Web links on this blog are now a brighter red, and should thus be more visible to the reader. The links used to be a dull brown-red, and some people had difficulty seeing that they were links.

Tolkien’s old stamping ground the University of Leeds has made public a large collection of English dialects. They are now calling for more to be added to their Survey of English Dialects, following fresh funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

There’s now a website for this with a survey form, The Great Big Dialect Hunt. They’re specifically looking for local dialect words and phrases used in… “your everyday speech with family and friends”.

The survey has a set of structured questions about everyday situations, easy to answer. There’s no “form sent” confirmation sent at the end of survey, but the form then gets blanked and I assume it’s sent.

At The Potteries Post, Good news: Ten rare paintings of Stoke discovered, to go on show soon in Tunstall in Stoke-on-Trent.

My labour-of-love “With the Night Mail”, annotated edition is available now as a .PDF file on the Gumroad service.

This is the best version of the famous “With The Night Mail” (1905), the first ‘hard’ science-fiction story. Still an absorbing and lively steampunk read, today.

Here newly and fully annotated with 4,600 words of precise scholarly annotations. Several important new discoveries are made, including the identity of “little Ada” — she was a real pilot! All four earliest versions have been checked and cross-referenced, and the modern corrupted text has been carefully cleaned. Differences between editions are noted in the footnotes.

There are 145 footnotes in total, explaining the technology, lingo, and places. One footnote even discovers a long ‘new’ section of dialogue about the risk of plague, unseen since the first publication — and never reprinted until now!

This .PDF is thus as close as we will get to a definitive version of the seminal story that launched the entire genre of hard science-fiction, and which had the honour of opening the highly influential Gollancz survey anthology One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1969).

As a bonus, there are four new full-page colour illustrations including one of “George”. This labour-of-love e-book is 28 pages in total, delivered to you as a .PDF file. It may interest RPG gamers, as well as scholars and readers.

Many have agreed on Kipling as the first true SF writer in the modern sense:

Kipling was… “the first modern science fiction writer” — John W. Campbell, editor of the seminal Astounding magazine and pioneer of hard science-fiction.

What Kipling was doing in “With the Night Mail”… “had never been done before. There is no such subtlety in the contemporary proto-SF of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. I think we may safely credit him with inventing the style of exposition that was to become modern SF’s most important device for managing and conveying information about imaginary futures”. — “Rudyard Kipling Invented SF!”, by Eric S. Raymond.

“With The Night Mail”… “anticipated the style and expository mechanics of Campbellian hard science fiction fourteen years before Hugo Gernsback’s invention of the ‘scientifiction’ genre and twenty-seven years before Heinlein’s first publication.” Eric S. Raymond, A Political History of SF (2000).

“With The Night Mail” is… “an amazing tour-de-force of inspired genius […] the sort of thing that Verne or Wells would never have dreamed of doing […] Kipling, in 1905, is doing things that science fiction as a genre wouldn’t achieve until Robert Heinlein arrived in the late 1940s.” — Bruce Sterling.

Kipling… “is for everyone who responds to vividness, word magic, sheer storytelling.” — Poul Anderson.

Kipling was… “a master of our art.” — Gordon R. Dickson.

“He was a superb and painstaking craftsman, the most completely well-equipped writer of short stories ever to tackle that form in the richest of languages.” … “”With the Night Mail” is an astounding vision … his influence on 20th century SF writers was probably greater than anyone else’s, except Wells … he was a master at making the fantastic seem credible”. — John Brunner.”

“When you read Kipling, you’re there, [he] builds a total sensory impression that surpasses the language” [which is partly why he will never be taught in schools] — C.J. Cherryh.

“what a good writer he was … the work is superb and he could make words sing. [On looking into the political claims that had dissuaded me from reading him,] I found that most of his supposed sins had been vastly overstated.” — George R.R. Martin.

At SF conventions… “I found that so many SF writers could see his sterling merit that I felt vindicated” [in my early love of Kipling, despite my mundane Eng. Lit. teachers who ignored him] — Anne McCaffrey.

There are two anthologies from science-fiction writers influenced by Kipling. Heads to the Storm: A Tribute to Rudyard Kipling, and A Separate Star: A Science Fiction Tribute to Rudyard Kipling. “Accompanied by introductions [to stories] in which the likes of Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Joe Haldeman, and Gene Wolfe describe the impact that reading Kipling has had on their own writing.”

