Wronged Women and Wretched Sinners - the Case of the Maid in Växjö

I have spoken about my love for old murder ballads before. A Swedish compilation of such old folk songs was made between 1896 and 1901 by a man called August Bondeson. If you speak Swedish, you can read the volume online here. 

If you don't... Well, I thought I'd post a few translations here. Nothing fancy; no rhymes or anything, just the basic meaning so you can compare them to their English and American counterparts.

I thought I'd start with a particularly gruesome one called Där tjänte en flicka (There served a girl). It was recorded a few years ago by Swedish artist Louise Hoffsten. Her version is quite good, but it doesn't contain all the verses – only 1-3, 5 and 9-10. It's a pity in my opinion since that leaves out some of the more horrid ones. Anyway, if you have Spotify, you can listen to it here.

I put the Swedish lyrics first and then the English translation right after each verse.And, like I said, it's not a fancy translation, but, I dare say, pretty accurate as far as content goes (but without any poetic flair like rhymes and rhythm).

And – gruesome and purple as this song is, contains at least a pinch of realism. Women being executed for infanticide is historical fact, not fancy. 

1. Där tjänte en flicka i Växjö i två år,

hon tjänte hos en köpman, en ungkarl det var,

det var väl ett stort under, att hon torde

en sådan gärning göra, som hon gjorde.

1.  There served a girl in Växjö for two years,

she was maid to a merchant, a bachelor too,

but it was a mystery how she dared

to do the deed she did

 2. Det hände sig så om en lördagskväll,

hon födde två foster, dem mördade hon själv;

hon trodde, där var ingen, som såg det,

och därför tog hon livet utav dem.

3. It happened on one Saturday night

that she bore two children, she murdered them herself

she thought there was no one who saw it

and so she took their sweet lives.

3. Så svepte hon dem uti renaste lin,

så kastade hon dem i den skarpaste ström;

hon trodde, där var ingen som såg det,

och därför tog hon livet utav dem.

3. She wrapped them in linen

and cast them into a stream

she thought there was no one who saw it

and so she took their sweet lives.

4. Sen gångar hon sig på kyrkogården in,

och tårarne runno så stritt på hennes kind.

 Ja, det var väl ett stort under, att hon torde

en sådan gärning göra, som hon gjorde,

4. Into the graveyard she went

and tears ran down her cheeks.

Yes, it was a mystery how she dared

to do the deed she did

5. "Men ett det är, som grämjer mitt hjärta allra mest,

att min allra yngste broder har mig i bojor fäst;

han fängslar och binder mig så svåra.

Gud nåde mig, syndare arma!

5. "But what grieves my heart the most,

is that my youngest brother has clasped me in irons,

he traps me and binds me so badly.

God have mercy on me, wretched sinner!"

6. Min moder lät stöpa en silverkanna ny,

med fyra förgyllande fötter däruti,

den fyllde hon med blanka riksdalrar,

hon ville själv med konungen samtala

6. My mother had made a silver jar

with four golden feet inside;

filling it with shiny shillings,

with the king she wanted plead

7. för att lösa mitt unga liv, om hon det kunde få.

Men mitt ungaste liv, det passar jag ej på:

när jag för mina synder haver lidit,

så hoppas jag, de äro mig tillgivna.

7. for my young life, if she could

but for my life I have no care;

once I have paid for my sins

I hope they are forgiven

8. I morgon så fyller jag mitt adertonde år,

då hade jag tänkt, att mitt bröllop skulle stå;

men då skall röda hjärteblodet rinna,

likt vatten uti stridaste strömmar."

8. Tomorrow I will turn eighteen,

when I had thought to be a bride

but instead the red blood of my heart 

shall stream in torrents like water." 

9. Den andra dagen ’fördes hon till spetsgården fram. 

Och fram kommer bödeln med yxan i sin hand: 

"Si, här skall detta unga liv iörrinna, 

liksom det vore blodröda strömmar!" 

9. She was brought to the scaffold on the second day

and with an axe the executioner stands:

"See, this young life shall run

in blood red torrents like water!"

10. Så talte hon till folket, som däromkring stod: 

"Ack, hör I, unga flickor, jag råder eder till, 

låten inga falska gossar er behaga, 

ty då fån I sorg i alla edra dagar!" 

10. She spoke to the people who stood all around:

"Oh, hear me, girls, I shall offer you advice,

trust not young men, fair and false, 

lest you shall grieve for all your days!"

*Picture from The Graphics Fairy . It has nothing to do with the song besides looking rather dramatic.

Anyone for Swedish murder and fin-de-siècle gloom?

Hjalmar Söderberg (source: Wikipedia)

If you are looking for some good old fin-de-siècle gloom and you happen to be in the vicinity of London, England, you really should take the opportunity to see Dr Glas, starring Swedish actor Krister Henriksson (of Wallander-renown).

Dr Glas is based on a novel, first published in 1905, by Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg,  considered to be one of the finest novelists this nation ever produced. It is, admittedly, not a cheerful story. On the other hand, it has murder, adultery, depression and lots and lots of good old misery. Nobody get a HEA, because that was not what Söderberg was about. He was, after all, the man who wrote the legendary phrase: "I believe in the lust of the flesh and the incurable loneliness of the soul" (from the play Gertrud), quoted by generations of Swedish teenagers suffering their first disappointment in love.

If you can't make it to the Wyndham's Theatre, I heartily recommend digging out Doctor Glas as a novel or Söderberg's other novel The Serious Game as they are both excellent and translated to English.

Life around 1900

Just had to share this lovely enhanced video with footage from around 1900 – it really brings the past frighteningly close when you can meet the eyes of strangers from a gap of more than 100 years.

Just lovely!

Fashion Plates Galore!

I just realised I've been a bit bad at sharing some of the truly awesome resources out there and thought I'd remedy that, by letting you in on a pretty little secret - Collection Maciet.

