I, Dynamo

George W.M. Reynolds, James Malcolm Rymer And Some Etceteras

17. Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle

by

R.E. Prindle

Reynolds: Corpus

Rymer, James Malcom: Varney the Vampire, Valancourt Pubs, Dick Collins Introduction.  Originally 1847

Rymer, James Malcolm:  A String Of Pearls or Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street  Originally 1847

Smollett, Tobias: Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand, Count Fathom, Humphrey Clinker. 1740-1760

There seems to be a continuum in English literature.  A mentality that descends from generation to generation.  The same fictional character types appear and reappear.  This situation can only exist in a relatively small homogeneous population dealing with the same societal situations.

In many ways the Romantic era can be seen as the last of this concentrated mentality before the Industrial Revolution transformed English society; the population began to grow almost exponentially to the present day and the experience of the confusion of different cultures were introduced into the country.  Today there is no cultural uniformity in England, only a mélange of competing cultures.

George William McArthur Reynolds then can only be understood in reference to this cultural continuum and his place in the authors of his time.  The society in which he labored perhaps began to be shaped by the restoration of the monarchy as Charles II Stuart returned from France.  They came from the era of absolute monarchy.  Absolutism had been destroyed by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution and could not be restored.

Charles II nominally accepted the Protestant religion but his successor James II insisted on Catholicism which could not be tolerated so absolutism was then completely replaced.  William and Mary succeeded, followed by the last of the Stuarts, Queen Anne.  Modern England began to form with the ascension of the German Georgian dynasty.

This period from 1714 to 1837 formed the mind of late Romantic authors that included George Reynolds.  A whole body of writers would rework the period with shared, if differing, perspectives.  They would be succeeded by mid-century writers such as Anthony Trollope, George Elliot and others for whom the results of the Industrial Revolution would displace the mind set of the late Romantics.  Perhaps the Great Exhibition of 1851 could be set as the end date of the Romantic period.

George Reynolds, for instance, who lived through the railroad boom seldom even mentions the railroads, even though his contemporaries were affected by them, preferring  to live in the days of the stage coach.

He does acknowledge steam but the telegraph and photography never enter his stories.  His is a storied career, a career that was very short.  If one begins his successful career in 1844, he was only thirty years old.  When his career effectively ended sixteen years later in 1860 he was only forty-six, but he was done.  His wild ride was over.  He wrote nothing after that point at which he had nineteen years left to live perhaps dreaming of earlier glories.  One might ask, what happened?  Why did he stop cold?  Why did his magazine, the Reynolds Miscellany, disappear, folded into his publisher and printer John Dicks magazine Bow Bells.  Why did he sell his copyrights to John Dicks losing control of his incredible sixteen year effort?  Shuffling off his life so to speak?

I think the answer is politics and the key to the politics is John Dicks, Reynolds’ printer, friend and partner.  While there is no biography of Reynolds extant there is a fair amount of information about Reynolds contained in a volume by Guy Dicks (don’t ever look that name up on the internet) entitled The John Dicks Press self published by Guy.  While its primary subject is John Dicks, he and Reynolds are inseparable.

Their association seems to have been an unlikely one.  The two minds were far apart.  Dicks was a conventional middle class mind while Reynolds was a Bohemian questioning all authority.  Dicks born in 1818 was four years younger than Reynolds.  Our biographer here, Guy Dicks, was an amateur writer so he doesn’t always provide sufficient information.  It appears that John Dicks had a minimal formal education.  He may possibly have attended Sunday School for a couple years.  If so he must then have been self-educated, perhaps only been taught a minimal amount of reading and writing.  Nevertheless he became a printer beginning his career sometime at the Queen’s Printers a large organization employing hundreds.  Guy then skips to 1841 which finds him working for Peter Perring Thoms…

Quote:

…the Sinologist (China expert), publisher, printer, and stereotyper to the trade at Warwick Square…

Unquote.

Dicks would become his chief assistant.  It would appear that he knew how to apply himself.  So John proved himself to be a master printer somewhen at twenty-three or shortly after.  In 1844 Dicks married so he had a wife and family by 1847 when he took a flyer leaving Thoms to join Reynolds as his printer.  A seemingly chancy move as Reynolds was coming off the success of his Mysteries of London but no proven record as a businessman.  This might have proven perilous to Dicks as Reynolds was in bankruptcy court in 1848.  However Reynolds pulled through and thus began a lucrative successful partnership.

If Reynolds was a successful writer Dicks was a great printer who fully complemented Reynolds.  Guy Dicks quotes Victor E. Neuburg’s  Popular Literature: A History and Guide, concerning Dicks:  The scope of the vast publishing empire over which Dicks presided in the second half of the nineteenth century awaits investigation. 

And one might say, still awaits.  Dicks was a real innovator.  His relationship with Reynolds was two sided:  a great writer on one hand and a great printer on the other.  However there was a problem.  Reynolds was an advocate of violent revolution in the same manner as France in 1793.  He advocated that and that would cause problems with the authorities, especially after the failed revolution of 1848 in which Reynolds played a prominent part in England.  One wonders if John Dicks wasn’t a government spy used to monitor Reynolds.  Apart from slighting references to Reynolds association with the Chartist Movement his political activities have not been investigated.  There can be no doubt that Reynolds favored violent revolution as in the French Revolutions of 1789, 1793, 1830 and 1848 all of which were bloody and in sequence disinherited thrones and aristocracies.  The British Government could not have looked on Reynolds complacently.

It would have been essential to place an informer inside the organization.  The Sinologist Thoms who spent years in the East, primarily in Macao, where he was instrumental in publishing a Chinese-English dictionary, thus the government must have referred to him on Chinese matters.  Who better to have insinuated Dicks into Reynolds’ organization?  As we will see, Dicks disinherited Reynolds from his company while at the same time destroying his very successful magazine, Reynolds Miscellany, acquiring his copyrights, and his newspaper essentially pushing Reynolds out the door into the street at the very young age of forty-five.

All that was left of his copyrights was Pickwick Abroad that he republished in 1864 by another publisher.  Was that his last effort?

By the time of his exit his reputation as a revolutionist was fully established.  There was a loyal body of followers who revered him.

Dicks himself who had established his empire, as Neuburg puts it and was publishing series such as Dicks’ English Novels and others, as well as six a shilling, later three shilling, complete Shakspere, as he spelled it, that sold a million copies.  In his ad at the back of Reynolds’ Mary, Queen Of The Scots, Dicks notes six Dickens, all early, at the top of the list; five Ainsworth titles, he even published first editions of three of the titles that the author couldn’t place elsewhere at that time in his career d of which was Ainsworth’s excellent novel The South Sea Bubble.  It is noteworthy that Dicks demeans Reynold titles in his English novels.  It would seem that the severance of the partnership was one sided and complete.

