I see that the 2006 BBC Radio adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is now free on Archive.org. At the climax of the story Gawain crosses from Cheshire, somewhere around Congleton, rides past Leek and then takes a road up into the Staffordshire Peak District, so in part Gawain is a local tale and the poet was a man of the northern part of the West Midlands. Be warned that the BBC’s reading was from the Simon Armitage ‘modern vernacular’ version, and was radically abridged down to just 42 minutes. Still, it’s probably a good introduction for older children who might not listen to anything longer and who would be confused by thee‘s and thou‘s and other archaic language.

In comparison other free readings run far longer, usually around 2.5 hours. Such as the best Archive.org/Librivox version which is Tony Addison’s steady reading of the early translation by Jessie Laidlay Weston. Hers was a spritely early translation published at the turn of the 20th century, and was only very occasional sprinkled with thou and ye, quoth and bade.

Tolkien’s translation, probably the best available in terms of a listening experience despite also having many thee‘s and thou‘s, is available as a 2006 HarperCollins audiobook. It’s professionally read by Terry Jones in around 2.2 hours, not including Tolkien’s 15 minute scholarly introduction. Jones sounds a little fast and sibilant/breathy. For me his reading works best when played in the free Impulse Media Player, which on a desktop PC allows real-time pitch shifting and other tweaks. Slow him down by -10, and use the following graphic equaliser settings, and see if he improves for you…

It’s surprisingly difficult to find any online map service which accepts Ordnance Survey grid references, even the OS-based footpathmaps.com which one of the quickest-loading map services in the UK. Surely the UK government should require that the OS licence a grid reference option ASAP, to all the major map services? A little drop down box, input your OS GR number… and off you go. How difficult can it be?

Thankfully that’s exactly what the National Grid Reference Redirect has made. It’s blissfully simple and works. Sadly it doesn’t speed up the incredibly slow-loading and generally spam-filled online map services, but it works with Google Maps and Bing Maps and more.

You just have to make sure you use the format SJ882359. That means if you have a more precise four-number grid reference like SJ882?359? then you’ll need to lop off the last ‘?’ number in each block of four.

In future it would be great to see it work with the excellent footpathmaps.com. The other great UK mapping service maps.nls.uk can already handle OS grid reference input, although only for historic maps, and it’s often as slow as all the others (bar footpathmaps.com).

Update: footpathmaps.com no longer offers OS maps.

Why does the Staffordshire County Showground website (just east of Stafford) completely ignore Stoke-on-Trent? The distance in miles on the ‘Location’ page makes no indication of how near it is to the city. And according to a Google site: search the nearest the website as a whole comes to mentioning the city is that it has a tickets agent at John Rice Motors at Blythe Bridge, and that one old event had “guest speakers from the National Farmers Union, Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire LEP and the Country Land and Business Association”. That’s it.

A delightful bit of local science whimsy: “Can moo hear me?”

A book titled “Unknown Immortals in the Northern City of Success” (1917) on the topic of “Eccentrics and Eccentricity”. How could I resist the click? Sadly Archive.org was in its usual unresponsive mood, and on Hathi the book is locked down due to the EU’s excessive ‘copyright’ terms.

But I eventually got through. It turns out that his book is a collection of character studies of unregarded ‘queer people’ in what seems to be the city of Belfast in the earliest part of the 20th century. Most are quite short, and the book only has 96 pages in total…

The Willick woman.
The rent man.
The rag, bone, and balloon man.
The fish man.
The soul of Smithfield.
That which is called Johnston.
Monsieur among the mushrooms.
The boiler of bones.
The madman.
Julius McCullough Leckey Craig.
The little child, the wisest of all.

I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it’s obviously a beautiful-written little set of inspirations for a historical fantasy/steampunk novelist, looking for unusual and inspirational character traits. The Kindle ereader .mobi is here.

The book is by a name new to me, the Ulster novelist and speculative historian Herbert Pim. He became a Catholic convert in 1910, but before his conversion wrote several supernatural novels, such as The Vampire of Souls and The Man with Thirty Lives, and a number of short stories. In the years after conversion it appears that his energies went mostly into giving pro-Catholic speeches, Irish nationalist politics, magazine editorships, and some very conventional poetry. Then at the end of the war he became a proto-fascist, and so abrupt was this conversion it makes one wonders if his stint among the Catholics and nationalists had been as some sort of undercover ‘mole’ and provocateur? He then published an insider expose memoir called Adventures in the Land of Sinn Fein (later the IRA), among other things.

The Spring 2017 issue of the journal Wormwood (#28) has a scholarly article on him. There was also an article “The Man with Thirty Lives: An Indiscreet Portrait of Herbert Moore Pim” in the 1916 special issue of The Green Book (#7, April 2016), a journal on the history of Irish supernatural and gothic writing. He died 1950, so is not set to be out of copyright in the UK until 2020.

