Sentimental Friendships, Take One

In the late 18th century, sentimental friendships were all the rage. These were and are extremely close, very emotional friendships in which the two people do not hesitate to declare their undying love to one another, spill out their innermost secrets, hang around each others' necks whilst weeping, and kiss each other. The Amateur Historian theorizies that this was particularly popular amongst the upper classes in the late 18th century, where most marriages were not based on love, and there was no divorce if love-matches sadly went sour.

Your average bourgoisie or aristocrat would therefore have to find the emotional fulfillment necessary to a happy existance outside of marriage. This resulted either in affairs (which were generally accepted if the couple in question were discreet) or in sentimental friendships.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a disappointing marriage (in The Eolian Harp, he begins to wax poetic about his wife, who promptly tells him to shut up) and developed a sentimental friendship not only with William Wordsworth, but with Thomas Poole. Unfortunately for the increasingly dependent Wordsworth, during their trip to Germany, Coleridge realized that Poole was more necessary for his emotional well-being.

Coleridge's letters to Poole include: "The Ocean is between us & I feel how much I love you!", "Of many friends, whom I love and esteem, my head & heart have ever chosen you as the Friend--as the one being, in whom is involved the full & whole sacred title....", and "My spirit is more feminine than your's--I cannot write to you without tears/ and I know that when you read my letters, and when you talk of me, you must often 'compound with misty eyes'...."

The Amateur Historian's personal favorite?

"O my God! how I long to be at home--My whole Being so yearns after you, that when I think of the moment of our meeting, I catch the fasion of German joy, rush into your arms, and embrace you.... Now the Spring comes, the vital sap of my affections rises, as in a tree!"

Poetic Eccentricity

Wordsworth is one of the best known and one of the most ridiculed of the Romantic poets. Who among us, Gentle Readers, has not had to read "I wandered as lonely as a cloud" and wondered why on earth the poet was so obsessed with daffodils? (The Amateur Historian wishes to mention that her favorite flowers are daffodils and she has, on occasion, quoted said poem while buying daffodils.) Those familiar with his sister Dorothy and her journals will also wonder why the well-documented entry in which she and her brother take and walk and stumble across a host of golden daffodils turned into a poem in which she was not present?

William Wordsworth's ambivalence towards his sister is one of his least endearing traits (Richard E. Matlak suggests that Wordsworth's Lucy poems, a series of elegaic poems in which the narrator has a presage of his beloved's death and then angsts on about his loss for three more poems, stem from Wordsworth's ambivalence about his sister and his subconscious wish that she was dead). One of his more entertaining traits is one which he mentions in Book IV of his incredibly long and somewhat (in the Amateur Historian's opinion) eye-rollingly narcissistic poem, The Prelude. Wordsworth composed outloud while taking walks. On these walks he brought his dog with him. After a particularly good bit of verse, Wordsworth would pet his dog. Most of the time the dog ran ahead, and would bark and run back if it saw anyone.

Wordsworth writes: "Punctual to such admonishment, I hushed/ My voice, composed my gait, and shaped myself/ To give and take a greeting that might save/ My name from piteous rumours, such as wait/ On men suspected to be crazed in brain."

Literary PSA

On the subject of Lord Byron, the Amateur Historian would like to make a general statement on the Byronic hero for the edification of her gentle readers:

Breakfast with Lord Byron

Ah, Gentle Readers, today is a special day! For those virtuous few who rise early may dine with Lord Byron... after he shoos away his company from last evening and takes out his hair curlers of course.


Your meal will consist of tea with a raw egg stirred in, if Lord Byron is feeling partiuclarly hungry, or watered vinegar if not.


You will probably be feeding Byron's manorexia and vanity more than anything else, but you will be the envy of all of London and a jealous Lady Caroline Lamb (possibly Byron's most famous lover, if one does not count the questionable liasons between Byron and his half-sister, Augusta Leigh) will most likely faint on your doorstep and hate you forever.

More Fun Times With Blake

Mention has been made of the ecentricities of William Blake, who also took advice from his dead brother, saw angels in a tree outside his home and once saw God outside his window.

A patron came by Blake's home one day to buy a book. Not finding Blake indoors, the patron went around back and found Blake and his wife, sitting completely naked in their garden, reading Milton's Paradise Lost.

"Come join us!" quoth Blake. "We are Adam and Eve."

No record is left of the patron's participation in this Edenic scene, or if said patron ever got his book.

Oh that Crazy Blake!