So what was Dicks thinking when he left Thoms for Reynolds.  One should not put Dicks in the background in the combination.  Dicks was obviously an ambitious guy and perhaps he saw Reynolds as a stepping stone to found an empire he had already projected in his mind.  Of course, originally Reynolds’ work was his function as a printer.  Still he started out as Reynolds’ employee and yet many of the titles state:  Printed for the author by John Dicks.  So Dicks must always have considered the printing division his and compelled Reynolds to accept him a full partner later, probably to gain title to the printing plant.

All of this is going to transpire quickly, thirteen years is a blink of an eye, yet in those years Reynolds and Dicks made two fortunes, one for each.  At their deaths they left a combined 50-60 thousand pounds to their inheritors.  The Dicks empire was the printing and publishing plant,  probably equaled that.

It appears that the firm prospered from the beginning.  Guy Dicks says that each received one hundred pounds a week in salary for several years, probably beginning in 1854.  Thus both men were earning 5,200 pounds a year.  Whatever they might have gotten from outside sources would be in addition.  The acme of an attainable annual income at the time was 10K a year.  Ten thousand would be over a million pounds in current coin.  The year end division of profits might easily have reached five thousand pounds so that both Dicks and Reynolds may have been 10K a year men.  Very successful.    

Eighteen fifty-four was the year that Reynolds removed his family to Herne Bay.  We have a picture on the gwmreynolds.com website of the house they lived in which was handsome but not palatial.  Today the same house might sell for a million pounds.  The move may have been prompted because George’s wife Susannah was ill and in decline as she died in 1858 at which time George moved back to London with twenty years left to his life.

A question to be asked is what John Dicks was doing all this time?  As Reynolds was presumably absent from the plant most the time while living in Herne Bay, probably visiting London for only a few days a month Dicks would have been in full control of the plant and the accounting department.  By 1854 the business would have required a fairly large office staff including compositors and a shipping and sales force. Dicks would have been running the company and perhaps enjoying it.

Perhaps, on returning in 1858 Reyolds may have found himself something of an outsider.  By 1858 his writing career was in noticeable decline.  The books after 1858 are running toward recapitulations with a noticeable decline in mental energy.  Princess Eugenie’s Boudoir, for instance recapitulates three of Reynolds favorite stories that he doesn’t want forgotten.  The rest are pitiful compared to his star in full flame. They’re OK, don’t get me wrong but they’re not worth the study as are the 1844-56 corpus.  Twelve stunning years.

Another aspect to consider is how Reynolds fit into the literary scene.  During this period the primary literary salon was run by Harrison Ainsworth from his house in Kensal Green.  Kensal Green is North of Chiswick.  The Kensal Green cemetery was used by many of these writers as a last residence.  Of course as Charles Dickens was a member of Ainsworth’s salon George Reynolds was barred while none of the Penny Dreadful writers ever belonged.  Time dispersed  the salon by the Sixties as the next wave of writers led by Anthony Trollope dominated the literary scene.

Who did Reynolds associate with?  Ever since he came back from France he was involved with the literary scene.  As a young twenty-three year old he was given the editorship of the Monthly Magazine and turned it from a nearly defunct magazine into a new success.  The success itself may have been a problem as with George’s wild enthusiasm for the continuing revolution in France he may have been attracting a more unwelcome readership than his more staid employers approved..  Then his appropriation of Dicken’s character Mr. Pickwick ‘may have been the last straw so that he was relieved of his duties.

While he issued several titles subsequently to 1837 he was not having success.  When George Stiff tapped him as the writer for The Mysteries of London in1844 he was given an opportunity to work within a framework in which he could display his talents to maximum effect.  Obviously he must have been known in literary circles.  Making a success of the Mysteries Stiff then tapped him to edit his London Monthly that Reynolds successfully did while writing the Mysteries at the same time.

Certainly he must have known the Edward Lloyd stable of writers including James Malcolm Rymer.  Rymer’s serials Varney the Vampyre and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, were sources for at least four of Reynolds’ titles while many incidents were lifted whole.

We’ll get back to that while we consider another of Reynolds’ sources and that of the Romantic school. That writer would be the eighteenth’s century’s Tobias Smollett (1721-1771).  While not a prolific novelist what he did write was influential.  His first novel was the wonderful Roderick Random followed by Peregrine Pickle and next the superb and monumental Ferdinand, Count Fathom, these three being the heart of his production.  The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker terminated his novels while two minor novels intervened  The History of the Atom and Launcelot Greaves.

Charles Dickens has been said to have been influenced by Smollett.  However you might as well be reading Reynolds in The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom.  The resemblance is astounding.  The Man of the World and the Man About Town replaced Smollett’snot  eighteenth century Adventurer.  The resemblance is astounding. 

While Rymer may have read Smollett, after all one criterion of education of the period was to be read in your country’s literature, I have not read enough Rymer to recognize it.  I’m sure it’s there.

Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker seem to be thought Smollet’s best novels.  While I admire all his work I am especially knocked out by Count Fathom.  The novel was not well received on issue.  Indeed, the character of Count Fathom is quite repulsive.  Even Smollett says that it pains him to have to relate the acts of his character.  While I was exasperated at the selfishness and self-interested obtuseness of Fathom I found the novel extraordinary and a mine of historical information.  Perhaps the depiction of Fathom and his situation is too realistic for most people to handle.  Indeed, I found the novel somewhat sickening but so is reality under the magnifying glass.

So, this essay brings us to an examination of Rymer and Reynolds..  It is perfectly obvious that Reynolds read and appreciated both Varney The Vampyre and Sweeney Todd.  If Count Fathom was tough reading, Sweeney Todd almost makes you vomit, but in a good way.  Gawd, what a story.  Dick Collins wrote the introduction and provides background.  The story is a simple one.  Sweeney Todd, a barber, wants a lot of money, thinking he will be able to pass as a gentleman if rich.  He, therefore, forms an alliance with a Mrs. Lovett to produce the fortune.  Sweeney kills the victims, chops up the bodies and Mrs. Lovett bakes them into meat pies that become the rage.  At the time Mr. Gillette had yet to perfect his safety razor, that will come in the twentieth century, so, unless you had the courage to use a straight razor and shave yourself, you employed an expert in the use of one, that is a barber.  When Sweeney Todd shaves a customer who confides the fact that he has valuables on him, Sweeney murders him divesting him of valuables and baggage.  He then butchers the body into gobbets and cuts and forwards them to Mrs. Lovett who turns them into delicious meat pies.