The epic 1870s battle to de-poo Burslem…

Search on eBay for “Sudbury Hall” in collectables, as a phrase. It’s the National Trust Museum of Childhood, some 12 miles east of Stoke-on-Trent on the Staffordshire / Derbyshire border.

eBay’s ‘Recommendations’…

What a load of rubbish. So much for the much-hyped advanced in semantic search capabilities and sophisticated tailoring of search to user data.

This is on eBay, but it’s just as bad on Amazon. And Pinterest. Search Pinterest for staffordshire postcard -dog and get…

But I just told Pinterest (-dog mean no posts which mention the word dog) I didn’t want any dogs, so why the hell is Pinterest still recommending dog stuff to me? Grrr.

Search recommendation systems are obviously running on pathetically broad and isolated keywords. It’s even infecting pure search. For instance, Google Images seems to be rapidly becoming so fuzzy in the relevancy ranking of its results as to be unusable. Why can’t huge billion-dollar world-leading tech companies get this right?

A proper system for eBay might be something along the lines of:

  User is logged in – yes.
  Where is the user known to be based? UK, Midlands.
  Is the search phrase a recognised placename – yes.
  Compare current search phrase to user’s search history. For this type of search the user is expecting results from Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Cheshire.
  Does the place name geo-match with the user’s search history and known location – yes.
  Therefore – cluster all sidebar recommendations on the UK Midlands, and exclude listings from all other UK areas.
  Then filter Midlands suggestions so that they only show ‘known place’ items + cluster within a fifteen mile radius of “Sudbury Hall”.

How difficult can it be? And how much would user-goodwill and profits be boosted, when they stop showing totally irrelevant suggestions?

An important new PhD thesis from Matthew Blake, “Stories from the Edge: Creating an Identity in Early Medieval North-West Staffordshire”…

“This thesis takes as its research area the southern half of Pirehill Hundred, Staffordshire. Despite being in the Mercian heartland, it is an area that has remained on the periphery of discussions by scholars of the early medieval period. To bring this area into focus this study has undertaken both a multi-disciplinary and a multi-focused approach. Chapters one and two discuss burial mounds, both in terms of survival and their cultural context and the lives of local saints. Both are viewed in terms of their historical context as well and through the lens of storytelling and the formation of identity as expressed in the landscape. The discussion pulls in wider themes concerning the power of the dead as expressed in the landscape. The chapter on the stone sculpture of Staffordshire brings these monuments back into a Mercian context, seeing them as a continuation of this wider narrative as well as bringing to the fore broader discussions around land ownership. This is later linked through a series of case studies to the propensity for early medieval manors to be found on the edge of watery landscapes. It is through these detailed case studies that evidence is provided for a series of ‘symptoms’ by which early medieval settlements can be discerned. The role of the powerful family Wulf is discussed in the final chapter, placing this family and their landholding firmly in a Staffordshire context. What links this thesis is an understanding of ‘edgy-ness’, either in landscape terms with the desire for early medieval manors to seek out the edge, or how this region has remained on the edge of academic discussions. Above all else this thesis is a study of the landscape of the often overlooked rural landscape of early medieval Staffordshire.”

I’ve finished reading Erasmus Darwin’s fascinating The Botanic Garden: The Economy of Vegetation (1791). One can see why it was a best-seller and went through many editions, including pirated American and Irish editions. It’s a charming snapshot of science coming-into-being and exploring the world through accessible topics such as plants, geology and the weather. Also coming-into-being via a sprightly poetry in the Pope style, though there’s a curious dip in quality in the middle (which I suspect may relate to the insertion of a few lesser verses by his collaborator). The book was made all the more interesting for me because he’s a Staffordshire man and never misses an opportunity to point up some aspect of his own county, or the nearby Peak District to which he often seems to have travelled from Lichfield. And it often seems that scarcely twenty pages can go past for the reader encounters some spot-on suggestion or forecast for the future, which will delight science fiction readers. If H. G. Wells did read him in 1888, as I suspect, then he would surely have found there a template for the tight alliance of the poetic imagination, hard science and speculative futurology.

What of the biographies of the man, which seems the logical next step after a taste of the poetry. Here’s my quick survey in the form of a date-ordered list:

Sketch of the life and writings of Erasmus Darwin, Monthly Visitor, Vol. X, 1800. With a nice portrait.

Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin: chiefly during his residence at Lichfield: with anecdotes of his friends, and criticisms on his writings (1804). Apparently a rather scurrilous anecdotal account written by his one-time friend. Seward knew Darwin but had a fairly stormy on-and-off relationship, and by all accounts she wanted to settle old scores by scribbling at the graveside.

Mary Anne Galton (‘Mrs Schimmelpenninck’), Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck (1858, 2 volumes). Another woman who somewhat knew Darwin and the Lunar Men. Like Seward she picked faults, real or imagined, in his character, and Charles Darwin later referred to her memories as full of “calumnies”. Charles Darwin states that the memories were “dictated in old age”, and were heavily embroidered and coloured by her religious animosity to Darwin’s ideas and science.