The Amateur Historian would like to apologize for the lack of updates and blames the demands of a college education. Speaking of education, here are a few Historical Tidbits about a man who recieved very little formal education, the Romantic poet, William Blake.

Blake was an odd character, whom all the other Romantic Poets found bewildering, and whom Wordsworth and Coleridge called "crazy Blake". Coleridge, reviewing Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, found fault with Blake's hand-drawn illustrations, in particular with the "I don't know whatness of the countenance, as if the mouth had been formed by the habit of placing the tongue, not contemptuously, but stupidly, between the lower gums and the lower jaw." Coleridge also diapproved of "the mood of the mind", i.e. the supposed sanity of the poet. Robert Hunt, a critic of the time, was highly upset that "the ebullitions of a distempered brain [were] mistaken for the sallies of genius... [in the] admirers of William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement and, consequently, of whom no public notice would have been taken, if he was not forced on the notice and animadversion of the Examiner, in having been held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs and professors as a genius in some respect original and legitimate."

The Amateur Historian personally thinks that the best line from Hunt's review is as follows:

"The praises which these gentlemen bestowed last year on this unfortunate man's illustrations... have, in feeding his vanity, stimulated him to publish his madnesss more largely."

The fact that Blake amped up the crazy in order to get people who annoyed him to leave him alone probably did not help this impression.

Voltaire Takes On the Universe

Gentle Readers, the Amateur Historian is Quite Pleased to announce yet another series, entitled "Voltaire Takes on the Universe: Voltaire Wins."

The title, I should hope, is self-explanitory.

To begin with, we must start with the twenty-three year old Voltaire, who was then going by the name Francois-Marie Arouet and was merely a minor poet. Someone had recently published some extremely subursive verses about the sexual escapades of Phillippe d'Orleans, who was serving as regent of France until Louis XV was old enough to rule on his own.

Arouet, who was rumored to be one of the possible authors of the poem, got into a dicussion of said poem in the Parisian inn where he was living. Arouet mysteriously asked one of his new friends, i.e. a random guest in the inn, if he liked the poem and boasted that though he, Arouet, was very young he had, in fact, written it and written many more like it.

His new friend turned out to be a police spy.

Arouet went to the Bastille.

While he was there, he befriended his guards and formed an instant dislike for his head inquisitor, Monsieur Ysabeau. Ysabeau asked Arouet for any and all subursive poems. Arouet said he had no knowledge of said poems (which was actually true, as he hadn't yet written any) and then "gave in" and said he'd left them at the inn. When Ysabeau failed to find them, Arouet feigned a fit of temper and "admitted" to throwing them down the toilet.

Ysabeau was forced to open up the sewage drain near the inn where Arouet had been staying, much against the wishes of the rest of the inn and all the people living around it. Ysabeau ought to have listened to the protests of Arouet's neighbors. The drain was made of old bricks and mortar and collapsed as soon as Ysabeau tried to inspect it more closely. The sewage spewed forth, ruining everything in the cellars of the inn (the inn-keeper later got compensation for the loss of his entire collection of beer and wines) and forcing Ysabeau to pick through the collected waste in search of the poems.

As Ysabeau wrote in his formal report: "It appears M. Arouet, with his active imagination. only pretended to have thrown away [the documents]... to create unnecessary work."

While this was going on, Arouet wrote his first famous play, an adaptation of Oedipus that became the theatrical success of the decade. While his eleven-month jaunt in the Bastille had been unpleasant, the lack of other occupation forced him to finish his play, and this play earned him popularity with audience and critics alike. Philippe d'Orleans, apparently feeling Arouet (who had now chosen the penname Voltaire) had learned his lesson, told him to keep up the good work and gave him a gold watch and a large annual subsidy.

Voltaire thanked Philippe d'Orleans for paying for his food, but begged the regent to never again chose his lodgings.

Percy Blysshe Shelley's First Foray into Publishing

The Amateur Historian has a soft spot for Shelley, who writes fantastic poems and whose life was chock full of the sort of absurd happenings that make the Amateur Historian laugh aloud.

Her personal favorite has to be when Percy Shelley wrote The Necessity of Atheism. It is difficult to understand what, if anything was going through Shelley's head when he decided to send this treatise to a bunch of bishops and the heads of all the Oxford colleges.

He apparently expected for his theories to be accepted and widely publicized if he was right, or for some kindly ecclesiastical or academic official would draw him aside and give him empirical evidence for the existance of God if he was wrong.

He got kicked out of Oxford instead.