According to Dick Collins there is no factual basis for the story although many think there is.  I’m with the many on this one.  While as Dick Collins says, if there ever was hard evidence for the story its gone now, however, he says that there was a French model for the story while providing no details.  While speculating now, there is a true account during World War II in France which gives credibility to the possibility.

There is a true story of a French barber in WWII Paris who almost exactly replicated Sweeney Todd.  The man was known as Dr. Petiot.  There are several books available including Thomas Maeder’s The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot and some visual treatments.

During the war there were many people seeking to escape Europe from France through Spain.  Dr. Petiot ran a barbershop to which people wishing to exit Europe were directed.  Dr. Petiot negotiated a price guaranteeing to get them through France into Spain. 

 Petiot takes his victims to his house, secures their money and baggage and kills them.  He then butchers the bodies into pieces and burns them in his furnace.  Thus replicating Sweeney Todd. He did this to hundreds of people, retaining the baggage in storage, hundreds of suit cases and effects.  Note the baggage.

Dr. Petiot falls behind in burning bodies so he overloads his furnace creating a huge stench in the neighborhood bringing in the police.

Sweeney Todd murdered his victims in subterranean passages that ran under St. Dunstan’s Church creating a nauseous stench that permeated the church alerting the police.

Dr. Petiot absented himself from the house returning to find a mob and the police milling around the street.  His gig is up.  He is arrested and sentenced to be hanged.  On the scaffold he is asked if he has any last words to which he calmly replies in black humor:  “No. I’m the kind who takes my baggage with me.’  Very funny line.

Sweeney Todd was arrested, incarcerated  and hung himself taking his baggage with him.

So, the stories are almost identical.  In our time Jeffrey Dahmer in the US was a cannibal and like President Sekou Toure of Guinea kept his human flesh in the refrigerator.  Toure said that human flesh is very good; there are some things that the West just doesn’t understand.

As incredible as Sweeney Todd’s story is then it is more than possible and quite probable.  After all, Rymer didn’t invent the story.

Reynolds read the story, much admiring it, and while he didn’t replicate the cannibalism in his story of Princess Amelie’son abducted by the Monster Man, the son was placed with the master criminal of his time who ran a barber shop where the actual princeling was brought up to a detestable criminal. That’s quite evil in itself.  There is a direct line of descent from Todd to his successor.

In this case when the boy was about twelve Amelie discovered his presence and has Reynolds’ master detective, Larry Sampson take the lad under his wing to reform him.  It proves impossible to reverse his criminal indoctrination and conditioning.  Like all good criminals the lad was shipped to the United States.  Many of Reynolds criminals are exiled to the US.

There is however no solid evidence to Sweeney’s and Mrs. Lovett’s pies.  Remarkably there is evidence of a predecessor in French history along the lines of Dr. Petiot.  Must run in French culture.

Varney the Vampyre and George W. M. Reynolds

It is quite clear that George read Sweeny Todd and was obviously very impressed.  Rymer also wrote another enduring title from which George profited greatly, and that was Varney the Vampyre.  Both Varney and Sweeney have survived into the present, Sweeney more than Varney.  Not a bad record for Rymer.  Both stories were first published in 1847.  Varney being much longer than the published text was begun almost at the same time as Reynolds’ Mysteries of London while running as long.  Thus in terms of popularity they must have rivalled each other.  That means that Edward Lloyd, the publisher, and Reynolds were in competition.  When Reynolds began publishing the Miscellany in 1846 he might have been an equal to Lloyd while soon having a much better publishing and printing arm.

At present I can find only one reference to Sweeney in Reynolds’ work and that is in The Mysteries of the Court of London written in 1851 or 52.  On the other hand I find four titles that reference Varney.  The most obvious is Wagner the Wehrwolf.  Varney the Vampyre-Wagner the Wehrwolf, a direct appropriation.  So Rymer had co-opted the vampire,  Reynolds would obviously have to co-opt another European legend, that of the werewolf.  Further next he would co-opt the legend of Faust and of the Holy Vehm.  He still wanted a crack at a vampire story but not so obvious as to be noticeable.

For that Reynolds retreated for a couple years to consider then mythologized Varney to come up with the third best of his novels, The Necromancer.  Now, in Varney Rymer has this passage (my copy is the Illustrated Varney the Vampyre published by Pulp-Lit Productions, Corvallis, Oregon pp.1181-82):

Quote:

…There was the grave of Mr. Brooks with its circular mound of earth, all right enough; and the Mr. B was known to have been a respectable man.  He went to the City every day, and used to do so just for the of granting audiences to ladies and gentlemen who might be laboring under any little pecuniary difficulties, and accommodating them.  Kind Mr. Brooks.  He only took one hundred pounds percent.  Why should he be a Vampyre?  Bless him.  Too severe, really.

Unquote.

As concerned with usury as George was, he must have given a sardonic chuckle over that passage.  The passage clearly unites usury with blood sucking or Vampirism.  George then was prompted to work over Vampirism, usury and the Jews in his subconscious.   Thus in 1851 he created the character of Lionel Danvers who, while not described as a Vampire he did appropriate the souls of six women as a blood sucker or soul devourering usurer, allows Reynolds to write a Vampire story while avoiding the imputation of copying Rymer and Varney as he had Dickens and Mr. Pickwick in his Pickwick Abroad.

He also makes a controversial association with a burning question of the day, the character of England’s Jews.  In 1851 Lionel Rothschild was head of the Rothschild dynasty of the Jewish Shadow Kingdom not only in England but all of Europe.  Thus the empire of Lionel Danvers is not only in England but the whole of Europe.  Reynolds expertly combines all three strands.

At one point Rymer says that Varney only wanted the blood of young virgins who said they loved him.  He doesn’t adhere to this tenet in his story but he says it and Reynolds obviously picked up on it to use.  Thus George has Danvers, or Lionel Rothschild and the Rothschild family, sell their souls to the devil for worldly success.  A popular theory for the unresolved and mysterious success of them was that the family had sold its soul to the devil.  Thus, Danvers did in the fourteenth century before the rise of the Rothschilds.

Danvers obtained a caveat from the Devil that he could redeem his own soul if he could find six young virgins who would love him body and soul and die for him, thus giving the devil six souls as the price of his.  After each conquest Danvers then sacrificed the girl to the Devil.

