"He Firmly Believed in Cats as an Article of Diet"

In honor of the day, I have an update to a story I tried to tell here nearly two years ago. I am much indebted to commenter Randy Nonenmacher for bringing this new information to my attention.

Some of you may remember Elizabeth Palmer of Little Compton, Rhode Island. Her gravestone proclaims that she "Should have been the Wife of Mr. Simeon Palmer."

Elizabeth Mortimer Palmer, 1776, Little Compton, RI

What an intriguing stone! What happened in this person's life to prompt such an epitaph?

The curious thing is that records show that Elizabeth Mortimer did marry Simeon Palmer in 1755. Back in 2009, I wrote:

So what on earth is that epitaph supposed to mean? Even if Elizabeth and Simeon were in love/engaged before he married Lidia, why would it still matter in 1776, after Elizabeth and Simeon had been married for over 20 years? It seems a strange grudge to hold. Perhaps Simeon, who outlived both his wives, was responsible for the epitaph and used the opportunity to apologize to Elizabeth for wronging her.

The whole thing is very strange. Among other things that raise red flags, Elizabeth Mortimer was 11 years older than Simeon Palmer, which certainly isn't outside of the realm of possibility, but would be unusual. Since Simeon married Lidia in 1744, when he was 21 years old, it would mean that any preexisting relationship between Simeon and Elizabeth would be between a very young man and a woman in her 30s. Again, not impossible, but strange for 18th-century New England.

Well, apparently, I did not know the half of it. In 1901, a reader named M.L.T. Alden wrote to the Newport Mercury to tell the editor about some local history he had picked up in the 1880s. It is hard to do his letter justice without quoting it at some length:

Twenty years ago this summer, I came first to Little Compton. I was much interested in this stone and made inquiries and also consulted the Town records. Aunt Sarah Charles Wilbur, the antiquarian of the village, and also Mrs. Angelina (Palmer) Griswold were then alive and they supplied the details that did not appear on the records of the Town.

The first church of Little Compton, R. I. was organized in 1704 under Rev. Richard Billings, a man of prominence and ability, much beloved, and exerted a strong influence over his charge. He had one idiosyncrasy, however; he firmly believed in cats as an article of diet, and fatted them for the purpose. Amongst his parishioners was a man, Simeon Palmer, of the fine old family resident in Little Compton. He was wealthy married first Lydia Dennis, Aug. 25, 1745, and had Susannah, Gideon, Humphrey, Sarah, Walter and Patience. At some time between 1745 and 1752 he had sunstroke which left him mildly insane and he adopted the views of his minister on cats and insisted on his family using them for food.

Poor Little Match Girl

I suppose this child is supposed to be praying, but he just looks so cold.

Sledding Hat

Celebrate winter with the American Museum of Photography's online exhibit: Faux Snow. Apparently, late-19th-century photographers sometimes filled their studios with fake snow in order to stage fanciful winter scenes like the one pictured above. While you're there, check out the rest of the museum's lovely digital exhibits.

Beware the Tassel

This daguerreotype (ca. 1855) of George Leverett Stowell is part of the Library of Congress' American Memory Collection. If you click through, you can view over 700 early daguerreotypes in their online exhibit, America's First Look Into the Camera. Be careful, though. They might force you to wear a monkey-armed coat and a hat left over from the BPOE parade.

10 Gallon Hat, 2 Gallon Head

Is he planning to wear that hat on his entire body? He is just too adorable with his little pout and his overlarge tunic and standing on that chair.

via VIA

Not a Hat

While I was looking for more daguerreotypes of kids in hats, I came across this image in the online collections of the George Eastman House. The little girls are hatless, but check out that farmer's tan!

Usually, 19th-century portraits show children dressed within an inch of their lives, but this photograph was taken by Julia Margaret Cameron, whose artistic portraits are rarely so stiff or formal. The religious overtones of this portrait cast the children as cherubs, saints, or the Christ child, but the little one's sun-darkened arms make it immediately clear that she belongs to earth, rather than to heaven. It's a lovely image.

Visit the George Eastman House website for more photos by Cameron and other famous photographers of the 19th century.

This Hat is Brought to You by the Harvard Theatre Collection and the Number 3

Young Irving Selden and his magnificent hat.

