Alice in Wonderland

Posted on April 25, 2012 by inkunderskin

Alice by Leigh @ Cosmic Tattoo

Andrea has always loved Alice.

‘She was…very imaginative, little bit odd, bit flawed… And I think the nonsense of the book makes sense when viewed with life as a whole; mad things happen all the time, crazy characters move in and out of our lives, we grow, we shrink…’

The tattoo is based on John Tenniel’s illustration for the first edition of Alice, published in 1865. It depicts a scene from the end of the book when Alice calls the King and Queen of Hearts out as nothing but playing cards, before cards fly all over her and she wakes up on the river bank next to her sister.

Lewis Carroll and Alice

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who would write his novels under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was born in Cheshire, England, in 1832. He was a brilliant mathematician, and gained a 1st Class Honours degree from Christ Church College Oxford before being appointed as a maths lecturer there in 1855.

John Tenniel's Alice

The following year he publicly adopted his pseudonym for the first time, in The Train magazine for a poem called Solitude. He also became friends with Christ Church’s new Dean, Henry Liddell, whose daughter Alice has traditionally been seen as the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s true that Alice Liddell asked Carroll to tell the story that became Alice (on a rowing trip in July 1862; she asked for a manuscript, receiving it more than two years later once Carroll had received encouragement to seek a publisher and had approached John Tenniel to do the illustrations), but Carroll claimed that the character was entirely fictional, and there are very few physical similarities between the real Alice and either Tenniel’s illustrations or Carroll’s own. Carroll did dedicate the book to her, and used her birthday as Alice’s birthday.

We know what Alice looked like because Carroll took lots of photographs of her. Carroll has been rumoured to have been sexually interested in Alice Liddell, a theory backed up by the high percentage of young girls he used as photographic subjects. Scholars on the other side of the debate point out that more than half the photos he’s known to have taken no longer exist.

Alice Liddell in 1860, by Carroll

Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell has always been controversial. Were his feelings for her inappropriate, or is this a myth? We do know that Carroll’s friendship with the Liddells cooled, but the page of his diary that should explain what happened is missing. The final sentence for the entry before reads:

‘wrote to Mrs Liddell, urging her either to send the children to be photographed…’

Then the sentence disappears over the page, and the Liddells are not mentioned again for several months. Because of the mystery, rumours have abounded. Scholar Karoline Leach thinks it’s more likely that Carroll had a vaguely unhealthy interest in Alice’s 14-year-old sister Lorina than in Alice, but unless the page is languishing in a Carroll descendent’s library somewhere nobody will ever know for sure.

Carroll and the Post Office

In 1889 Carroll decided to invent the Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case, which he intended to accompany his pamphlet Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing. It’s a lot longer than eight or nine words.

Malian stamps showing Carroll

In 1982, to commemorate Carroll’s 150th birthday, the west African republic of Mali issued a set of Carroll stamps.

Links and further reading

The Lewis Carroll Society

 

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Ulysses S Grant

Posted on April 17, 2012 by inkunderskin

Ulysses S Grant by John Howie@Moo Tattoo, Philadelphia

Tuesday hails from Connecticut, but lives and studies in Philadelphia. She loves history, especially 19th century American history – hence the Ulysses S Grant tattoo on the right-hand side of her back.

Tuesday has a lot of additional information about Grant on her blog.

A (Very) Potted Biography of Grant

Born Hyram Ulysses Grant on the 27th April 1822 in Ohio, Grant has a reputation as a great military leader and a less-great President.

He played an instrumental role in forcing the surrender of Confederate army commander General Robert E. Lee in 1865, thus effectively ending the American Civil War, and maintained sufficient popularity to be elected the 18th President of the United States in 1869 – despite having no previous experience in any elected office.

Grant was a supporter of Radical Reconstruction, a movement that advocated equal rights for African-American Freedmen. During his first term in office Grant oversaw the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African-Americans the right to vote, and made intimidation of black voters by the Ku Klux Klan a federal offence.

Though his support for civil rights has won him the admiration of some scholars, generally his two-term Presidency is remembered as incompetent and riddled with scandal. He has been accused of nepotism, and his Administration is widely held to have badly handled the ‘Panic’ (economic Depression) of 1873.

Accordingly, the eventual victor in the contested 1876 election was the fiscally conservative Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

Grant and Mark Twain

Grant was, according to biographers, a poor businessman. He was made bankrupt because of a poor investment decision, so when, in 1884, Century magazine offered him a contract to write his memoirs he was understandably tempted. Fortunately for his prospective bank balance though, Grant was close friends with Mark Twain, 19 years Grant’s junior and an established novelist (though The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wasn’t published until 1885). Twain, unimpressed with Century’s contract terms, offered Grant a better one. After a slight wrestle with his conscience, Grant signed with Twain’s publishing firm.

Illustration of Grant (middle) and Twain (right) from Twain's travelogue 'Following the Equator'

Twain likened Grant’s memoirs – a two-volume work that mostly skips over his Presidency in favour of a comprehensive account of the Civil War – to Julius Caesar’s Commentaries. Grant seems to have been anxious to impress Twain, and the comparison pleased him. Twain found it hard to believe that a man as revered as Grant valued his feedback:

‘[I was] as much surprised as Columbus’ cook would have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating.’