Source: Collection Maciet, Mode. [XIXe siècle]. 1886

It is hosted by Les Arts Décoratifs, which is a private not-for-profit association and recognized as being in the public interest under French law. It originated in 1882, in the wake of the Universal Exhibitions, when a group of collectors banded together with the idea of promoting the applied arts and developing links between industry and culture, design and production. Thus, it is a thoroughly Victorian product which in itself is rather nice, n'est-ce pas?

That's all very well, you're saying now, but what is it good for? Why, old chap, says I. Fashion, of course! Lots and lots of fashion!

Source: Collection Maciet, Mode. [XIXe siècle]. 1842 à 1843, image 10

You see, the Collection Maciet contains a great number of fashion plates, going back to the 18th century and up to 1940. Well, they have later stuff too, but it's not available online, and, anyway, that's not what we're her for, is it? No, we want the 19th century stuff, right? No worries. There's plenty of that to be had.

The trick, however, is that the search function is in French. If you speak the lovely language of Molière and Racine, that's fine of course, but if you don't it's not entirely simple how to find what you are looking for. Because of that, I thought I'd provide a short guide.

Go here, and pick Consulation du Catalogue (or click that link obviously, but I wanted you to be able to hack it for yourselves without having to start here, appreciated that your visit is). Then pick "Recherche simple". If it isn't obvious, it means "simple search". You then get this menu:

Do what I have done here - fill in "mode" under Termes de recherche and select "Album Maciet". Then click Rechercher and you'll get a list of fashion related material, in chronological order. Scroll down to the years you are interested in. Say you want the fashions for 1868, for example. Just scroll down until you find the listing Mode : [XIXe siècle] : 1868 .- ... .- [éditeurs divers] .- 1868 .- Collection Maciet. Click the number next to the listing and you get this window:

Click "Voir les vignettes Maciet" and you get all the images as thumbnails. Select the ones that look interesting and enjoy - you can zoom rather far and also adjust contrasts and lighting, so you won't miss a single detail.

Source: Collection Maciet, Mode. [XIXe siècle]. 1868, image 2

Hope it proves useful to you. If nothing else, there's plenty of eye candy for the Victorian-ly inclined!

The Daily Victorian, 1897

The Daily Victorian, 1854

DECLARATION OF WAR. (1854, June 26).  

The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), p. 5. 

Retrieved March 23, 2013, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12960424

Various updates

Follow my blog with Bloglovin
I'm trying to organise myself a bit and so I've made some adjustments to the design of this blog. I also added some new elements, like a selection of news from my twitter feed of historical tweeters and links to my research shelf on Goodreads (at the bottom of the page). As you can see above, I also added this blog to Bloglovin for those who want to use that to follow it.

I would also really like to hear from you. Tell me what was helpful and what wasn't and what you would like to see more of, please. You can reach me at contactvictorianexplorer@gmail.com.

Reflections on the month of March

Forgotten Divas: Teresa Carreño

Teresa Carreño, ca. 1903 (picture from Wikipedia)

Born in  Venezuela in 1853, Teresa Carrneño was an internationally acclaimed singer, pianist, composer and conductor. She debuted very early - only 10 years old, she performed for Abraham Lincoln - and moved to Europe in 1866, where she toured as an opera singer and pianist. She composed, among other things, over 40 works for piano, but her greatest hit was a piece called Tendeur. Mme. Carreño also lived a rather interesting personal life, being married no less than 4 times and having altogether 5 surviving children.

By lucky chance, she recorded some music in 1905 so we can actually here her play today. Among pieces she recorded is the Chopin Ballade No. 1 in G minor Op. 23.

 

In December 1902, she appeared in London and played, among other things, this very same Chopin ballade. The Times was reasonably impressed:

"Mme. Teresa Carreño has long held a place of undisputed supremacy among virtuousi of her sex, and the program of her recital, given on Monday afternoon in Bechstein-hall, is surely a sign that she is no laying stress upon the interpretative side of her art rather than on its merely technical side. With the exception of a formidable "étude de concert" by E. MacDowell, with which it concluded, there was not a note which pianists of ordinary calibre could not execute with certainty, and there must have been at least half-a-dozen people in the audiende whose repertory includes all that Mme. Carreño played. The sonatas were the "appassionata" of Beethoven, and Schumann's in G minor, op. 22, labelles in the programme "Sorasch (sic) wie möglich," as if that were the title of the whole sonata, instead of the direction for the first movement. The Chopin selection included two preludes, in D flat and B flat respectively, the nocturne in C sharp minor, the fine and rarely-hear polonaise in E flat minor, the ballade in G minor, and, for an encore, the éurde in A flat. Tchaikovsky's pretty "Chant sans Paroles" in F, and Rubinstein's barcarolle in G, completed the proamme, and Henselt's "Si oiseau j'étais" was given afterwards as an encore. The player was at her best in Chopin and later composers, but parts of the Schumann sonata were finely interpreted; her style has gained very remarkably in breadth and her splendid tone and the absolute certainty of her execution remain what they were."

Source Citation: 

"Concerts." Times [London, England] 10 Dec. 1902: 4. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 9 Dec. 2012.

Teresa Carreño died in 1917 in New York and today, the second largest theatre in South America, the Teresa Carreño Cultural Complex in Careras in Venezuela, carries her name, as does, oddly enough, a crater on Venus.

Blood, Tears and Betrayal: The Shilling Sheet Genre

The Lion's Bride, referenced below (source: Vintage Printables)

In the 19th century, song sheets could be bought most everywhere in Sweden. Mostly they contained only lyrics and reference to an already well-known or traditional melody and cost one or two Swedish shillings ("skilling" in Swedish, pronounced very close to the English word "shilling"). These little booklets appeared already in the 16th century and were very common through the 18th and 19th centuries, until about 1910 when they were replaced by more modern versions of songbooks.

In principle, they could contain any sort of songs – secular, religious, folk songs or newly written – but the most popular variety were tragic stories of death and broken hearts. Hence, in Swedish, this genre of music has become known as "Shilling Sheets" and most people still know snippets of them  You might say they're part of our pop culture heritage every bit as much as ABBA or Stieg Larsson.