See this and many other unusual portraits from the Harvard Theatre Collection here!

A Tribute to Robert Burns?

This is Edward Waldo Emerson, youngest son of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He seems unimpressed with his little Glengarry cap. Not too fond of that basket of lettuce, either.

via VIA

Treasure Trove

All lovers of kids in hats should go immediately to photo_history's Flickr photostream! I have already spent more than an hour flipping through the hundreds of beautiful daguerreotypes there. If you do not click through, this little girl will pout at you with her chubby, chubby cheeks and then dispatch her casts gloves to track you down and drag you there.

Addams Family Hat

I dedicate this hat to my mother, who loves 19th-century portraits in which half-hidden monsters mothers steady their floppy offspring for the camera.

I think this hat thing needs to be a weekly feature.

via VIA

More Overdressed Kids in Hats

I have about a hundred of these. Poor little 19th-century kids. I'd probably be pursing my lips if someone made me wear that fetching little collar when I'd rather be making mud pies.

More available via Harvard VIA.

Nice Hat, Kid

Someone in this photo is a teeny bit overdressed:

More adorable kids in hats@ Harvard Visual Information Access.

A Herd of Majestic Giraffes!

Thanks to Stephen V. for recommending that I take a look at the Emergence of Advertising collection at Duke. This digital collection includes several thousand scanned images of advertisements from the 19th and 20th centuries, including colorful cartoons, broadsides, and Kodakiana.

One of my favorites is this pamphlet advertising the Sells Brothers' Circus.

Strange Monuments of Mount Auburn

Mount Auburn is full of elaborate monuments, so it's hard for any individual monument to stand out. Regular old angels and marble lace won't cut it.

What will draw attention? A 25-foot edifice embellished with a man-sized urn, giant mastiff, and marble relief panels depicting mail delivery.

This is the grave of William F. Harnden, founder of one of America's first private express companies. In 1839, when Harnden sent his first package, the United States was expanding tremendously, both geographically and economically. Many historians have pointed toward twin revolutions in transportation and communications to explain this growth. Harnden brought both together in his express company — he shipped packages via railroad and steamship. He died in 1845 at age 31.

In order to commemorate Harnden's important work, his family depicted elements of his business on his memorial.

Here we have well-dressed man handing a package to a woman. He seems to have driven to her door in a wagon — the wheel is behind him and she is hatless, suggesting that she is not dressed to leave the house. I find this image a bit surprising because historians generally emphasize the role of mail and railroads in expanding political connections and business opportunities between men. With a slight clothing change, this could be an image of me accepting a UPS package containing a book from Amazon. Did Harnden envision his business as customer-oriented rather than business-oriented? And did he envision his average customer as a woman?

The other relief is a bit more difficult to decipher, but no less interesting:

Here we have a woman (possibly the same woman) indoors, holding a baby and caring for a toddler. Behind her, a man stares out the window. There is a stove on one side of the room and an object in the foreground that might be a little cart (?). The man is resting his hand on a stack of lumpy objects that might be packages.

Is this image meant to show the interior of a house? Of a store? Is our female customer struggling to drag her offspring to the local post office to retrieve her package? Or is the man in the background her husband, waiting wistfully for someone to come and carry his packages away? Is the woman Harnden's wife, harassed by daily cares while he daydreams about deliveries? I don't know, but I'd appreciate any insight you might have. It's worth noting that the woman is still the focus of the image.

In addition to these panels, the monument has several other striking features.

The canopy is emblazoned with four virtues: hope, charity, faith, and justice. These are illustrated with icons — a dove, a cup, a cross, and a wide, staring eye. The eye is a bit jarring. I confess that I was expecting scales.

This dog reminds me of my childhood trips to Civil War battlefields. My parents would encourage us to look for animals on the monuments to keep our interest when we were very young. My sister had a special love for the 11th Pennsylvania's mascot, Sallie, and demanded to visit her statue on every visit.

Brighid and Sallie:

Dorothea Dix

I am very fond of Dorothea Dix's gravestone at Mount Auburn.

