Batgrl: Bookish Hooha

I was forced (forced I tell you) to buy the hardcover version of this (used books, I can not resist your prices), as there's no ebook version out there. (That's actually the truth for once and not some excuse I've pulled out of a hat to explain why I'm adding yet another book to my already-filled shelves.)

For those wanting immediate gratification, here's the Wikipedia link: Grace Elliott

Whether you like this author's telling of the saga of Grace Dalrymple Elliot or not depends on:
1) how much you prefer your history strictly linear
2) whether you can tolerate the author's frequent asides in parentheses, which at times are silly and/or snarky
3) whether you mind going off topic and into somewhat-related topics, and whether those topics interest you
4) whether you mind short "articles" focused on a specific, somewhat related topic mixed in with the text (like a sidebar in a magazine article)
4) whether you were expecting something more strictly academic in tone.

The tone here is chatty and gossipy - and I kind of see what the author's trying to do here - the book is a version of gossip shared over a cup of tea, discussing who's sleeping with who and getting away with what, and delving into all the salacious details. Also this is history with a huge focus on pop culture - both then and now. Be prepared to have examples from more current history (Princess Di, "Bennifer") pop up.

How much some of these things were enjoyable vs annoying - well, scroll down and read my various notes and quotes under Reading Progress. Because there is a level of annoying the book does hit for me in some places. Parts (like the "Walpole as the villain" bit, especially annoying in that it nears the "homosexual as villain" trope) reminded me of the "ew" feeling I'd get when reading a Hollywood-tawdry-gossip biography - but would I stop reading if I started one of those books? Noooo.... (I can't help it, I do like a certain amount of gossip.) And nothing in this book is on that low level - most just provokes eye rolling. And again, this isn't the kind of thing you deal with in most history books.

Despite not being at all academic in tone there are definitely a lot of great citations of source material (primary and secondary), and the book gives you the information to seek that out next. There are a geat deal of quotes, and the author makes it clear that she is quoting a source, the words aren't hers. Sources cited are given author name, title and often the date, and similar information is found in the end notes, which are chatty in themselves. (Every now and then there will be a quote without quite as much info as you'd like to track down the original. Just noting that. Doesn't happen often.)

One reason I'll be giving this more stars than I'd expected (from 3 to 4) - the author gives you important facts about Grace's published journal. You find out the correct spellings of historical figures and places, which dates are inaccurate, what the publisher was incorrect about in the parts of the book he authored, etc. In other words, the rest of the story. I plan to read that journal - but I'll keep this book handy as a reference.

Another reason for higher rating - due to the topics, the amusing sidebar articles, and random facts, I ended up discovering and downloading more free (public domain) books via this one read than many other history books I've read. Not necessarily the ones mentioned in the book, but sources I might not have found had I not gone looking for more information on the specific people mentioned.

Yet a final reason - Grace Elliott doesn't have a currently published book solely about her, besides her own Journal. Or not that I was able to find at this date. And this is a woman whose history is fascinating.

Examples of the titles of the sidebar articles:
A Glossary of Terms for Courtesans and Prostitutes, and Related Jargon
Those Coveted White Complexions...
"Criminal Conversation," the So-Very-English Civil Tort Familiarly Referred to as "Crim. Con."
Scandal: The Newspapers' and Print Shops' Stock-in-Trade
The Men's Clubs of London


Quotes:

Am liking the "author's voice" here, not something you see in this manner in history books. Could be problematic, but hey, at least Manning is up front about it. (p. 9):

"...Courtesans are fashioned by circumstance, not born, despite the charges of Grace Elliott's most serious detractor, the biographer Horace Bleackley, who included Grace in his 1909 compendium of courtesans (a work several times reprinted) entitledLadies Fair and Frail: Sketches of the Demi-Monde During the Eighteenth Century. Bleackley asserts with great confidence:

Nature intended her to be a courtesan, and she reveled in the power and the risk and the freedom of her adventurous life.

How absurd! Bleackley is judgmental to an amazing degree. He's a typical late Victorian male, and his biased comments are outrageous to contemporary readers. He categorizes females as either good (wives, mothers) or bad (courtesans, prostitutes). What he had to say about Grace Elliott has, unfortunately, obscured the truth and has been repeated as fact for almost a hundred years."