Also, in my new 2022 annotated text I could have mentioned some of the loose predecessors to “Night Mail”, but I didn’t want to speculate too much. I note these here…

1) Possibly Kipling had persevered with trying to fathom Edgar Allan Poe’s rambling “Mellonta Tauta”. A late political satire by Poe, now only comprehensible to those who know the tedious American politics of the period. Told as if letters from a slow balloon voyage around the earth, though there are encounters with faster luxury ‘liner’-like balloons…

“How very safe, commodious, manageable, and in every respect convenient are our modern balloons! Here is an immense one approaching us at the rate of at least a hundred and fifty miles an hour. It seems to be crowded with people – perhaps there are three or four hundred passengers — and yet it soars to an elevation of nearly a mile, looking down upon poor us with sovereign contempt.”

The tedious voyage leads to men struggling to amuse themselves by recalling “the old days” and how things were done then, and hence we get the tortured satire on Poe’s day. Possibly this was uproariously funny to Poe’s magazine readers, but it is almost un-readable now and certainly not the influential precursor to a whole field of later science-fiction.

2) I might also have mentioned H.G. Wells “The Land Ironclads” (1903) as having a slim claim to being the first ‘hard’ SF. But I think Arthur C. Clarke was right when he called it “an engineer’s story”, rather than imaginative futuristic SF. The new invention is deployed in the present-day (Wells’s setting is 1903’s cavalry, bicycle, trench and “Howitzer” artillery warfare of the Boer War) to make various political points. His armoured war-vehicles are 80-foot steam-powered metal tanks — and rather akin in shape to the various armoured land-craft that had, for a decade or more by then, been the staple of the American ‘boy inventor’ weekly story-magazines…

Example from 1898. This ‘land ironclad’ is similar in size and design to those of Wells.

Kipling instead imagines a complete distant-future world with multiple interlocking advanced technologies, attitudes, world-system and economies. And he makes it believable and human. He invents or anticipates numerous things that have since come to pass, and does so in a single tale.

3) There’s also a journalistic account that could have influenced Kipling’s “With the Night Mail” prior to 1905. This point has been suggested as such by the author of the free “Night Mail”-based RPG game Forgotten Futures. This short true-life article was Edward John Hart’s “With Her Majesty’s Mails to Ireland”, in The Strand Magazine in April 1895, being a brisk journalistic account of a mail packet journey across the Irish Sea from Holyhead in Wales to Kingstown. This article is now freely online at Archive.org. There is a similar encounter with a dingy tramp steamer, but Hart has him being avoided and gone in a few seconds. There is a similar recounting of shipping lights seen and passed, but such things are to be expected. The mail-ship ‘meets the dawn’ before her arrival. Those are the only similarities I can see. Possibly the general idea of such an account was all that taken by Kipling, if he had even noticed it.

I’ve now seen the new Boggart Sourcebook. The unglue.it aggregator has it and usefully offers a “Save to Dropbox” feature that works in getting the PDF file. The normal PDF download is still not working.

The new book has the usual Kidsgrove boggart article and gives it as a good fully transcribed text…

* ‘Up and Down the Country: Ranscliff’, Staffordshire Sentinel and Commercial and General Advertiser, 6th December 1879.

It also brings to light…

* A newspaper article on a Harecastle tunnel rape trial (Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser, 16th August 1843, page 4), which shows the lore was well-know to boatmen in 1843.

* Leese, Philip R. The Kidsgrove Boggart and the Black Dog, Stafford: Staffordshire Libraries, 1989.

Full title of the latter is found to be: Philip R. Leese, The Kidsgrove Boggart and the Black Dog: A Version of the Story and an Examination of the Written Source. A 32 page booklet. This is new to my North Staffordshire Folk-lore bibliography, and will be in the next edition.

Not published as full-text or identified as North Staffordshire in the Boggart Sourcebook is the reference…

* Wigfull, Chas. S. ‘Alton Addenda’, Derbyshire Advertiser, 6th May 1927, page 31.

I suspected this was Alton in the Moorlands. Cross-referencing this with the list of ‘Boggart Names’ in the book shows that this newspaper article had noted a named “Barberry Gutter Boggart”. This gave me a lead to follow. Folk-lore journal (1941) usefully stated that the Gutter was located “on the road from Alton to Farley”. In Folk-lore, the places referenced either side show that the Manifold Valley area is under discussion. Hence, this is Staffordshire’s Alton and not some other Alton.

The new book offers a useful ‘Boggart Census’ for Derbyshire, none of which are items shading over toward Staffordshire. The same is true of Cheshire. It then appears our Kidsgrove Boggart is very much an outlier.

But my above winkling out of the “Barberry Gutter Boggart” at Alton now gives North Staffordshire one more boggart.