One of the most famous shilling sheet songs is Elvira Madigan, written in 1889 by Johan Lindström Saxon about the tragic elopement of tightrope dancer Elvira Madigan and Lieutenant Count Sixten Sparre that I have written about before on this blog. Another example of a well-known shilling sheet song is Amanda and Herman. It tells the story of  fair Amanda who is let down by the faithless Herman and seeks her death in the waves (women betrayed by faithless men is one of the most popular themes in these songs for some reason). It's been recorded many, many times and I found this lovely version uploaded to YouTube by the talented Elina Järventaus Johansson:

 
Quite often shilling sheet songs are translations of foreign poems or songs - like Lejonbruden (The Lion's Bride) about a lion tamer's daughter who is tragically killed by the lion she loves, which was originally written in German by Adelbert von Chamisso (it can be read in original German and English translation here and you can listen to it in Swedish on YouTube).
 
As adults, we tend to laugh at the unbridled sentimentality of these songs, but most children still find them hauntingly fascinating and heartbreakingly sad. During my childhood, me and my friends would beg my mother to sing them to us over and over, and we cried and cried – for some reason singing them ourselves was not the same thing at all. We didn't want control, we wanted the tragedy to sweep over us with purposeful and unrelenting force.

Why, one might debate. Personally, I think there is something about vicarious suffering that appeals to all people, and while we may think ourselves conditioned to prefer the less melodramatic forms of storytelling that our modern culture celebrates, let us not be fooled. What is the movie Titanic, really, but one long film-version of what would have made an excellent shilling sheet song?

ETA: for those who want to hear more, I made a Spotify playlist with some of the most famous ballads, including Elvira Madigan and the other ones mentioned above:

spoti.fi/YZua2c

Images of India: A Bombay Wedding

The following passages is found in Modern India, a book containing a series of letters written for The Chicago Record-Herald during the winter of 1903-04 and recounts the American journalist's experiences at a wedding in Bombay:

"The home of the bridegroom's family is an immense wooden house in the native quarter, and when we reached it we had to pass through a crowd of coolies that filled the street. The gate and outside walls were gayly decorated with bunting and Japanese lanterns, all ready to be lighted as soon as the sun went down. A native orchestra was playing doleful music in one of the courts, and a brass band of twenty pieces in military uniforms from the barracks was waiting its turn. A hallway which leads to a large drawing-room in the rear of the house was spread with scarlet matting, the walls were hung with gay prints, and Japanese lanterns were suspended from the ceiling at intervals of three or four feet. The first room was filled with women and children eating ices and sweetmeats. Men guests were not allowed to join them. It was then half past four, and we were told that they had been enjoying themselves in that innocent way since noon, and would remain until late in the evening, for it was the only share they could have in the wedding ceremonies. Hindu women and men cannot mingle even on such occasions.

The men folks were in the large drawing-room, seated in rows of chairs facing each other, with an aisle four or five feet wide in the center. There were all sorts and conditions of men, for the groom has a wide acquaintance and intimate friends among Mohammedans, Jains, Parsees, Roman Catholics, Protestants and all the many other religious in Bombay, and he invited them to his marriage. Several foreign ladies were given seats in the place of honor at the head of the room around a large gilt chair or throne which stood in the center with a wreath of flowers carelessly thrown over the back. There were two American missionaries and their wives, a Jesuit priest and several English women.

Soon after we were seated there was a stir on the outside and the groom appeared arrayed in the whitest of white linen robes, a turban of white and gold silk, an exquisite cashmere shawl over his shoulders, and a string of diamonds around his neck that were worth a rajah's ransom. His hands were adorned with several handsome rings, including one great emerald set in diamonds, so big that you could see it across the room. Around his neck was a garland of marigolds that fell to his waist, and he carried a big bridal bouquet in his hand. 

/.../ 

The Parsees wore black or white with closely buttoned frocks and caps that look like fly-traps; the Mohammedans wore flowing robes of white, and the Hindus silks of the liveliest patterns and the most vivid colors. No ballroom belle ever was enveloped by brighter tinted fabrics than the silks, satins, brocades and velvets that were worn by the dignified Hindu gentlemen at this wedding, and their jewels were such as our richest women wear. 

/.../

They brought us trays of native refreshments, while the nautch girls danced, handed each guest a nosegay and placed a pair of cocoanuts at his feet, which had some deep significance--I could not quite understand what. The groom did not appear to be enjoying himself. He looked very unhappy. He evidently did not like to sit up in a gilded chair so that everybody could stare and make remarks about him, for that is exactly what his guests were doing, criticising his bare legs, commenting upon his jewels and guessing how much his diamond necklace cost. He was quite relieved when a couple of gentlemen, who seemed to be acting as masters of ceremonies, placed a second garland of flowers around his neck--which one of them whispered to me had just come from the bride, the first one having been the gift of his mother--and led him out of the room like a lamb to the slaughter.

Nautch dancers (picture found in Modern India)

When we reached the street a procession of the guests of honor was formed, while policemen drove the crowd back. First came the military band, then the masters of ceremonies--each having a cane in his hand, with which he motioned back the crowd that lined the road on both sides six or eight tiers deep. Then the groom marched all alone with a dejected look on his face, and his hands clasped before him. After him came the foreign guests, two and two, as long as they were able to keep the formation, but after going a hundred feet the crowd became so great and were so anxious to see all that was going on, that they broke the line and mixed up with the wedding party, and even surrounded the solitary groom like a bodyguard, so that we who were coming directly after could scarcely see him. The noisy music of the band had aroused the entire neighborhood, and in the march to the residence of the bride's family we passed between thousands of spectators. The groom was exceedingly nervous. Although night had fallen and the temperature was quite cool, the perspiration was rolling down his face in torrents, and he was relieved when we entered a narrow passage which bad been cleared by the policemen.