As the story of The Necromancer opens Danvers has just sacrificed the fifth girl, Clara Manners, and begins the conquest of the sixth girl, Musidora Sinclair.  The Sinclair family was closely associated with the Knights Templar and its successor: The Freemasons.  George was a Freemason, actually getting Rymer to join his lodge.  His grade isn’t known, but I would imagine that he was well on the way to the highest grade, the thirty-third.  I don’t know what that has to do with the story but the Sinclairs are central to the Freemasonic story.  Perhaps Sinclair vs. Rothschild gives the triumph to the Sinclairs thus preserving English superiority.

It may be that since the Jews or Rothschilds were struggling  for preeminence in the kingdom that Reynolds translated that struggle into a Masonic contest of Danvers vs. the Sinclairs.  In The Necromancer, the struggle for the soul of Musidora, the real Henry VIII is captivated by Musidora and intends  to marry here, as he  is temporarily without a spouse, but he excuses himself for the necessity of attending to the cares of the realm.

In his absence Danvers/Rothschild transforms himself into a replica of Henry wooing Musidora in Henry’s place.  In this he succeeds, the carries Musidora off to his ruined castle on the Isle of Wight that just happens to be next door to her father’s, Sinclair, estate.  Kingdom and Shadow Kingdom.

He conducts Musidora to his abattoir where the five maidens were sacrificed.  Still he hasn’t captured her soul; in fact Musidora recognizes him  as the seducer of her girlhood.  She repudiates him, as her father and her local idolizer burst into the chamber.  Having failed Satan Rothschild/ Henry VII/ Danvers’ hundreds of year old body crumbles into dust.  Supposedly England is freed from the vampirism of the Jews  much as when Edward III expelled them from the kingdom in 1290.

Compare this to Trollope’s The Way We Live Now of 1875, a mere twenty-five years later.

It appears that Reynolds and Rymer had a fairly close friendship during the fifties.  When Lloyd collapsed Rymer switched to Reynolds’ stable while attending a company picnic or two.  At any rate Reynolds makes a couple of  other references to Varney.  For instance in Varney, the Vampyre has a conscience, regretting his existence so much that he ascends Mr. Vesuvius and throws himself in.

Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii of 1934 popularized Vesuvius and its eruption that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD.  The novel was a great success and most deservedly so as it is as perfect a novel as can be.  Vesuvius has since remained the epitome of the erupting volcano so Rymer has Varney pitch himself into the boiling cauldron.  In George’s novel Faust also of 1847 which couples Europe’s legendary Faust character with the equally legendary Holy Vehm, thus co-opting those two story lines, emulates Rymer by having Faust step off the ridge of Vesuvius thus terminating his contract with Satan.

Faust take place in the Holy Roman Empire in which the Holy Vehm was instituted to take up the slack of the legal justice system.  They sought out, arrested and tried criminals the instituted authorities couldn’t find grounds for prosecution.  Reynolds imagined they became a criminal organization somewhat like the Mafia today.  Faust and Wagner were both written in the same year of 1847 while the Mysteries of London were in progress.

One might suppose that Reynolds was so threatened by the success of Rymer and his Varney that he pulled out all the stops and tried to drown Rymer in a sea of prose.  Eighteen forty-seven must have been an exciting year for the reading public.

Reynolds The Bronze Statue of 1849 may also have some reference to Varney.  By 1851 then  and the Necromancer George had worked out the perfected reaction to Varney

One wonders if Rymer was his only serious competitor.  Other than Thomas Prest I’m not sure I could name another Penny Dreadful author.  I’ll have to check that out in the Wildside Press Catalog.  Wildside and Valancourt seem to be the leading publishers of popular literature of the nineteenth century.

Previously in this essay I mentioned the seventeenth century author Tobias Smollett.  Smollett’s 1753 novel Ferdinand, Count Fathom had a large influence on these late Romantic authors.  Charles Dickens is said to have been highly influenced by him although I find little resemblance.  Count Fathom is virtually a template for George Reynolds.  Like Reynolds Smollett was much concerned about usury.  In Chapter 47 his Count Melvil in desperate straits attempts to borrow money.  None of the English usurers will have anything to do with him because he is not a qualified borrower.  He has no collateral or obvious means of repayment while he intends to leave the country.  As no English borrower could enforce recovery in foreign countries he would have had to remain in England.  Melville is friends with Fathom, in fact he is in his hands.  Fathom then advises him he will have to ‘go to the Jews.’  Here’s how it went. Chapter 47:

Quote:

Melvil having signified his request, “Young gentleman” said the Israelite, with a most discordant voice,  “What in the name of goodness could induce you to come to me upon such an errand?  Did you ever hear that I lent money to strangers without security?”

“No,” replied Renaldo, “ nor did I believe I should profit by an application, but my affairs are desperate; and my proposal having been rejected by every Christian to whom they were offered, I was resolved to try my fate among the Jews, who are reckoned another species of men.”

Fathom, alarmed at this abrupt reply, which he supposed could not fail to disgust the merchant, interposed in the conversation, by making an apology for the plain dealing of his friend, who, he said, was soured and ruffled by his misfortunes; then exerting that power of eloquence which he had at command, he expostulated upon Renaldo’s claim and expectations, described the wrongs he had suffered, extolled his virtue, and drew a most pathetic picture of his distress.

Unquote.

Compare that with Arnold’s introduction of Crawford to the usurer in the Youthful Impostor and Reynold’s treatment of that scene.  In this case Smollett is a true Man of the World who indicates what his countrymen thought, that the Jews were a different species of men, which by the way is what the Jews think, between which the English and the Jews was a great divide. But perhaps not so great as Smollett as an objective observer indicates.  This usurer has a heart of gold. (No pun intended.)

Strangely in this situation, after checking Melvil out the Hebrew (Smollett’s term) not only advances Melvil an astonishing five hundred pounds on his signature but provides him with references to important usurers in Vienna with instructions to supply him with unlimited funds on request.  He is not concerned that Melvil is going to leave England.

Thus while the English usurer loses all authority outside his national borders, the international Jews can confidently expect to collect anywhere in Europe not only through his own ‘species’  but with the cooperation of important nationals of the various countries.

Compare this with the Youthful Impostor who through Arnold borrowed from a Jewish usurer in England while fleeing to France, stiffing the usurer.  The usurer notifies his people who steer Crawford into a business deal then clean him out leaving him penniless.

The whole real national political division is cleansed from academic histories, the mention of Jews being ‘as long suffering.’  Thus history is totally distorted and incomprehensible.

Reynolds as well as condemning usury also condemns the gambling spirit of his time.  Gambling ‘hells’ as they were called.  Apparently this gambling rage arose in Smollett’s time which astounded him.  I append a longish quote of Smollett’s discussion of the phenomenon, Chapter Fifty.  Fathom had been a successful gambler on the continent by knowing percentages, but here in England the spirit infusing gambling had changed to more wild speculation.