It looks like this:

Everything else at Mount Auburn looks like this:

or this:

When I was in high school, I spent some time transcribing various bits of Dix's Civil War era correspondence in the collections of the University of Connecticut. It was a chore — she had the handwriting of someone who was too busy to bother with the niceties of legibility. I've read many 19th-century letters by women, and they have generally been tidy, pristine exemplars of impeccable penmanship. Dix's letters are blotched with ink and the individual letters are scrawled so large that she can only fit 1/4 of the usual text on a page. That's ok, though, because her correspondence is terse and businesslike — it's very rare that she sticks in any of the usual blandishments or runs over to a second page.

I love her gravestone because it is so like her letters: terse, to the point, and unconcerned with the fripperies of Victorian convention. It stands out at Mount Auburn.

I Love Thee

 

 

Plymouth, MA

Boy or Girl? A Public Service Announcement

Until the middle of the 20th century, young children in Europe and the United States regularly wore dresses, regardless of sex. Many modern Americans are aware of this tidbit of sartorial history, but find it amusing or baffling. When I was looking for a digital image of this Winterhalter portrait of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their five oldest children, many of my Google hits contained comments along the lines of "Two of the kids are boys!?!?"

Yes, two of the children are boys. From left to right, this portrait shows Alfred (b. 1844), Edward (b. 1841), Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Alice (b. 1843), Helena (b. 1846), and Victoria (b. 1840). Before WWII, most European and Euro-American boys wore skirts until they were "breeched" around age 5-6 (sometimes as late as 7-8).

If you looked at Alfred and thought he was a girl, don't worry — lots of people have trouble telling. Luckily, my early years as a Civil War reenactor and historical costume enthusiast have armed me with some tips for deciphering mid-19th-century images and I am happy to pass them along to you.

The most reliable way of identifying the sex of a child in a mid-19th-c image (1840ish-1870ish) is the hairstyle. As a general rule, boys' hair is parted on the side or swept up in a topknot, while girls' hair is nearly always parted dead-center. Take another look at the portrait — the little princes have side parts, the princesses have center parts, and the baby doesn't have enough hair to tell.

Here are some examples from Harvard's Houghton Library:

Girls:

Boy, Boy, Girl, Boy:

(Adorable) Boy, (Adorable) Girl:

Now that we've established a pattern, we can look at some ambiguous images:

Boy or Girl?

side part = boy

Boy or Girl?

center part = girl

Boy or Girl?

top knot = boy

Boy or Girl?

boy on left, girl on right

If you still can't tell the difference, don't feel bad — whoever catalogued these pictures for Houghton can't tell either. Nearly all of the boys under the age of five are misidentified as girls on Harvard's VIA site:

Yet, when we look at pictures with identified subjects, the pattern holds firm:

Ellen Tucker Emerson:

Alice Howe Gibbens James and Mary Sherwin Gibbens:

Tad Lincoln:

It's not a perfect method — for example, the Davis boys have wonky center parts — but it's a good starting point.

Other tips:

• Props: Is the child holding a doll, needlework, or a flower? It's probably a girl. Is it holding a ball, whip, dog, or military accoutrement (drum, toy cannon, kepi)? It's probably a boy. A book? Could be either.
• Accessories: Some types of jewelry can offer hints — earrings and brooches worn at the throat generally signify "female," but necklaces are tricky. Children of both sexes have worn coral necklaces as charms for centuries.
  
• Color: Before the 1930s, Americans generally considered red/pink to be a masculine color (think Mars) and blue to be a feminine color (think Virgin Mary). That said, there was not hard and fast rule on the color issue and it won't help you much unless you're looking at a painting or an actual garment. The Valentine Museum in Richmond had a fabulous exhibit on this subject a few years ago.
  
• Pattern: It would be a mistake to assume that only girls wore floral patterns in the 19th century. Still, if something is all-out floral and other signs point to girl, girl is a safe bet. On the flip side, little boys often wore tartans that evoked a martial style.
  
• Tunics: Sometimes, young boys went through an intermediate stage of dress — neither dresses nor full-on pants. See Prince Edward in the first painting (red belted tunic). Tunics often had a military flair win the form of buttons, belts, and trim. Other types of jackets worn by boys also have military overtones, such as the zouave jackets that became popular during the Civil War.
  

boy in tartan tunic, side-parted hair

I'm sure that people who are familiar with images from other eras could offer similar tips. I imagine the general principles are the same — look at hair, props, cut, etc. — but the specifics are slightly different.