The bride's house was decorated in the same manner as the groom's, and upon a tray in the middle of a big room a small slow fire of perfumed wood was burning. The groom was led to the side of it, and stood there, while the guests were seated around him--hooded Hindu women on one side and men and foreign ladies on the other. Then his trainers made him sit down on the floor, cross-legged, like a tailor. Hindus seldom use chairs, or even cushions. Very soon four Brahmins, or priests, appeared from somewhere in the background and seated themselves on the opposite side of the fire. They wore no robes, and were only half dressed. Two were naked to the waist, as well as barefooted and barelegged. One, who had his head shaved like a prize fighter and seemed to be the officiating clergyman, had on what looked like a red flannel shirt. He brought his tools with him, and conducted a mysterious ceremony, which I cannot describe, because it was too long and complicated, and I could not make any notes. A gentleman who had been requested to look after me attempted to explain what it meant, as the ceremony proceeded, but his English was very imperfect, and I lost a good deal of the show trying to clear up his meaning. While the chief priest was going through a ritual his deputies chanted mournful and monotonous strains in a minor key--repetitions of the same lines over and over again. They were praying for the favor of the gods, and their approval of the marriage.

After the groom had endured it alone for a while the bride was brought in by her brother-in-law, who, since the death of her father, has been the head of the household. He was clad in a white gauze undershirt, with short sleeves, and the ordinary Hindu robe wrapped around his waist, and hanging down to his bare knees. The bride had a big bunch of pearls hanging from her upper lip, gold and silver rings and anklets upon her bare feet, and her head was so concealed under wrappings of shawls that she would have smothered in the hot room had not one of her playmates gone up and removed the coverings from her face. This playmate was a lively matron of 14 years, a fellow pupil at the missionary school, who had been married at the age of 9, so she knew all about it, and had adopted foreign manners and customs sufficiently to permit her to go about among the guests, chatting with both gentlemen and ladies with perfect self-possession. She told us all about the bride, who was her dearest friend, received and passed around the presents as they arrived, and took charge of the proceedings.

The bride sat down on the floor beside the husband that had been chosen for her and timidly clasped his hand while the priests continued chanting, stopping now and then to breathe or to anoint the foreheads of the couple, or to throw something on the fire. There were bowls of several kinds of food, each having its significance, and several kinds of plants and flowers, and incense, which was thrown into the flames. At one time the chief priest arose from the floor, stretched his legs and read a long passage from a book, which my escort said was the sacred writing in Sanskrit laying down rules and regulations for the government of Hindu wives. But the bride and groom paid very little attention to the priests or to the ceremony. After the first embarrassment was over they chatted familiarly with their friends, both foreign and native, who came and squatted down beside them. The bride's mother came quietly into the circle after a while and sat down beside her son-in-law--a slight woman, whose face was entirely concealed. When the performance had been going on for about an hour four more priests appeared and took seats in the background. When I asked my guardian their object, he replied, sarcastically, that it was money, that they were present as witnesses, and each of them would expect a big fee as well as a good supper.

"Poor people get married with one priest," he added, "but rich people have to have many. It costs a lot of money to get married."

Every now and then parcels were brought in by servants, and handed to the bride, who opened them with the same eagerness that American girls show about their wedding presents, but before she had been given half a chance to examine them they were snatched away from her and passed around. There were enough jewels to set the groom up in business, for all the relatives on both sides are rich, several beautifully embroidered shawls, a copy of Tennyson's poems, a full set of Ruskin's works, a flexible covered Bible from the bride's school teacher, and other gifts too numerous to mention. The ceremony soon became tedious and the crowded room was hot and stuffy. It was an ordeal for us to stay as long as we did, and we endured it for a couple of hours, but it was ten times worse for the bride and groom, for they had to sit on the floor over the fire, and couldn't even stretch their legs. They told us that it would take four hours more to finish the ritual. So we asked our hosts to excuse us, offered our sympathy and congratulations to the happy couple, who laughed and joked with us in English, while the priests continued to sing and pray."

Modern India by William Eleroy Curtis (1904)

The British on the Germans: the Junker Edition

"The Prussian Junker is a kind of glorified peasant who may in some individual cases or even for some generations have acquired the veneer of Western civilization, French or English, but who remains essentially a well-to-do peasant, cunning, grasping, tenacious, and jealous to the death of his traditional privileges."

- The Times, 27 October, 1906

Policing Persia: Swedes Very far From Home

In the early 20th century, some forces in Persia were pushing to modernise the country which had, in regards to organisation and government, changed very little in the past few hundred years.

The Shah of Persia arriving in Ourmiah, 1911 (source: Library of Congress)

In July 1910, the Democrats came to power and one part of their modernisation program was the construction of a national gendarmerie - a sort of paramilitarian force that was part police force and part armed force aimed at keeping the peace by any means necessary. While events soon lead to the program being dropped, the idea of a gendarmerie survived, partly likely because it was in the interest of the two super-powers in the region - Russia and Great Britain - to ensure safe passage through the notoriously dangerous region. As an example, Mr Smart, the British Consul at Shiraz, was attacked in the neighbourhood of Kazerun in December 1912. Grazed by a bullet, and trapped under his wounded horse, he was only saved due to the efficiency of the troop of the Central India Horse that escorted him and the kind care of some of the locals, and the incident led to considerable diplomatic tension. In fact, the Gendarmerie was to be in great part funded by Britain and Russia – for example, in may 1913, the British Government advanced a sum of £100,000 to the Persian government for this purpose, following the Smart-incident.

However, in order to build such a force, Persia needed help from the outside since the country lacked officers with the relevant sort of training. The question was which country to turn to? In 1907, Russia and Great Britain had, much to the outrage of the Persians, divided the country into two speheres of influence; one Russian and one Britain. Naturally, it was unthinkable for either side to allow the other party to organise a national armed Persian force, and they also vetoed Teheran's first choice Italy, because Italy was viewed to be too much of a power in itself.

Sweden, however... Let's face it; while the Russians may once have been trounced by Swedish forces in battles such as Narva, Sweden in the early 20th century was not that impressive. In fact, she had just voluntarily granted Norway independence and was now only a small fraction of the Baltic power she had once been. Nobody needed fear the Swedes – least of all super-powers like Russia and Britain.