Quote:

Besides he perceived that gaming was now managed in such a manner as rendered his skill and dexterity of no advantage.  For the spirit of play had overspread the land, like a pestilence, raged to such a degree of madness and desperation that the unhappy people who were infected laid aside all thought of amusement, economy, or caution and risked their fortunes upon issues equally extravagant childish and absurd.

The whole mystery of the art was reduced to the single exercise of tossing up a guinea, and the lust of laying wagers, which they indulged to a surprising pitch of ridiculous intemperance .  In one corner of the room might be heard a pair of lordlings running their grandmothers against each other, that is, betting sums on the longest liver; in another the success of the wager depended upon the sex of the landlady’s next child; and one of the waiters happening to drop down in an apoplectic fit, a certain  noble peer exclaimed, “Dead for a thousand pounds.”  The challenge was immediately accepted; and when the master of the house sent for a surgeon to attempt the cure, the nobleman, who set the price upon the patient’s head, insisted upon his being left to the efforts of nature alone, otherwise the wager should be void.  Nay, when the landlord harped upon the loss he should sustain by the death of a trusty servant, his lordship obviated the objection by desiring that the fellow might be charged in the bill.

In short, the rage of gaming seemed to have devoured all their other faculties, and to have equalled the rash enthusiasm of the inhabitants of Malacca in the East Indies, who are so possessed with that pernicious  vice  that they sacrifice to it not only their fortunes, but also their wives and children; and then letting their hair down upon their shoulders in imitation of the ancient Lacedemonians when they devoted themselves to death, those wretches unsheathe their daggers, and murder every living creature in their way.  In this, however, they differ from the gamesters of our country, who never lose their senses, until they have lost their fortunes, and beggared their families; whereas, the Malays never run amuck, but in consequence of misery and despair.

Such are the amusements, or rather such is the continual employment of those hopeful youths who are destined by birth to be the judges of our property, and pillars of our constitution.

Unquote.

It seems that Smollett is describing a psychological malady here, a group frenzy, a sort of herd madness affecting upper class society..  It would appear that the malady didn’t exist before the Georgian period of the eighteenth century.  What disturbance in society might have induced it?  Perhaps gambling was associated to the usury of the borrowing mania.  They may be related.

After all, what disordered mind borrows money without the means to pay it back at perhaps cent percent compound interest? What monsters prey on their fellow men in that way.  Nor was the money borrowed for any other use than to temporarily maintain an exorbitant lifestyle that must end in prison?  These people were too intelligent to adopt either course and yet they suspended their intelligence and essentially committed suicide.  Usury and gambling.

What changed in English society in Georgian times?  One societal change that did not bode well was when Cromwell readmitted the Jews into England in 1660.

The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 precisely because of their practice of exorbitant usury that was impoverishing the populace.  When the Jews were readmitted the practice of expropriatory usury began again.  Of course, lending at interest was practiced but as Smollett shows it was at moderate rates with collateral so that the borrower  had to put the amount of the loan into the hands of the usurer.  Sort of a type of pawn shop.  English usurers did not lend on expectations as collateral.  But the Jews did.

It therefore follows that gambling hells were a desirable occupation to reap the cash.  The initial influx of returning Jews then increased from 1660 to 1740-50 thus reaching critical mass, got the lay of the land and organized.  Once organized the assault on laws and mores began to accommodate the invaders.  Two competing systems cannot exist side by side in the same ‘house’ without one or the other first dominating then ousting the other.  At least by mid-nineteenth century laws governing these procedures were discovered if not understood and implemented.  In Reynolds’ time Lionel Rothschild was busy attempting to change the rules governing Parliament to suit the Jews thus attempting to form a partnership of Jews and English rather than one people.

Darwin’s Origin of Species explained the competition of species while Gustave LeBon enumerated the hysteria of crowds in 1895 The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind which was amplified and put into execution by Sigmund Freud in his An Analysis of the Ego and Group Psychology of the early 1920s. The processes are clear; they have been explained.  They only need to be applied.

The important thing in social control is to get the money.  Get the money.  Money is where social power begins.

Usury at exorbitant expropriating rates is therefor a big element in getting the money while a gambling mania such as Smollett describes transfers the cash into casino operator’s hands.  Key occupations then have to be occupied.  It follows then that Jews were an important element in usury and gambling down through Reynolds times.  That would explain what mystified Smollett.  The gambling rage had to be incited.

These two problems were not abated by the time of Reynolds but intensified.  As Smollett’s Melvil says:  Jews were regarded by the English as a separate species and he might have added despised.  By Reynolds’ time the Jews had the money and then wanted entrance into the governance of the country.  In this the Rothchilds led the way from a shadow kingdom into the light of day. The founder of the Jewish dynasty was Nathan Rothschild who made the Jews that is his people economically dominant..  Nathan’s son Lionel replaced his father in 1837 at the former’s death, hence Reynolds called his usurer Lionel Danvers, the Lionel pointing directely at Lionel Rothschild who was attempting to change the rules of Parliament to suit Jewish desires.  In other words he refused the Christian oath preferring a Jewish oath so that he could serve as a Jew and not a Christian.

Thus, when Lionel Danvers assumed the form of Henry VIII there was a shadow king and the actual king vying for authority.

At the same time in real life the radical Chartists and Communists were making a frontal assault on the governments.  The Communists succeeded in France where the king was abolished and the aristocrats were disenfranchised.  The Governance was transferred to the Bourgeoisie.  This is exactly what Reynolds was working toward in England.  Thus, he was an enemy of the State and had to be controlled directly.

John Dicks And His Relationship To Reynolds.

I think it should be apparent that John Dicks was transferred from Thoms to Reynolds.  Dicks was a sort of printing and publishing genius as that, as the partnership between he and Reynolds began the company consisted of Reynolds’ writing and Dicks’ printing.  As I see it, by the time Reynolds completed the Mysteries of the Court of London in 1856 he had essentially peaked while his succeeding work was less popular while at the same time the genius of Dick’s printing and publishing became the more important asset to the firm.

By 1856 Dicks was not only publishing Reynolds but various Libraries of English novels published at the lowest possible price to encourage newly literate people to read and buy.  So this was a very large organization employing hundreds of people.  Perhaps Dicks thought he built it and it was his.