The Gore Children (1755)

John Singleton Copley

Sarah and Frances hold flowers and have loose, flowing hair. John wears child-sized clothes in the style worn by adult men. Samuel's hair is confined and styled differently from his sisters' hair. He is also wearing red/pink and has a dog to mark his masculinity.

My grandfather, Benjamin Manfredo DeAngelis, 1921

What Hath God Wrought

I am one of those people who is ruining American history. When curmudgeons lament the much-exaggerated death of "traditional" history or complain that young scholars only care about sexy minutia, they have me in mind. I'll read any journal article with a title that promises prostitution or infanticide.

That said, I am thoroughly enjoying Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. I didn't expect to feel any affection for a tome on the antebellum period, but the writing is lively and Prof. Howe shares my love of John Quincy Adams (the book is dedicated to Adams). After slogging through Sean Wilentz' fawning Jackson lovefest, I'm tickled to find that Howe's Jackson is a violent, anti-intellectual, petulant demagogue. If I have to read about bank charters and the transportation revolution, I prefer to be entertained, and Howe delivers.

He also does a good job of alternating between politics-heavy chapters and chapters that focus on social, cultural, and technological developments. If I feel myself flagging during a section on monetary policy, I can be comforted by the thought that something closer to my interests is not far off.

If you're looking for a survey of this period, I recommend this one over all the other doorstops and textbooks out there.

More Room At the Top, Please

This seems to be more than a run-of-the-mill spacing issue. Why on earth did the carver leave all that unused marble above the inscription? Did an embellishment erode? The tops are even — why aren't the names? I'm perplexed.

Charles Field and Elizabeth Ann Hayward

Plymouth, MA

mid-19th c.

Bodies Politic

I recently finished reading John Wood Sweet's Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (2003). In part, this book is a project of recovery — Sweet points out that while "American came to present itself as a white nation," the reality was that "it was, and had been from the start, diverse, hybrid, and multiracial" (10). His basic argument is that racism in 18th-century New England was not a matter of cultural misunderstanding — in fact, as people of color converted to Christianity and assimilated other aspects of European culture into their daily lives, they found themselves even more reviled by their white neighbors. Over the course of the century, "stubborn, essentialist identities of race . . . supplanted a potentially mutable form of difference — culture" (108). The larger point is one that is often difficult for proud New Englanders to swallow: even though the Civil War pit North against South, the war and its memory "has obscured underlying similarities that derive from a shared legacy of colonialism" (11).

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in American History, particularly if that interest is focused on southern New England. Sweet's title says "the American North," but what he really means is Rhode Island with some eastern Massachusetts and a smattering of Connecticut. That was great for me — I love Rhode Island history —but readers looking for Pennsylvania or Maine will be disappointed.


Bodies Politic is a thick book (409 pages), but an easy read. Sweet employs many engaging vignettes to make his points, which makes this a great book for the casual reader or for the academic looking for some arresting anecdotes for lecture.

The one scene that stayed with me after reading this book was the opening paragraph of Chapter Four:

When Paul Revere set out on his midnight ride in April 1775, one of the first landmarks he passed was the body of a long-dead slave — a figure that represented, no less than the Sons of Liberty themselves, a colonial family drama of abused paternal authority, emasculating enslavement, and rebellion. Revere knew the body by name. Mark's remains, suspended in a metal gibbet overlooking the road, had been greeting travelers for some twenty years — since 1755, when he was hanged. His accomplice, Phillis, was burned at the stake. Their crime had been killing their master, Captain John Codman of Charlestown.

I was already somewhat familiar with the case of Mark and Phillis because all the graduate students have been talking about Blindspot lately, but I hadn't really assimilated the image of the gibbet into my mental picture of late colonial Boston. When I think heads on spikes or bodies suspended near the road, I'm thinking 17th-century Ireland or the Caribbean, not Stamp Act-era Boston. You won't see any gibbets in the John Adams miniseries, that's for sure. Now, I have adjusted the image in my mind, though I can't quite imagine what a 20-year-old exposed corpse looks like. Blanched bones? Strips of ragged cloth? A pile of dust?