Hence, in August 1911, Colonel Harald O. Hjalmarson (helpful tip: 'hj' is pronounced as an English 'y', so he would be 'Yalmarson')  arrived and with the help of several other Swedish officers, began the laborious task of organising a gendarmerie, aimed at maintaining security on the highways and roads. It was called the Persian Central Governemt Gendarmerie (or in Persian, Zhandarmiri-yi Dawlati).

 General Harald Hjalmarson (source: Wikipedia)

The Swedish officers were to a large degree Swedish aristocrats, and the Persian officers were also drawn from the higher social strata and well-educated – many of them spoke French, for instance. At the end of 1912 the Gendarmerie consisted of 21 Swedes and nearly 3,000 Persian officers and men. By the end of 1913, the number of Swedish officers had risen to 36 while nearly 6,000 Persians were employed. According to an article in The Times, around 2,000 of them were mounted, and they were organised in six regiments, or more accurately, nine battalions.

The outbreak of World War I led to a distinct shift in policy. First of all, Sweden recalled all the officers who were on the roll for active duty. Second, Persia was in a very delicate position, finding itself between Germany's ally Turkey and British India. Both sides wooed the Persians, who nominally remained neutral. However, the Gendarmerie had distinct German loyalties. Not only were the Swedish officers by tradition friendly towards their bigger Germanic cousin, but nationalist Persian forces who were still outraged at Russia's and Britain's high-handedness in splitting the country between them, were also in favour of Germany. They accepted subsidiaries from Germany and covertly aided German expiditions, such as the expedition headed by Niedermayer, as well as allowing Wasserman's proslyting among local potentates in southern Persia.

In 1916, the force split; some siding with the nationalists, actively fighting the Russians, while parts of the first and second regiments in Teheran remained neutral along with their Swedish officers. The troops who had remained neutral would later form the nucleus for the reconstructed Gendarmerie, which took part in the campaigns against the Bolsheviks in the Caspian provinces and the Kurdish rebellion in Azerbaijan, as well as keeping up its police duties of guarding the roads.

After the coup d'état in 1921, the Gendarmerie formed the core for the new national Iranian army together with the the Iranian Cossack Division and the remaining Swedish officers returned home. Harald O. Hjalmarson would later head the Swedish Brigade in the Finnish Civil War, and died in 1919, only 51 years old.

And that is how, bizarrely, a few Swedish officers actively aided Germany's overtures to the Muslim World during World War I.

Sources:

"The Unrest In Southern Persia." Times [London, England] 5 Apr. 1912: 3. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"British Officer Killed In Persia." Times [London, England] 12 Dec. 1912: 6. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"Policing Persia." Times [London, England] 27 Dec. 1913: 5. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"Indian Soldiers Attacked in Dangerous Pass: The Consul Smart Incident." The Straits Times, 26 January 1912, Page 2

Cronin, Stephanie, Gendarmerie, Encyclopaedia Iranica www.iranica.com, online edition, 28 July 2012 (available at http://www.iranica.com/articles/gendarmerie)

Hopkirk, Peter, On Secret Service East of Constantinople: the plot to bring down the British empire, J. Murray, London, 1994

Wikipedia; entry on Swedish Gendarmerie in English, and on Harald Hjalmarson in Swedish.

(This post was originally posted on my old blog)

British Courts in India: Perpetuating Power Or Challenging It?

Bombay High Court, 1902 (source: The National Archive, Catalogue Reference: Part of CO 1069/179)

Having spent the some time reading about the administration and legal system of British India, I came across the following statement by Gandhi:

"Do you think it would be possible for the English to carry on their Government without law courts? It is wrong to assume that courts are established for the benefit of the people. Those who want to perpetuate their power do so through the courts."

Pretentious as it might seem, I couldn't help asking myself if Gandhi was right. Did law ultimately serve the purpose of upholding or undermining the structures of Victorian England, especially when seen in a colonial perspective?

First, law can obviously both be a reflection of society as it is, or as we would like it to be when we make laws trying to accomplish social change (as when established legal systems reflecting the existing social order have been replaced in one fell swoop through Communist revolution in traditional societies, for example). But I would argue that even when "conservative", as in constructed to uphold the existing structures, law will always potentially threaten the very structures it is designed to protect.

Why? Because law is about expressing power in a logical and structural way, and that in turn makes it vulnerable to structured arguments based on logic. While power is hidden, unexpressed and implicit, it cannot really be addressed except through violence. But when it is explained and structured, it is stripped of its almost magical abilities. In that sense, law is to power what exposing a marked deck is to magic.

You might compare it to theology, which is really all about structuring faith in a logical fashion. While theology is more or less necessary in order to justify and uphold a complex belief system, it also makes that belief system vulnerable to attack. Look at Christianity, for example. The most successful attacks on the religious status quo are all founded on what are ultimately theological arguments – for example, Luther's and Calvin's Reformation are both "legal" revolutions in that they use the language and arguments of theology to challenge the tenets of that same theology. Thereby it made the justification for the existing beliefs the very foundation for the questioning of status quo. The same thing could be said for the challenge of science. It would be much harder to attack for science to call faith into question if it had not implicitly tried to justify itself by logic; i.e. through a carefully structured belief system that is rationalised through rational argument (and the truth is that modern scientific thought to a large extent is dependent on the rules for argument that was originally designed within a religious context, such as the tomistic logic).

In the same way, when power is called into question in such a way that it feels it must defend itself by rational argument (as it increasingly did in Britain over the centuries), it also becomes vulnerable to being questioned on the very same premises it uses to legitimise itself. Law forces power to explain itself and no matter if it does so by positivism (it is the law because I say so and I am the power) or by utilitarianism (it is the law because it is the best for the majority) or any other mechanism (it is the word of God, for example), the explicit justification makes it possible to question it. Thereby, it is possible no only to call into question not only the ultimate cause for justification, but also that this justification makes the application of power (law) reasonable in an individual case. By laying claim to rationality, power can be questioned by rationality, and not just in legal theory but in its practical application in courts.