Where, then, is or was the Barberry Gutter? Folk-lore tells us this was “on the road from Alton to Farley”, and interestingly one also finds there a headless horseman riding a white horse and clad in armour (again, according to Folk-lore). Such rural tales are admittedly common and often late confabulations, but it might be interesting to know if it can be found before the re-discovery of the very nearby head-chopping tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

A study of local molluscs for the journal of the North Staffordshire Field Club (1921) adds a little more data to the location of this Gutter. The diligent mollusc-hunter Mr Atkins noted a colony thriving under damp fir-bark at Alton on or near the…

Earl’s Drive, Barberry Gutter

The boggart could then be somewhere along the well-known “Earl’s Drive”. The drive having been built in the 1800s by the Earls of Shrewsbury, a lovely ride going over damp ground by a series of bridges. So far as I know this could also be used by the public.

An old map then reveals the correct location of the Gutter, seen here spelled as “Barbary” and in relation to the Towers and the Castle…

It is thus also the location of the “Chained Oak”.

(This modern Earl’s Drive is not to be confused with the medieval Earlsway).

New in open access from the University of Exeter, The Boggart Sourcebook (2022)…

‘Boggart Ephemera’, is a selection of about 40,000 words of nineteenth-century boggart writing (particularly material that is difficult to find in libraries). Part two presents a catalogue of ‘Boggart Names’ (place-names and personal names, totalling over 10,000 words). Finally, part three contains the entire ‘Boggart Census’ – a compendium of ground-breaking grassroots research. This census includes more than a thousand responses, totalling some 80,000 words, from older respondents in the north-west of England, to the question: ‘What is a boggart?’

Not currently downloading, for me, on either my regular or my ‘clean of add-ons’ Web browser. But hopefully it will soon, and then I’ll know how much Staffordshire is in it.

Update: There is a way to get the PDF. unglue.it have it and they usefully offer a “Save to Dropbox” feature that works. The normal PDF download is still not working.

Another previously unknown local magazine discovered. As with others, this looks like it’s in need of digitization and being made public and searchable.

But I guess we really need a big well-funded digitization project for North Staffordshire, for many such publication runs. Because there’s so much that is languishing in the dusty archives and private collections.

Possibly of interest to scholars of the young Tolkien’s formative experiences. Due from sumptuous coffee-table publisher Taschen in September 2022, the oversized book THE ALPS 1900: A Portrait in Color. In their growing “1900” series, though seemingly not limited to that year. Note the alpine-high price of $200.

“The gigantic Alpine mountain range includes some of the most grandiose natural sites in the world, such as Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Matterhorn, and their glaciers. Tourism began in the late 1800s and grew tremendously over the next centuries, especially with the rise of winter sports. This book offers a charming tour of a bygone era, when the first mountain trains and cog railways were carrying men in lederhosen and women in long dresses to the foot of the glacier, when local guides accompanied tourists riding on mules; a time when the first alpinists were considered mad, and skiers were a curiosity.

Through photochromes, photographs, and color postcards of the 19th and 20th centuries, through travel posters and tourist brochures, we cross passes such as the Mont-Cenis, Simplon, Brenner, and St. Gotthard; climb Mont Blanc, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, and the Dolomites; marvel at crystal-clear lakes in Switzerland, Italy, Bavaria, and Slovenia; explore Tyrol, the Via Mala, and the Engadin; and spend the winter season at grand hotels in Gstaad, Grindelwald, Davos, St. Moritz, and Cortina. This is a journey dotted with literary quotes by travel writers that evokes these happy days of pristine snow and untouched slopes.”

Sad to hear that King Doug, ‘The Lord of The Roaches’ has passed away. The Leek Post and Times has a tribute article with some biographical details. The Ludchurch blog also has a fine long article from 2012, which has attracted comments from those who knew him.

There’s also a 2015 book on his battles, and another from 1991 titled The Wars of The Roaches. I’m uncertain of the 2015 is a Lulu re-issue and update of the 1991 title, or a new book.

Chester Walls Complete Walking Tour. A complete two-mile circuit of the ancient walls, with a reasonably-balanced steadycam and a steady pace and hand. I didn’t get motion-sickness from it. The walk probably gets a lot more hectic where rammed with tourists, backpacks, dogs and the like. But here it’s people-free.

There’s no narration. It helps to know that the wide section by Chester Racecourse was once a key English port and the medieval civilian embarkation point for Ireland. But over time the river silted up and navigation became ever more difficult. Liverpool served larger ships and began to take over the trade. Later the railways took passengers to Holyhead for the crossing to Ireland. There is however still a river there (it now slides round the back of the Racecourse) and short boat-trips can be taken on it in the summer.

Recreation in 3D and more.