personal address in manuscript: Flat No 3, The Rise, Station Road, Amersham, Bucks, the town (incidentally) to which Arthur Machen retired.

Jenkins also published a book wholly on the subject, Telling Fortunes by Tea-Leaves, Cecily Kent’s New Method of Divination Clearly Explained (1921), a 172pp treatise. My copy also has, on its olive-green back cover, the marks of numerous tea cups rested upon it, which again it may not be fanciful to suppose was in the pursuit of the trade. The author also offered Telling Fortunes By Cards in the same year.

It may be as well to say at this point something of the contents of this and the similar books described. They usually consist of two parts: firstly, a description of the practical apparatus and modus operandi for achieving the tea leaves, and secondly a catalogue of the meaning of various shapes and symbols. Some include diagrams of what to the untrained eye look largely like dark blotches, but in which apparently may be discerned certain forms. Among those noted in Madame Kent’s book are a log, a loaf of bread, duck, sign post, leaves, boots, toadstool, doll, broken gate and the head of a polar bear.

A rare item in the tea cup reading sphere is a privately published pamphlet by one Winnicott Edmonds, issued in Liverpool by the author in 1922. I have not been able to trace either this tantalising piece of ephemera or any information about its originator, but it suggests the possibility that similar local opuscules were issued in other provincial towns and cities. Another example is a slim anonymous work, Tea-Cup Reading, published in Christchurch by Whitcomb & Tombs, circa 1942.

It was not uncommon for publications to offer a range of divinatory devices, and Foulsham combined two of the most popular in a neat terracotta pocket book entitled Tea-Cup And Card Fortune Telling, by ‘Mercury’ (1937), while ‘Sagittarius’ provided a little handbook, The fortune teller's guide : including tea-cup readings, an alphabet of dreams, horoscopes, lucky dates, palmistry, handwriting explained, reading faces, the luck of weddings etc. from Featherstone Press, circa 1945.

It seems likely that there remain quite a number of pamphlets in this and allied crafts that have so far eluded catalogues and collections. For those who think, as I do, that wear and tear in a book often provides additional interest, there is also the thrill of finding books that bear all the suggestion of vigorous use. It is hard to resist the notion that they may be, as it were, infused with the strains of mystic portent.

Some Books Relating to Tea Cup Reading: A Checklist

‘Mother Bridget’. The universal dream book, containing an interpretation of all manner of dreams, ... to which is added, the art of fortune-telling by cards, or tea and coffee cups, ... a treatise on moles, ... with the manner of making the dumb-cake. By the late celebrated Mother Bridget. ...
London : printed and sold by J. Bailey, [1816?]

[Anon]. Tea-Cup Reading: Your fate in your tea-cup. [1907].

Ward, James. Dreams & Omens and Tea-cup Fortune-telling. Wonderful examples and scientific explanations, with ancient & modern interpretations.
London : Newspaper Publicity Co., 1915.

‘A Highland Seer’. The Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea-Leaves.
London : G. Routledge & Sons ; New York : E. P. Dutton & Co., [1917]

‘Minetta’. Tea Cup Fortune Telling: the signs illustrated and fully explained. Introduction by Sephariel.
London: W. Foulsham & Co. 1920. 93pp. Octavo. Expanded edition, 153pp, 1925.

[Anon}. The Gypsy Queen Dream Book and Fortune Teller. By Madame Juno.
London : Herbert Jenkins, [1921].

Kent, Cecily. Fortune Telling by Tea Leaves, etc.
London : Herbert Jenkins, 1921. 172pp. Octavo.

Edmonds, Winnicott. Reading the Tea-cup.
Liverpool; the author, 1922.

Nelson, Helen. Tea-Leaf Fortune Telling ...
London : Skeffington & Son. Third edition. [1922]. 63pp. Octavo.

[Anon]. Foulsham’s Tea Cup Fortune Teller.
London: W. Foulsham & Co. 1923. 29pp. Octavo.

‘Mercury’. Tea-Cup & Card Fortune Telling.... Illustrated.
London : W. Foulsham & Co., 1937. 90pp. Octavo.

[Anon.] Tea-Cup Reading.
Christchurch: Whitcomb & Tombs. [1942]. 71pp.

‘Sagittarius’. The fortune teller's guide : including tea-cup readings, an alphabet of dreams, horoscopes, lucky dates, palmistry, handwriting explained, reading faces, the luck of weddings etc.
London : Featherstone Press [1945]. 71pp.