Undoubtedly, British law and legal practices in the 19th century was an expression of power over an underprivileged majority by a fairly small and privileged group of white males, but in order to justify this order, British law and legal practices had long used the application of a set of principles that ultimately allowed its opponents to argue against those same inequalities.

This is also evident in the ambivalence in 19th century British justification for its colonial ventures. The idea of British superiority, which was what was often considered to ultimately give Britain the right to occupy foreign countries such as India, also gave Britain an obligation to act in a "superior" manner and gave her a certain responsibility towards "inferior" cultures, which she had to shoulder if she was going to be able to successfully maintain her right to govern these people. In short, if Britain acted in a cruel, arbitrary and "uncivilised" manner, then the basic tenants underlying British legal thought disqualified her from laying claim to her colonies, unless she was to accept the collapse of the mental cosmology that had been created over several centuries. Since that was clearly intolerable, these principles had to be upheld in the laws and the courts, which in turn made it possible to question inequality before the law and the power of the privileged group over the disfranchised such as women, the poor and the colonial groups.

Just, then, as the very carefully constructed theology of the Church in the Middle Ages, made it possible for Luther to call its tenets into question, the theories of rights and power that ultimately justified the British constitutional and legal order made it possible for the American colonialists to call it into question, and for the tea coolies of Assam to demand equality before the law. You might say that whenever the authorities applied the governmental power in an arbitrary on unjust way, they actually called the entire system into question and to do so too openly would necessarily have lead to its collapse. Therefore, in order to survive, it had no choice but to allow itself to be attacked on the grounds of being unfair and unjust.

By providing both a monopoly on violence and a justification for that monopoly, you could say that the law, and the faith in the law by the oppressed, did serve to uphold the basic unfairness underlying the colonial order, and that if the oppressed had refused to acknowledge this order, they might have hastened its demise. But then, the almost sacrosanct status of the law and courts in the British mind also opened it up for a revolution from within – the demands of the oppressed became not a foreign power trying to force its will on the British, but made them an inevitable consequence of the system itself, which may ultimately have been a greater threat to it. In that context, peaceful protests and British violence in response to it, was a much greater threat to the existing order than separatist violence since the British could very well justify violence in the face of violence, but it was much harder justify violence applied in direct opposition of the justification for the monopoly of violence for the state.

I would therefore argue that all justification for power, and its open and rational expression through laws and legal theories, necessarily makes it vulnerable to challenge, but the form of a successful challenge will vary depending on what that rationale is. In that sense, you could say that all belief systems are vulnerable their own kryptonite. The very different challenges faced by Russia in Central Asia, I think, serves to pinpoint this. Russia had a very different rationale underlying its social order, and thus, it was less vulnerable to protests based on fairness and the rights of the governed people, but was ultimately more vulnerable to open revolution, since the autocratic system could not be justified once it failed to apply its will successfully on the people. 

And thus, I would also argue that British law in India, while striving to uphold the social order actually, ultimately, undermined it. On the other hand, the fact that it contained the mechanisms for challenging it built into the system likely helped the fundamental social order in Britain to survive even the cataclysm of the social change of the 20th century, and survive well into the 21st.

The modern Western law, then, I would say, is a double-edged sword that can be used both as a weapon against inherent unfairness in the system and as a shield to defend those very structural inequalities against radical change. The awareness of this somewhat contradictory nature of Western legal thought is, I think, helpful when discussing the role of law in oppressing and/or liberating marginalised groups in the past. I would be curious to hear if anyone agrees with me, or if I'm coming across as completely spaced out (or just repeating an argument that has been made many times before).

Thoughts?

Baghdad: Worth a Mosque?

The Kaiser; aka "Hadji Wilhelm Mohammed" (Source: Wikipedia)

World War I is usually associated with the trenches on the Western Front. You know; shelling, gassing, the Somme, the Battle of Verdun... But as Germany knew right at the outset; the Allies' weakest spot was not the French border. No, the soft, unprotected underbelly of the Allies was Britain's Achilles heel – India (why, yes, I do like mixing my metaphors – why do you ask?).

Germany had long groomed Turkey for the (officially un)express(ed) purpose of getting a foothold in Asia. When the rest of the world refused to have any truck with the late Sultan Abdul Hamid after his brutal crushing of the rebellion by the (Christian) Armenian minority, Germany had taken Turkey's side against the outraged Russians. Germany had even helped Turkey arm itself by offering military advisors and arms. In return, Germany only wanted a small thing – a railroad, running straight from Berlin to Baghdad. That way, Germany would be well prepared to open up an Asian front in case of a conflict with Russia and Britain without risking that her troop movements were impeded by Russia and her Slavic allies in Eastern Europe.

In order to affirm the friendship Germany felt with the Islamic world, Kaiser Wilhelm even declared himself the protector of the Muslim world. During a state visit to Turkey in 1898, he made speech to that effect which was repeated on postcards that were spread from Kabul to the Bosporus. Islam's cause, Germany declared, was also Germany's.

Example of the postcards described above, with the German text on the left and the same in Arabic on the right

When war finally broke out, Germany urged the Sultan as the leader of the Islamic world to declare a jihad, a holy war, on Britain. The idea was that the vast Muslim population in India would then rise up against its British masters and throw them back into the sea from whence they came. Without India, Britain would be little but a puny island kingdom whose bark was considerably worse than its bite.

Germany was not content to rely entirely on the sultan, however, considering the rather bad relationship between the Ottomans and many Islamic peoples. No, Germany was going to take it one step further and try to persuade India's closest neighbours, Persia and Afghanistan, to join their cause. In order to do so, Germany sent several expiditions in order to treat with the Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan, as well as to proselyte among the local tribes.

The full story of Germany's jihad is too long and complicated to relate here, but one of the more absurd aspects of it was the claim that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam and gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca. His name, therefore, was given as "Hadji Wilhelm Mohammed", a rather shameless, not to say blasphemous, attempt to exploit the genuine religious feeling of the Muslims. Meanwhile, Germany coldly planned to lay claim to most of the land under Ottoman control as soon as Britain and Russia had been defeated.