John Dowson, Erasmus Darwin: Philosopher, Poet, and Physician (1861). Printed 60-page copy of an “ingenious and informing” (Westminster Review) lecture, with a strong focus on examples of the evolutionary theories and speculations. Public domain and freely available online.

Ernest Krause, Erasmus Darwin by Ernest Krause, with a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin (trans. 1879). Charles Darwin… “added a sketch of his character and habits from materials in my possession”, and apparently this was rather substantial. A silly mistake by Darwin meant that the book had a virulently bad review shortly after publication by the quasi-religious satirist Samuel Butler, which in turn meant that the book sold poorly. Public domain and freely available online in the 1880 New York edition, with a Kindle ebook version. Though this is made difficult to read due to infestation by multiple ” marks, arising from the unconventional layout of quotations on the printed page.

Charles Darwin, The Life of Erasmus Darwin (1887). I haven’t yet had time to compare closely, but this appears to be a second edition of Ernest Krause’s book (above), issued under a new title. Curiously there appears to be no free edition on Hathi, Archive.org or Gutenberg, at least not under that title on via a search for “Erasmus Darwin”. It’s available today as an “unabridged” version produced in 2003 by Cambridge University Press. King-Hele states that 16% of both the 1879 and 1887 editions was censored and cut by one Henrietta Litchfield before publication, apparently because the material offended her prim Victorian sensibilities. Possibly the involvement of Henrietta Litchfield has somehow kept it in copyright? Anyway, the 2003 Cambridge edition saw these “cuts being restored and printed in italics”, and a double-set of footnotes. There appears to be no ebook of the 2003 Cambridge edition, though a PDF can be had if you peer hard enough through the tangle of fake malware-laden ebook vendors which infest the search-engine results.

On the Amazon store there seems, at first glance, to be a cheap £2.50 Kindle edition of the New York University Press Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 29: Erasmus Darwin (2010). Though note that the ebook publisher there is Golgotha not the University, and as such this appears likely to be a result of Amazon’s foul and misleading practice of failing to discriminate between public domain ‘shovelware’ ebook reprints and scholarly editions. It thus seems likely this will have the same infestation by multiple ” marks as the 1879 Krause edition.

Hesketh Pearson, Doctor Darwin. With portraits (1930). Republished as a Penguin Books paperback in 1943. Apparently a lively and readable yet fastidious survey of the life, intended for the learned public outside academia. Freely available online in the abandonware 1940s American edition, with a Kindle ebook version which has OCR errors in places but is readable. Possibly the best free introduction to the man, for the general reader and the 1930 date suggests it’s likely to be free of modern leftist spin.

Update: yes, it’s an excellent read, though marred by some OCR errors.

Donald M. Hassler, Erasmus Darwin (Twayne’s English authors series, No. 160), 1973. A short 140-page reader guide by an American science-fiction scholar, later President of the Science Fiction Research Association. Apparently focuses on Darwin’s humour while lamenting his need for all the scientific and explanatory footnotes (personally I found it a delightful and easy format, at least in The Economy of Vegetation), but also explores his influences and the ways he influenced later generations. Sounds interesting, although the Isis review of 1975 laments “it is a pity it is not written in an easy style”. In paper only, as a used book, but is appears that £10 copies can be had. But as a general short primer on the poetics I suspect one might perhaps be better off with James V. Logan’s The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin (1936) from Princeton University Press.

Desmond King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution: Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin (1977). Can currently be had for pennies on Amazon, in paper. I’m guessing that’s because it’s probably been superseded by King-Hele’s expanded 1999 biography? The title suggests that the publisher envisaged a market among late-1970s leftist academics, so there may be some political skew?

Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (1986). Ridiculously high prices, so presumably aimed at elite academic libraries and lit-crit thesis writers.

Maureen McNeill, Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age (1987). The first book to place the topic in a robust and wider set of historical contexts. By all accounts it sounds like a fine book, although sadly it’s another one of those £100+ academic slabs which are effectively inaccessible to anyone of modest means living outside of the university system. A prime candidate for open access via the Knowledge Unlatched programme, I’d suggest, though these days they seem to strongly favour leftist books.

Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (1999). A chunky 448 pages, with a Kindle ebook edition. Probably the best option if you can afford £10 and have a Kindle ereader. I’m guessing it must take into account the historical contexts explored a decade earlier in Under the Banner of Science (1987).

Desmond King-Hele and Stuart Harris, Erasmus Darwin and Evolution (2014). Hardcover only, but fairly affordable at around £10. Presumably a summation of all the research done on the title topic over the decades, and a shelf companion to King-Hele’s 1999 biography.

Now online, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 1879-2012. Many of the articles examine the archaeology of parts of the Peak District nearest to North Staffordshire. The PDFs are free and public.

Clemening at Enville, in South Staffordshire, between Stourbridge and Bridgnorth. Illustrated London News, December 1857.

A new local photoblog, Postcards from Stoke with vintage postcard pictures from Stoke and across north and mid Staffordshire, and the nearby Peak and the bits of Cheshire bordering Staffordshire.