‘Minetta’. The Art of Tea-Cup Fortune Telling. Alphabetically arranged.
London: W. Foulsham & Co. 1958. 155pp. Octavo.

© Mark Valentine, 2016. Photographs: © Jo Valentine, 2016.

Eccentric Personages - W Russell, LL.D.

When I first caught sight of the book, I at first mis-read the title as Eccentric Parsonages. That might have been even more interesting, but Eccentric Personages (1865) by William Russell, LL.D, in its old crimson leather with faded gold ornaments, was still enticing enough.

I suppose there are about twenty subjects and some of them are still well-known today – the magician Cagliostro; the transvestite Chevalier d’Eon; the doughty traveller in the Levant, Lady Hester Stanhope. Others are from the 18th century’s bright cavalcade of bucks and rakes and dandies, with their amusing (or otherwise) foibles and antics.

The author has a sceptical and worldly tone, but his manner softens somewhat when he comes to tell of a figure perhaps otherwise lost to us, so far as I can see. He calls her “The Lady-Witch”. Her name was Helen Royston and she lived near the now unromantic town of Doncaster, in southern Yorkshire, in the late 17th century. She was the daughter of a Cromwellian trooper, Valiant-for-Truth Royston - a name which rather makes one wonder how his friends addressed him - but did not follow in her father’s puritanical zeal: rather, she acquired the reputation of a sorceress.

W. Russell, LL.D., airily says that her wonders were too many for him to relate: which is a great pity, for it is likely these cannot now be recovered. I have not seen her story before and it is not in the usual folk-lore compendiums. Her beauty, it seems, captured first the younger, then the elder, son of the local squire, who was averse to any such match: and the younger son pined away in consequence. She was thought to take the form of a swan, a well-known European folk-lore motif, but not particularly found in England; this may be the most striking example of the myth here.

The practical Mr Russell explains how it came about. He says she liked to repair to a hidden bower by a lakeside at evening and there sing to herself. The credulous rustics, hearing a lady’s voice, but seeing only swans, made a pardonable inference and supposed that she had been transformed. And their suspicions were confirmed – here is another popular folk motif – when a hunter maimed a swan, which, though winged, flew away: the lady was not then seen for some weeks afterwards; and she was presumed to be tending her wounds. That swans are indeed said to sing at evening, but only when pining for their mate, adds another curious dimension to the tale.

All ends well, for the lady does indeed marry the squire’s eldest son, and an enquiry by local magistrates into her reputed witchery is discreetly put aside. The local rural folk suppose that the marriage will mean an end to her spells and wonder-workings, but Mr Russell is slyly not so sure and implies it was not so.

The author is described somewhat vaguely by the British Library as a “miscellaneous writer”. In fact, he seems to have specialised in biographies of the peculiar. His other books include, as well as some romances, Extraordinary Women (1857) and Extraordinary Men (1864), and a series presented as "real life" stories, including Leaves from the Diary of a Law Clerk (1862) and Leaves from the Journal of a Custom-House Officer (1868), Charles Oldfield, the autobiography of a staff officer (1871) and Military Life, tales (1871).

However, his most successful title appears to have been his Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer (1856), under the pen-name of “Waters”, reprinted by the Covent Garden Press in 1972. These were sketches that had first appeared in Chambers’ Journal, Edinburgh, and must be among the earliest detective stories. They have the leisured and rather mannered tone of their time, and the investigatory element is often fairly rudimentary, but the stories are still quite vividly done and suggest a versatile imagination.

One, ‘The Monomaniac’, has a macabre aspect. Henry Renshawe, a gentlemanly but reclusive lodging-house-keeper has in his room the portrait of a mournful young woman, inscribed ‘Laura Hargreaves, born 1804; drowned 1821.’ He becomes obsessed by the idea that she has returned in the form of the wife of a lodger of his, an embroiderer of fine gold lace for epaulettes and similar, whom she in some ways resembles.

This almost leads to a further tragedy, and the story includes one or two distinctly Gothic touches: there is something of the theme and plot of Rodenbach's rather later melancholy novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892). It is tempting, also, to link the story to that of the Swan Lady and infer some particular fascination on the part of the author for images of young women and still water, perhaps inspired by Millais' painting Ophelia, renowned around this time.

Mark Valentine