It didn't work though,  and perhaps it never could have. Perhaps Germany underestimated her Muslim allies' ability to see through her rather feeble ruse, or maybe they simply overestimated the religious ties and underestimated the political and ethnic tensions within the Islamic world.

Nevertheless, forgotten as it is today, the affair of the German Jihad without a doubt managed to further increase the gap between Christian Europe and Muslim Asia and helped contribute to the dichotomy so strongly and painfully experienced in the century that followed World War I.

(This post was originally posted on my old blog)

George Gissing; Or, Fact Is Indeed Sometimes Stranger Than (Credible) Fiction

George Gissing (source: Wikipedia)

 George Gissing was born in the year of the Indian Uprising and although he survived Queen Victoria by two years, dying in 1903, he is almost the epitome of a Victorian writer, not only in that his books are unmistakably  Victorian in flavour, but also because his personal life contained all the elements of prime Victorian melodrama.

The son of a Yorkshire pharmacist, young George showed promise and scholarly aptitude. However, his budding career in the academic field came to a rather sudden halt at a young age, after he became more or less obsessed with a young prostitute named Nell (she was an orphan, naturally - how could it be a Victorian melodrama otherwise?). Having ruined himself trying to keep her off the streets, he began stealing from his fellow students, but was soon exposed (the shame! the shame!) and sentenced to a month of hard labour.

He tried to get a fresh start in America, but he soon returned to England, propelled by the twin forces of financial failure and longing for his Nell, whom he married. It wasn't a successful marriage (I don't think you can label a marriage in which one party engages in prostitution and that ends with separation and the wife dying from alcoholism and/or syphilis as "successful" even if you try) but at least the 1880s saw the beginnings of his writing career – he was first published in 1880 and kept up a decent productivity with seven more novels published in that decade and 12 in the next.

He remarried in 1891, and to hear his friend H.G Wells tell it, the screening process was rather erratic – he simply picked up a servant girl in Regents Park one Sunday afternoon and married her. His reasons were, according to Wells, splendidly Victorian:

"he felt that to make love to any woman he could regard as a social equal would be too elaborate, restrained and tedious for his urgencies, he could not answer questions he supposed he would be asked about his health and means, and so, for the second time, he flung himself at a social inferior whom he expected to be easy and grateful."

This is obviously not a sound basis for married bliss, and so, rather predictably, the marriage was yet another failure. Mrs Gissing's violent and erratic behaviour led firstly to their children being sent away for their safety, and finally, to her being committed to a lunatic asylum in 1902 (yes, that's one wife who was a prostitute and another who went mad, albeit not hidden in the attic, which gives Mr Gissing 8/10 on the Victorian melodrama scale).

To make it even better, Gissing was, according to Wells, "an extremely good-looking, well-built man, slightly on the lean side, blond, with a good profile and a splendid leonine head" (yes, it's hard to tell behind that moustache, I agree, but we'll have to trust Mr Wells on this one). No wonder then that his insane wife should not keep him from scoring yet again – this time with a Frenchwoman, with whom he lived in "psuedo-marriage" until his death. Even that was suitably novel-esque – he died from pneumonia originating from a cold caught on a winter walk (he had emphysema and was thus in poor shape to begin with). It seems his final relationship was only just better than his former ones, and Wells gives poor Gissing a rather depressing epigraph:

"So ended all that flimsy inordinate stir of grey matter that was George Gissing. He was a pessimistic writer. He spent his big fine brain depreciating life, because he would not and perhaps could not look life squarely in the eyes,—neither his circumstances nor the conventions about him nor the adverse things about him nor the limitations of his personal character."

Gloomy, isn't it? If you don't trust Mr Wells' word, you can become personally acquainted with Mr Gissing's writing, since most of his novels can be found online these days.

If you don't know where to start, the most well-known of his books is New Grub Street, followed by Odd Women.  His style is generally realistic, close to documentary, but at the same time, he was an idealist, deeply in love with the Classical world, and his political stance was certainly not that of a reformer – he looked at the lower classes as doomed and mostly unable to reform. The Nether World is especially bleak, being written after Nell's death and describing the life of London's poor. Not a feel-good author, certainly, but a good choice for a close and unsentimental look at Victorian Britain.

Workers in the Dawn (1880)
The Unclassed (1884)
Isabel Clarendon (1885)
Demos (1886)
Thyrza (1887)
A Life's Morning (1888)
The Nether World (1889)
The Emancipated (1890)
New Grub Street (1891)
Denzil Quarrier (1892)
Born In Exile (1892)
The Odd Women (1893)
In the Year of Jubilee (1894)
Eve's Ransom (1895)
The Paying Guest (1895)
Sleeping Fires (1895)
The Whirlpool (1897)
The Town Traveller (1898)
The Crown Of Life (1899)
By the Ionian Sea (1901)
Our Friend the Charlatan (1901)
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903)
Will Warburton (1905)   

Enjoy!

Tragic Romance: The Story of Elvira Madigan

Elvira Madigan (Wikipedia

In 1888, the Madigan Circus visited the small Swedish town of Kristianstad. There, the young tightrope walker Elvira Madigan, the step-daughter of the circus' owner, met and fell in love with the considerably older Lieutenant Count Sixten Sparre.  Since he was already married and had two children, it was inappropriate to say the least, and during the exchange of passionate letters that followed the meeting, Elvira's mother and step-father did their best to dissuade her.

Love, however, isn't just blind, but infinitely stupid as well, and so, in 1889, when Sixten asked her to, she ran away and joined him. They travelled together to Elvira's home-country Denmark (her real name was Hedvig Olsen) where they lived together until they ran out of funds.

Lieutenant Count Sixten Sparre (Wikipedia)

By then, their situation was desperate; Sixten's family refused to help him and he was wanted for deserting his regiment. Faced with financial ruin, disgrace and without any recourse from friends or family, the future was beyond bleak.