Back in 1846 Reynolds had established his magazine Reynolds Miscellany.  The magazine prospered and was very popular but very radical and critical of the government.  Then Dicks formed a competing magazine called Bow Bells that was much more conventional and not critical of the government.  The Miscellany had a strong revolutionary bent.  Bow Bells on the other hand was strictly Bourgeois.  The below quote from Guy Dicks book. The John Dicks Press, gives some idea of the confusion between the two magazines.  The Figaro was apparently a competing magazine.  Reynolds believe that such magazines were put up by the government to undermine the Miscellany.

The Figaro and Reynolds’ Miscellany were in a running battle in 1872 that had started with the Figaro exposing the fact that Reynold’s and Dicks’ two main publications were at odds over their coverage of the royal family, going so far as to describe Reynolds as a disgusting and scurrilous publication—”a paper which no decent person dreams of touching, save with a pair of tongs,”  and moreover it was filthy rag, filled with disloyalty and obscenity, prepared by mischievous pens for the readers of the very lowest and vilest class.

Figaro published these lists to demonstrate the “wicked fraud” of these “unprincipled” traders and “vile slandering of the Prince of Wales” [future Edward VII], the Carrion Journal.

Facts:

Reynolds’s Newspaper:

1. Is printed by John Dicks.

2.  Is published by John Dicks

3.  Is printed at 313 Strand

4.  Is published at 313 Strand

5.  Belongs to G.W.M. Reynolds and John Dicks

6.  Compared the dead child of the Prince of Wales to a rat

7.  Has called the Prince of Wales a louse

8.  Constantly and with bestial coarseness assails the royal family

Now Bow Bells Magazine:

1.  Is printed by John Dicks
2.  Is published by John Dicks
3.  Is printed at 313 Strand
4.  Is published at 313 Strand
5.  Belongs to G.W. M Reynolds and John Dicks
6.  Has just issued a Prince of Wales number with very loyal biographies
7.  Says that “the personal character of the Prince is essentially engaging
8.  Says  “England is equally fortunate with the Prince of Wales in the presence of Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who is a perfect lady and an admirable mother.  She will worthily follow in the footsteps of the Queen, whose social example has always been perfect.

Unquote.

Reynolds’ Newspaper brushed off the Figaro with:  We laugh at its impotent rage. And delight at seeing it writhing under the whippings we administer to its crabby carcass.

Unquote.

Well, what about this?

The writer in Figaro sees a mystery.  He obviously believes that Dicks and Reynolds were of one devious mind.  I think a correct interpretation of the information we have, that Figaro didn’t’, is that Dicks’ Bow Bells magazine represents Dicks’ real mind.  Having worked out from under Reynolds beginning about 1858-60 the firm, which after all was known as the John Dicks Press, already eliminates Reynolds who may popularly have been thought of  as merely an author the John Dicks Press published.  Many of the title pages of Reynolds’ books specifically state:  Published for the author by John Dicks.  That implies a separation not a partnership.

Perhaps John Dicks was a clever fellow from the beginning.  Anyway by 1869 and the consolidation, and elimination, of Reynolds’s Miscellany into Dicks’ Bow Bells Reynolds was out.  There appears to have been no loyalty to Reynolds; Dicks appears to have used him as a stepping stone.  I think it more than probable that Dicks detested Reynolds.

If one looks at Reynolds last novel, the pitiful, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, Dicks doesn’t even list the titles by Reynolds on the title page.  For all intents and purposes Reynolds past is wiped clean.

On the ad page at the back of the book a list of ‘Dicks’ English Novels, the top author listed is Charles Dickens with six titles, all early.  Clearly an insult to Reynolds.  Then six novels by Bulwer-Lytton, then a foundational novel by Charles Lever, The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, then six by Reynolds none of which is among his best, ending with eight by William Harrison Ainsworth who held a special place in Dicks’ heart.

In conclusion then I think it highly probable that Dicks was a covert agent of government security and he was there to do what he did:  baffle Reynolds’ career as much as possible, finally eliminating him from his legacy. It will be noted that after a large printing about 1880 nothing further was printed until something called the Oxford Society republished the Mysteries of the Court of London at century’s end.  I intend to discuss this publication in my next essay.

George W.M. Reynolds, James Malcolm Rymer And Some Etceteras

17. Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle

by

R.E. Prindle

Reynolds: Corpus

Rymer, James Malcom: Varney the Vampire, Valancourt Pubs, Dick Collins Introduction.  Originally 1847

Rymer, James Malcolm:  A String Of Pearls or Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street  Originally 1847

Smollett, Tobias: Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand, Count Fathom, Humphrey Clinker. 1740-1760

There seems to be a continuum in English literature.  A mentality that descends from generation to generation.  The same fictional character types appear and reappear.  This situation can only exist in a relatively small homogeneous population dealing with the same societal situations.

In many ways the Romantic era can be seen as the last of this concentrated mentality before the Industrial Revolution transformed English society; the population began to grow almost exponentially to the present day and the experience of the confusion of different cultures were introduced into the country.  Today there is no cultural uniformity in England, only a mélange of competing cultures.

George William McArthur Reynolds then can only be understood in reference to this cultural continuum and his place in the authors of his time.  The society in which he labored perhaps began to be shaped by the restoration of the monarchy as Charles II Stuart returned from France.  They came from the era of absolute monarchy.  Absolutism had been destroyed by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution and could not be restored.

Charles II nominally accepted the Protestant religion but his successor James II insisted on Catholicism which could not be tolerated so absolutism was then completely replaced.  William and Mary succeeded, followed by the last of the Stuarts, Queen Anne.  Modern England began to form with the ascension of the German Georgian dynasty.

This period from 1714 to 1837 formed the mind of late Romantic authors that included George Reynolds.  A whole body of writers would rework the period with shared, if differing, perspectives.  They would be succeeded by mid-century writers such as Anthony Trollope, George Elliot and others for whom the results of the Industrial Revolution would displace the mind set of the late Romantics.  Perhaps the Great Exhibition of 1851 could be set as the end date of the Romantic period.

George Reynolds, for instance, who lived through the railroad boom seldom even mentions the railroads, even though his contemporaries were affected by them, preferring  to live in the days of the stage coach.

He does acknowledge steam but the telegraph and photography never enter his stories.  His is a storied career, a career that was very short.  If one begins his successful career in 1844, he was only thirty years old.  When his career effectively ended sixteen years later in 1860 he was only forty-six, but he was done.  His wild ride was over.  He wrote nothing after that point at which he had nineteen years left to live perhaps dreaming of earlier glories.  One might ask, what happened?  Why did he stop cold?  Why did his magazine, the Reynolds Miscellany, disappear, folded into his publisher and printer John Dicks magazine Bow Bells.  Why did he sell his copyrights to John Dicks losing control of his incredible sixteen year effort?  Shuffling off his life so to speak?