Really enjoying this next aside about Bleackley, p. 20:

"...Lady Craven - showing not a little jealousy, perhaps, to a possible rival - upon seeing Grace at the Ranelagh pleasure gardens, described her in a catty manner as a "Glumdalclitch," the young giantess in Jonathan Swift's fantasy tale Gulliver's Travels. (Bleackley, who rarely has anything good to say about any woman he writes about, gets his digs in about Lady Craven too, calling her "clever and winsome...[but the] most wanton of wives.")

Am wondering if this is the Lady Craven referred to...

I've liked the choices of direct quotes from sources, even non period (p. 56):

"The feminist scholar Lillian S. Robinson in 1978 wrote a provocative essay, "Why Marry Mr. Collins?" that's crucial to a modern reader's understanding of the reality of marriage..."

I've seen that essay cited so many places - and happily it's available online (here) if you have an account on Open Library (it's free). It's in Robinson's book Sex, Class, and Culture .

...In other reviews it was mentioned that the book hops around a bit in its narrative. I've seen that a bit already (noting something that's ahead in the timeline), but it doesn't bother me because the author's voice in the story seems pretty well established. It's conversational, gossipy, and there are asides in parentheses. Such as (p. 59):

"...Granted Dr. Eliot was more controlling than most husbands, but a smart, discreet, manipulative wife could have worked around that and had him in her pocket. (Pockets, by the way, were worn under dresses and attached to a petticoat, accessible by a slit in the dress. As dresses narrowed, these pockets became too bulky, so purses, or reticules, came to serve the same purpose.) At any rate, Grace was reckless, or in love, which in effect amounted to much the same thing."

Many of these asides, rather than be tucked into the text like this, are actually set into a sidebar type column. At first I thought this was odd, but then I found the facts interesting and skipped forward to read more of them at one sitting. (Here's my own aside - Eliot is apparently spelled with one or two l's. Ah for the 1700s' more mellow concept of spelling.)

I don't know that we've been set up to see that Eliot was morecontrolling than the average husband - but again, it's very clear that the author is going to champion the cause of Grace, and frankly that's why I'm reading this. Also Grace is noted to be "pigheaded" as well, so it's not like it's all compliments.

...Manning goes on some interesting tangents - because I can not fault her for taking several pages (start, p. 67) to share the story of James Annesley, whose uncle has him kidnapped and sold into slavery. p. 69:

"...James' curious life story inspired fiction. Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering, Tobias Smollett'sPeregrine Pickle, and Charles Reade's The Wandering Heir were all based on poor James Annesley's dramatic experiences.

And, according to wikipedia, also Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped.

...Thanks to Manning's quotes, I now want to read the Tete-a-Tete gossip column from Town and Country Magazine. Or at least the essay "Keeping Up with the Bon Ton: The Tete a Tete series in The Town and Country Magazine" by Cindy McCreery. (Finding a copy looks to be the hard part - the books the essay is printed in are a tad expensive, so perhaps I can find it in a future library visit.) The magazine itself - or at least a volume of it - can be found here on Google Books. Which looks a bit difficult to read in that format.

...Random texts mentioned in Ch. 6: Bed-Hopping and Social Status (because it's the kind of thing some of us are curious about, and I may have bumped into some of these before):
"Signior Dildo" by John Wilmot (I've bumped into a LOT of citations of this one)
Fanny Hill by John Cleland
Aristotle's Masterpiece by unknown (but definitely not Aristotle, that wikipedia link has a link to entire text)
Thomas Rowlandson - there are about seven of his works (etchings) cited, all online. (Book only has one illustration.)
And a ton of period porn/medical/how to books that I'm not adding only due to being tired of stopping to type - google Nicholas Venette. Pietro Aretino, and Tommaso Piroli (illustrator).

...p. 120-121

"Snuffboxes and waistcoat buttons of the most dissolute men sported lewd drawings along the lines of Rowlandson's pornographic prints. ...Painted sporting scenes on waistcoat buttons were popular with fashionable men, but these sporting scenes went beyond what was considered polite, especially in company that included women."

I am now fascinated that there was such a thing as a lewd waistcoat button.