On 20 July, 1889, the couple packed a picnic bag and declared they were going on an outing to Norreskøv. There, they had a final meal, after which Sixten shot Elvira, and then killed himself with his service revolver.

The story naturally caused a scandal when it became public knowledge. A penny-sheet ballad was written about the affair, and I think to this day most Swedes know at least the first verse of it – it was one of those horribly moving songs that made me cry as a child (I loved those). The story has also been filmed on several occasions. The most famous version is the heart-breakingly beautiful film by Bo Widerberg from 1967. It rather famously used  Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 as a theme song – the piece is sometimes referred to as "Elvira Madigan" today though I'm sure many people have no idea why.

Tommy Berggren as Sixten Sparre and Pia Degermark as Elvira Madigan in the 1967 film

If you haven't seen it, I heartily recommend it – it's available on Amazon among other places.

(this is a modified version of a post that first appeared on my old blog)

Review: The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope

Full title: The Prisoner of Zenda (novel) 
Writer: Anthony Hope
First published: 1894
Available: digitally on Project Gutenberg; in print on Amazon 

Quote: "For my part, if a man needs be a knave, I would have him a debonair knave." 

The Prisoner of Zenda is a classic story taking place in the fictional German state "Ruritania"–a word which has come to be a generic term for "small fictional country in Europe which saved the writer the trouble of too much research", so well-known was Anthony Hope's story once. I should probably state up front that I love fictional places; countries, cities, stately homes, the occasional uninhabited island... You name it. That I would sooner or later have to visit Ruritania was obviously inevitable.

The basic story is what I like to call the "Two Peas In A Pod"-plot. You've encountered it before–in Mark Twain's The Prince and The Pauper, Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask, the film Dave... You've surely encountered it in some form before. The idea is that you have two people so incredibly alike that they can switch places and none will be the wiser. In this case, the reason is a common ancestor and obviously very dominant genes, and the result is that Rudolf Rassendyll and King Rudolf of Ruritania look exactly the same. Due to sinister plots and intrigues, Rassendyll is forced to take the king's place while he is imprisoned in the castle of Zenda. This leads to romantic entanglements when the king's future wife and cosuin Flavia suddenly finds herself liking Rudolf a lot more than she ever did before, and swashbuckling adventure as the king must be saved and put safely back on the throne.

Rassendyll isn't a bad sort of character – he's reasonably likeable and not insufferably goody-two-shoes. He's not splendidly charismatic either – the major star of the book is without a doubt the utterly despicable and dashingly handsome villain Rupert of Henzau who kills and kisses with the same flair and splendid lack of remorse. Flavia is nice and not a nitwit at all; she doesn't actually require saving even once, mostly because she behaves perfectly reasonably (take note, modern writers!). There are sword-fights and moat-swimming and the occasional witty verbal exchange so I can't complain. I also find the description of Rudolf's life as a royal fairly realistic in the peculiar mix of power and circumscription.

The plot is obviously over the top ridiculous and the book is clearly not written yesterday, but it mostly shows in a rather charming way. Vintage, rather than mouldy. I especially love the very period realistic touches, such as when Rudolf goes on a  swimming mission at night and describes his dress as: "I was covered with a large cloak, and under this I wore a warm, tight-fitting woollen jersey, a pair of knickerbockers, thick stockings, and light canvas shoes. I had rubbed myself with oil, and I carried a large flask of whisky." Take that, Jason Bourne!

To sum up; a classic swashbuckling adventure that still entertains after all these years and is a must for lovers of the genre.

I gave it 4/5 on Goodreads.

Wilkie Collins Journal Online

Public domain image (source)

For those interested in Victorian literature in general and the great Wilkie Collins specifically, The Wilkie Collins Journal, formerly The Wilkie Collins Society Journal, has recently been relaunched as an on-line, open access, peer-reviewed resource. It contains both articles on Collins-related topics and reviews, and can be found here: http://acc.wilkiecollinssociety.org/

I'm going to add the link to the Resources page as well.

A Visit to Lapland, 1868

Today is the international Sami Day. If you don't know the word, the Sami are the indigenous people inhabiting the far northern region of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola peninsular of Russia that is sometimes called "Sàpmi" or "Sami land". The Sami are traditionally hunters, gatherers and reindeer herders and were continually pushed north from part of their traditional lands by settlers, and their way of life, religion and language has been under threat for hundreds of years. The old Swedish word for the Sami is "Lapps", which is now considered derogatory and no longer in use. The word "Lappland" derives from that, and it is still used for parts of northern Sweden and Finland.

I'm part Sami, and in the 19th century, my family all lived in the traditionally way. They were nomads and reindeer herders and they lived in materially very poor conditions, in lands that were covered in snow and ice for 9 months a year and where there was no daylight at all in December.

In the 19th century, anthropological studies were gaining in popularity, and in 1868 Swedish physician and anthropologist Gustaf von Düben organized the first of two expeditions to Swedish Lapland in order to study the Sami people. He brought his wife Lotten, who helped document the Sami way of life using the still relatively new tool of photography. Her photographs are now in the care of Nordiska Museet of Stockholm, Sweden, who has kindly made them available on Flickr Commons.

Portrait of Maria Persdotter Länta, aged 45, from Sirkas Sami village (from Flickr Commons)

Inga Pantsi, a widow from Tuorpon Sami village, and her granddaughter (from Flickr Commons)

A Sami man carrying a spear (from Flickr Commons)

Portrait of Lars Anders Baggi, aged 25, from Jokkmokk (from Flickr Commons)

Portrait of Karin Savalo, a widow from Tuorpon Sami village, and her daughter Inga (from Flickr Commons)

Please feel free to have a look at the entire collection (which is really rather remarkable), and if you are interested in more facts about the Sami, you can of course find an article on Wikipedia.

Added Information and Helpful Links

I have added a page with Victorian-related entertainment. You'll find both period fiction and modern, Victorian-set novels, as well as a tentative list of films set in the period.

I have also updated the page of resources with, among other things, some online research resources. It's obviously embarrassingly incomplete, but please browse and  see if you can find what you are looking for anyway!