Grant completed his memoirs in July 1885, only two weeks prior to his death from throat cancer. Knowing he was dying, Grant had asked Twain for assurance that the book would be enough of a success to support his bereaved family. Twain sold it on subscription, door-to-door, cannily using military veterans as salesmen, and achieved enormous success. He was able to give Grant’s widow Julia a total of about $450,000 in royalties. In today’s money that’s about $8million.

Twain remained committed to Grant’s memory. After Grant’s death he summed up his friendship with this complex, much-maligned man, calling him ‘the greatest man I have ever had the privilege of knowing personally’.

He continued: ‘[a]nd I have not known a man with a kinder nature or a purer character. He was called the Silent Man — the Sphynx — and he was that, in public, but not in private. There he was a fluent and able talker — with a large sense of humor, and a most rare gift of compacting meaty things into phrases of stunning felicity.’

Links and further reading

 

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Clio, Greek Muse of History

Posted on April 11, 2012 by inkunderskin

By Martin Crosthwaite @ Flaming Gun

This beautiful black and grey tattoo (better photo to follow!) is on the left shoulder of a writer who’s also a history graduate/geek. It shows Clio (or Kleio), one of the Greek muses, sitting on a column with a scroll in her hand – a traditional depiction.

The Greek Muses

There were either three, seven or nine Greek muses, depending on whose version of the myth you believe. Here I’m sticking with nine, the number preferred by the Greek poet Hesiod (who lived some time between 750 and 650BCE). Hesiod claimed to have been visited by all nine muses while he was on Mount Helicon, and they inspired him to become a poet alongside his regular farming duties.

Homer, who may have been a contemporary of Hesiod’s (critics have treated Hesiod’s work somewhat less kindly), wrote that the muses lived on Olympus, were the goddesses of poetry and song, and were responsible for performing festive songs for the other deities. Homer mentions ‘nine’ only once, and gives no names, but this sole reference was enough for the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (active between 60 and 30BCE) to write:

‘…the number nine has prevailed since it rests upon the authority of the most distinguished men, such as Homer and Hesiod and others like them.’

In Disney's Hercules there were only 5 muses. Clio is 2nd left, apparently.

Unsurprisingly there are plenty of myths concerning the muses. Apollo was apparently their choirmaster. They were all nurses to Dionysus (Greek god of wine and ritual madness), and they took revenge on King Pierus of Macedon for daring to suggest that his nine daughters could rival the muses, by turning said daughters into magpies.

Clio

Clio’s name comes from the Greek verb kleô – ‘to make famous’ or ‘celebrate’. When, in the Classical period, the muses were assigned specific attributes, Clio was named Muse of History and was represented either with a scroll or seated next to books. She also sometimes carried a trumpet.

According to Hesiod she was the second muse to be born, after Calliope, the Muse of Epic Poetry. Some stories say she was the mother of Hyacinthus, and his father was the same King Pierus whose daughters Clio had helped punish. Other tales have all the muses as virgin deities.

Spenser and Clio

The Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (c.1552 – 1599) is responsible for The Faerie Queene (unfinished; started 1590), one of the longest poems written in English and primarily an allegorical brown-nosing of Elizabeth I. In it, Spenser references the muses, most notably Clio.

Spenser calls the capital city of his fairyland Cleopolis, and pays homage to her as ‘nourse’ (nurse) of both time and everlasting fame, maintaining records to ensure great acts are never forgotten.

Renaissance writers often conflated Clio with Calliope, because all epic poetry came from history and therefore the lines were blurry. In a 1591 poem, Teares of the Muse, Spenser writes Clio as the oldest sister.

Roman copy of a Greek statue, 2nd century, St Petersburg

Spenser also says that all nine muses had Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, and Zeus as parents, which is at odds with Hesiod’s claim that Phoebus, god of light, was their father. Not that we can ever prove it either way.

Links and further reading:


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Pictish Ogham

Posted on April 10, 2012 by inkunderskin

I had this tattoo done to celebrate (I think) making it into Honours at university. I definitely had it done when I was 20, and it was definitely to commemorate my love of early Scottish archaeology. It’s in Pictish Ogham. Originally it was going to be my initials, but there isn’t a J in the Ogham alphabet so I went with a B to signify a uni nickname.

The letters read upward

It was my first. I didn’t know anything about the art of tattooing or how to seek out a good artist, hence its awkward position too high up my spine and its slightly shoddy execution.

The Picts

Thanks to the 12th century Historiae Norvegiae a perpetuating myth is that the Picts lived underground and were the size of pygmies. Though we have no conclusive evidence either way, these are probably misconceptions. We don’t have conclusive evidence to back up the idea that they were tattooed, either, but their given name Picti translates as ‘painted ones’, so some sort of body art seems likely.