...Page 147 - Here begins the part about the anonymously authored poem The Torpedo, A Poem to the Electric Eel. The title page has it "Addressed to Mr. John Hunter, Surgeon: and Dedicated to The Right Honorable Lord Cholmondeley." You can find a copy of it here - Google free ebook - I haven't gotten around to even looking at it because it's 21 pages, with 17 of that being the poem. I'll have to be in the right mood for that. At first I wasn't sure that Manning was right that parts were directed at Cholmondeley and not Hunter (who I've read about before) - but keeping in mind that Cholmondeley was notorious for gossip about how large his penis was - yeah, this is all about size jokes and randiness. In poetry. The bits Manning cites are enough for me at the moment.

...Here's something that has been noted in other history books that I always feel is worth reflecting on, p. 248:

"Charles Dickens, in his novel of the Reign of Terror, A Tale of Two Cities, published in serial form in 1859, got it exactly right: more commoners than nobles were killed at the guillotine, perhaps as many as two-thirds to one-half more. Remember Dickens's Sydney Carton and the little seamstress? Neither of them was an aristocrat. Grace Elliot narrowly missed becoming one of these commoner victims in 1794.

I remember when I first read Dickens thinking it was weird that they would bother to kill someone that wasn't French. That was before I understood that it was actually easier to be suspect because you weren't French, and thus all the more reason to get rid of you. Also you were an outsider/foreigner anyway and who was going to come to your defense? It'd have to be someone that either really cared about you personally or just had a lot of courage.

...No matter where I read about it The September Massacres are always heartbreaking. I have nothing to quibble about over the way Manning describes them, because they were horrific. There were several quotes I couldn't bring myself to type - any book on the French Revolution will suffice for this. Incredibly bloody stuff. Read about the death of Princess Marie Louise to get the general idea of the bloodthirsty nature of the events. 1792 was a bad year.

...Lists of prisons that people were incarcerated in while waiting for trial/execution in the French Revolution, page 277:

The Carmes: This former Carmelite convent on the rue Vaugirard, near the Luxembourg Gardens - now the church of Saint Joseph des Carmes - holds an ossuary of the skulls and bones of more than one hundred members of the clergy who were massacred in the gardens on September 2, 1792. ...[Even in 1794:] It was a noxious place and there were vermin everywhere. The walls, cobblestones, ceilings and stairs were still stained with the blood of the martyred clergymen, even after two years and some attempts at cleaning."

...p. 284:

"The horror of being at the mercy of these radical revolutionaries and their robotic minions, the prison jailers, is reminiscent of the Nazi concentration camps."

This is actually a great comparison - but not just for the prisons and the treatment within them. I'd say it holds true for the entire system of the Terror, especially the bloody violence and lack of human empathy that seemed to run rampant.

....Mention of the executioners, the family Sanson on p. 286 - it's not cited here, but I found (thank you Wikipedia) that you can get the book of memoirs (Memoirs of the Sansons, from private notes and documents, 1688-1847) online (free) here. From the wikipedia page: "Charles-Henri's life is heavily and rather inaccurately fictionalized in German author H.M. Mons's novel The Sword of Satan (1954)." - and I am so tempted to hunt down a copy of that (no free online copy, sadly) since it sounds like good cheesiness.

...The last few chapters about Grace's final years and what happened to her grand-daughter Georgina Cavendish-Bentinck are full of "probably's" and supposition - but then given the lack of documentation that's not much of a surprise, particularly in women's history. (Men and their heirs are usually easier for historians to track.) The publisher of Grace's journal wasn't completely helpful in documenting the facts, p. 364:

"...There's a lot of confusion in what he [Richard Bentley] writes about Grace's personal life and how he came by the manuscript. His editorial comments in the prologue and epilogue to her book have misled readers and perpetuated gross inaccuracies, causing many to doubt the veracity of her narrative."

...Example of amusing endnotes, p. 402:

"...The National Archives were undergoing renovation at the time I went to Paris...
...the personnel were so unhelpful - in fact, downright snippy - that the trip was an exercise in aggravation.
...[A writer for a US news magazine said] the only conclusion he could draw, after years of encountering bad attitude, was that the government policy had to be to hire aliens only, aliens "who despised all carbon-based life forms.""

And now the tremendously long Reading in Progress section. Because I did want to save it from Goodreads.