I think the answer is politics and the key to the politics is John Dicks, Reynolds’ printer, friend and partner.  While there is no biography of Reynolds extant there is a fair amount of information about Reynolds contained in a volume by Guy Dicks (don’t ever look that name up on the internet) entitled The John Dicks Press self published by Guy.  While its primary subject is John Dicks, he and Reynolds are inseparable.

Their association seems to have been an unlikely one.  The two minds were far apart.  Dicks was a conventional middle class mind while Reynolds was a Bohemian questioning all authority.  Dicks born in 1818 was four years younger than Reynolds.  Our biographer here, Guy Dicks, was an amateur writer so he doesn’t always provide sufficient information.  It appears that John Dicks had a minimal formal education.  He may possibly have attended Sunday School for a couple years.  If so he must then have been self-educated, perhaps only been taught a minimal amount of reading and writing.  Nevertheless he became a printer beginning his career sometime at the Queen’s Printers a large organization employing hundreds.  Guy then skips to 1841 which finds him working for Peter Perring Thoms…

Quote:

…the Sinologist (China expert), publisher, printer, and stereotyper to the trade at Warwick Square…

Unquote.

Dicks would become his chief assistant.  It would appear that he knew how to apply himself.  So John proved himself to be a master printer somewhen at twenty-three or shortly after.  In 1844 Dicks married so he had a wife and family by 1847 when he took a flyer leaving Thoms to join Reynolds as his printer.  A seemingly chancy move as Reynolds was coming off the success of his Mysteries of London but no proven record as a businessman.  This might have proven perilous to Dicks as Reynolds was in bankruptcy court in 1848.  However Reynolds pulled through and thus began a lucrative successful partnership.

If Reynolds was a successful writer Dicks was a great printer who fully complemented Reynolds.  Guy Dicks quotes Victor E. Neuburg’s  Popular Literature: A History and Guide, concerning Dicks:  The scope of the vast publishing empire over which Dicks presided in the second half of the nineteenth century awaits investigation. 

And one might say, still awaits.  Dicks was a real innovator.  His relationship with Reynolds was two sided:  a great writer on one hand and a great printer on the other.  However there was a problem.  Reynolds was an advocate of violent revolution in the same manner as France in 1793.  He advocated that and that would cause problems with the authorities, especially after the failed revolution of 1848 in which Reynolds played a prominent part in England.  One wonders if John Dicks wasn’t a government spy used to monitor Reynolds.  Apart from slighting references to Reynolds association with the Chartist Movement his political activities have not been investigated.  There can be no doubt that Reynolds favored violent revolution as in the French Revolutions of 1789, 1793, 1830 and 1848 all of which were bloody and in sequence disinherited thrones and aristocracies.  The British Government could not have looked on Reynolds complacently.

It would have been essential to place an informer inside the organization.  The Sinologist Thoms who spent years in the East, primarily in Macao, where he was instrumental in publishing a Chinese-English dictionary, thus the government must have referred to him on Chinese matters.  Who better to have insinuated Dicks into Reynolds’ organization?  As we will see, Dicks disinherited Reynolds from his company while at the same time destroying his very successful magazine, Reynolds Miscellany, acquiring his copyrights, and his newspaper essentially pushing Reynolds out the door into the street at the very young age of forty-five.

All that was left of his copyrights was Pickwick Abroad that he republished in 1864 by another publisher.  Was that his last effort?

By the time of his exit his reputation as a revolutionist was fully established.  There was a loyal body of followers who revered him.

Dicks himself who had established his empire, as Neuburg puts it and was publishing series such as Dicks’ English Novels and others, as well as six a shilling, later three shilling, complete Shakspere, as he spelled it, that sold a million copies.  In his ad at the back of Reynolds’ Mary, Queen Of The Scots, Dicks notes six Dickens, all early, at the top of the list; five Ainsworth titles, he even published first editions of three of the titles that the author couldn’t place elsewhere at that time in his career d of which was Ainsworth’s excellent novel The South Sea Bubble.  It is noteworthy that Dicks demeans Reynold titles in his English novels.  It would seem that the severance of the partnership was one sided and complete.

So what was Dicks thinking when he left Thoms for Reynolds.  One should not put Dicks in the background in the combination.  Dicks was obviously an ambitious guy and perhaps he saw Reynolds as a stepping stone to found an empire he had already projected in his mind.  Of course, originally Reynolds’ work was his function as a printer.  Still he started out as Reynolds’ employee and yet many of the titles state:  Printed for the author by John Dicks.  So Dicks must always have considered the printing division his and compelled Reynolds to accept him a full partner later, probably to gain title to the printing plant.

All of this is going to transpire quickly, thirteen years is a blink of an eye, yet in those years Reynolds and Dicks made two fortunes, one for each.  At their deaths they left a combined 50-60 thousand pounds to their inheritors.  The Dicks empire was the printing and publishing plant,  probably equaled that.

It appears that the firm prospered from the beginning.  Guy Dicks says that each received one hundred pounds a week in salary for several years, probably beginning in 1854.  Thus both men were earning 5,200 pounds a year.  Whatever they might have gotten from outside sources would be in addition.  The acme of an attainable annual income at the time was 10K a year.  Ten thousand would be over a million pounds in current coin.  The year end division of profits might easily have reached five thousand pounds so that both Dicks and Reynolds may have been 10K a year men.  Very successful.    

Eighteen fifty-four was the year that Reynolds removed his family to Herne Bay.  We have a picture on the gwmreynolds.com website of the house they lived in which was handsome but not palatial.  Today the same house might sell for a million pounds.  The move may have been prompted because George’s wife Susannah was ill and in decline as she died in 1858 at which time George moved back to London with twenty years left to his life.

A question to be asked is what John Dicks was doing all this time?  As Reynolds was presumably absent from the plant most the time while living in Herne Bay, probably visiting London for only a few days a month Dicks would have been in full control of the plant and the accounting department.  By 1854 the business would have required a fairly large office staff including compositors and a shipping and sales force. Dicks would have been running the company and perhaps enjoying it.

Perhaps, on returning in 1858 Reyolds may have found himself something of an outsider.  By 1858 his writing career was in noticeable decline.  The books after 1858 are running toward recapitulations with a noticeable decline in mental energy.  Princess Eugenie’s Boudoir, for instance recapitulates three of Reynolds favorite stories that he doesn’t want forgotten.  The rest are pitiful compared to his star in full flame. They’re OK, don’t get me wrong but they’re not worth the study as are the 1844-56 corpus.  Twelve stunning years.