The word Picti first appeared in AD297 in the writings of a Roman called Eumenius, and refers to people north of the Forth/Clyde in Scotland. For the next few hundred years it appears that ‘the Picts’ were a confederation of tribes who gradually merged into one another until the Northumbrian monk Bede, in his seminal Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c.AD731), felt able to write of just ‘southern Picts’ and ‘northern Picts’. Bede regarded ‘Pictland’ as a single political entity.

The Picts left none of their own literature, so what scholars know is pieced together from scant archaeology, the records of others and, most importantly for our purposes, around 250 incised stone slabs found in the north, east and north-east of Scotland.

Pictish Symbol Stones

These slabs date from roughly the 7th – latter half of the 9th centuries. A 1903 hypothesis by scholar J.R. Allen is still used to divide the stones into classes I, II and III and show how the art on them changed over time. Class I stones are the oldest; they are incised with extraordinary beasts, household objects and incomprehensible abstract designs.

Examples of Pictish Symbols

 

Class II stones feature a cross as well as these designs. In the 1960s Isabel Henderson suggested that the cross was an affirmation of Christian faith by newly-converted landowners; certainly they appeared after, according to Bede, the Picts converted to Christianity and there is no more convincing hypothesis, though we will never know exactly what the stones were for. Various scholars have suggested that they indicate territory markers, memorial stones, marriage alliances and/or territorial ownership, all of which seem feasible explanations.

Class III stones are a more disparate group featuring only a cross, indicating perhaps the disappearance of traditional Pictish culture.

Pictish Ogham

The Picts may have spoken two languages. One language was a form of P-Celtic, the other possibly a non-Indo-European language spoken in prehistoric Scotland, which survived alongside the Celtic tongue for a while. The written form of the non-Celtic language is Pictish Ogham, which appears on about 30 Pictish symbol stones.

Because there are so few surviving ogham stones it is impossible to do any convincing code-breaking. Most of the inscriptions appear to be names, suggesting memorials or territory markers; the word ‘maqq’ appears frequently and is thought to mean ‘son of’. Alongside the more decipherable words though are clusters of nonsensical repeated consonants and, later, increasingly recognisable Celtic words.

Pictish Ogham Alphabet

It has been possible to ascertain that inscriptions should be read up and across (see example below from Aberdeenshire) and to come up with an alphabet, but Pictish Ogham will, disappointingly, probably remain a tantalising linguistic mystery.

Brandsbutt Stone, Inverurie

 

Links and further reading:

 



 

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The Royal Signals Jimmy

Posted on April 3, 2012 by inkunderskin

By Julie Clarke @Flaming Gun (unfinished)

Sarah’s father was a warrant officer in the Royal Corps of Signals. Sarah spent her first ten years as ‘an army brat’ and loved it; she wanted to celebrate her good memories and her relationship with her dad by having the cap badge, an image of Mercury, known as ‘Jimmy’ within the Corps, tattooed on her leg. Sarah said: ‘It’s been the biggest part of [Dad's] life (apart from marriage and kids) so represents him as a whole.’

The Royal Corps of Signals

The Royal Signals, a British army combat support arm, is responsible for providing the full telecommunications infrastructure for the army – units are among the first to see action.

The Corps can date its origins back to 1870, when ‘C’ Telegraph Troop, Royal Engineers, became the first formalised body of signallers in the army. The Troop, whose remit was to provide visual signals and telegraphs for a field army, first saw action in the Anglo-Zulu war (1879 – the Michael Caine film is wonderful but not terribly accurate). In 1884 the Troop was amalgamated with other Royal Engineers companies to form the Telegraph Battalion Royal Engineers.

One of the nicest stories about the Telegraph Battalion is on the British Army website – a group slashed through 72 miles of Ghanaian jungle to run an overhead wire between Cape Coast (165km west of the capital, Accra) and the inland town of Prahsu. The army was in Ghana to conquer, at the fourth time of asking, the Ashanti Empire; the Ashanti had a lot of gold and the British were keen to own it. The story goes that, as they emerged from the jungle, the Telegraph Battalion men ran into the Ashanti leader, Agyeman Prempeh, who was so surprised that he surrendered. This probably isn’t a comprehensive account, but it is rather lovely. Prempeh got exiled to the Seychelles, so he didn’t do too badly out of it.

Responsibility for signalling passed between several companies until 1920, when Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, signed the Royal Warrant to form a ‘Corps of Signals’. King George V added the ‘Royal’ six weeks later.

The Corps has been instrumental to every campaign since then. A Corporal Thomas Waters laid and maintained a field telephone line under heavy enemy fire on D-Day (1944) and was awarded the Miltary Medal.

The Royal Signals has lost men in both the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

Jimmy

Nobody knows exactly why the image of Mercury, winged messenger of the Roman gods, is nicknamed ‘Jimmy’. The most accepted theory is, apparently, that it’s an affectionate tribute to a Royal Signals boxer, Jimmy Emblem, who was the British Army Champion in 1924. Jimmy has the honour of being one of eight badges carved into a hill in Fovant, Wiltshire, placed there on the Corps’ 50th anniversary in 1970.

http://www.fovantbadges.com/

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