Another aspect to consider is how Reynolds fit into the literary scene.  During this period the primary literary salon was run by Harrison Ainsworth from his house in Kensal Green.  Kensal Green is North of Chiswick.  The Kensal Green cemetery was used by many of these writers as a last residence.  Of course as Charles Dickens was a member of Ainsworth’s salon George Reynolds was barred while none of the Penny Dreadful writers ever belonged.  Time dispersed  the salon by the Sixties as the next wave of writers led by Anthony Trollope dominated the literary scene.

Who did Reynolds associate with?  Ever since he came back from France he was involved with the literary scene.  As a young twenty-three year old he was given the editorship of the Monthly Magazine and turned it from a nearly defunct magazine into a new success.  The success itself may have been a problem as with George’s wild enthusiasm for the continuing revolution in France he may have been attracting a more unwelcome readership than his more staid employers approved..  Then his appropriation of Dicken’s character Mr. Pickwick ‘may have been the last straw so that he was relieved of his duties.

While he issued several titles subsequently to 1837 he was not having success.  When George Stiff tapped him as the writer for The Mysteries of London in1844 he was given an opportunity to work within a framework in which he could display his talents to maximum effect.  Obviously he must have been known in literary circles.  Making a success of the Mysteries Stiff then tapped him to edit his London Monthly that Reynolds successfully did while writing the Mysteries at the same time.

Certainly he must have known the Edward Lloyd stable of writers including James Malcolm Rymer.  Rymer’s serials Varney the Vampyre and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, were sources for at least four of Reynolds’ titles while many incidents were lifted whole.

We’ll get back to that while we consider another of Reynolds’ sources and that of the Romantic school. That writer would be the eighteenth’s century’s Tobias Smollett (1721-1771).  While not a prolific novelist what he did write was influential.  His first novel was the wonderful Roderick Random followed by Peregrine Pickle and next the superb and monumental Ferdinand, Count Fathom, these three being the heart of his production.  The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker terminated his novels while two minor novels intervened  The History of the Atom and Launcelot Greaves.

Charles Dickens has been said to have been influenced by Smollett.  However you might as well be reading Reynolds in The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom.  The resemblance is astounding.  The Man of the World and the Man About Town replaced Smollett’snot  eighteenth century Adventurer.  The resemblance is astounding. 

While Rymer may have read Smollett, after all one criterion of education of the period was to be read in your country’s literature, I have not read enough Rymer to recognize it.  I’m sure it’s there.

Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker seem to be thought Smollet’s best novels.  While I admire all his work I am especially knocked out by Count Fathom.  The novel was not well received on issue.  Indeed, the character of Count Fathom is quite repulsive.  Even Smollett says that it pains him to have to relate the acts of his character.  While I was exasperated at the selfishness and self-interested obtuseness of Fathom I found the novel extraordinary and a mine of historical information.  Perhaps the depiction of Fathom and his situation is too realistic for most people to handle.  Indeed, I found the novel somewhat sickening but so is reality under the magnifying glass.

So, this essay brings us to an examination of Rymer and Reynolds..  It is perfectly obvious that Reynolds read and appreciated both Varney The Vampyre and Sweeney Todd.  If Count Fathom was tough reading, Sweeney Todd almost makes you vomit, but in a good way.  Gawd, what a story.  Dick Collins wrote the introduction and provides background.  The story is a simple one.  Sweeney Todd, a barber, wants a lot of money, thinking he will be able to pass as a gentleman if rich.  He, therefore, forms an alliance with a Mrs. Lovett to produce the fortune.  Sweeney kills the victims, chops up the bodies and Mrs. Lovett bakes them into meat pies that become the rage.  At the time Mr. Gillette had yet to perfect his safety razor, that will come in the twentieth century, so, unless you had the courage to use a straight razor and shave yourself, you employed an expert in the use of one, that is a barber.  When Sweeney Todd shaves a customer who confides the fact that he has valuables on him, Sweeney murders him divesting him of valuables and baggage.  He then butchers the body into gobbets and cuts and forwards them to Mrs. Lovett who turns them into delicious meat pies.

According to Dick Collins there is no factual basis for the story although many think there is.  I’m with the many on this one.  While as Dick Collins says, if there ever was hard evidence for the story its gone now, however, he says that there was a French model for the story while providing no details.  While speculating now, there is a true account during World War II in France which gives credibility to the possibility.

There is a true story of a French barber in WWII Paris who almost exactly replicated Sweeney Todd.  The man was known as Dr. Petiot.  There are several books available including Thomas Maeder’s The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot and some visual treatments.

During the war there were many people seeking to escape Europe from France through Spain.  Dr. Petiot ran a barbershop to which people wishing to exit Europe were directed.  Dr. Petiot negotiated a price guaranteeing to get them through France into Spain. 

 Petiot takes his victims to his house, secures their money and baggage and kills them.  He then butchers the bodies into pieces and burns them in his furnace.  Thus replicating Sweeney Todd. He did this to hundreds of people, retaining the baggage in storage, hundreds of suit cases and effects.  Note the baggage.

Dr. Petiot falls behind in burning bodies so he overloads his furnace creating a huge stench in the neighborhood bringing in the police.

Sweeney Todd murdered his victims in subterranean passages that ran under St. Dunstan’s Church creating a nauseous stench that permeated the church alerting the police.

Dr. Petiot absented himself from the house returning to find a mob and the police milling around the street.  His gig is up.  He is arrested and sentenced to be hanged.  On the scaffold he is asked if he has any last words to which he calmly replies in black humor:  “No. I’m the kind who takes my baggage with me.’  Very funny line.

Sweeney Todd was arrested, incarcerated  and hung himself taking his baggage with him.

So, the stories are almost identical.  In our time Jeffrey Dahmer in the US was a cannibal and like President Sekou Toure of Guinea kept his human flesh in the refrigerator.  Toure said that human flesh is very good; there are some things that the West just doesn’t understand.

As incredible as Sweeney Todd’s story is then it is more than possible and quite probable.  After all, Rymer didn’t invent the story.

Reynolds read the story, much admiring it, and while he didn’t replicate the cannibalism in his story of Princess Amelie’son abducted by the Monster Man, the son was placed with the master criminal of his time who ran a barber shop where the actual princeling was brought up to a detestable criminal. That’s quite evil in itself.  There is a direct line of descent from Todd to his successor.

In this case when the boy was about twelve Amelie discovered his presence and has Reynolds’ master detective, Larry Sampson take the lad under his wing to reform him.  It proves impossible to reverse his criminal indoctrination and conditioning.  Like all good criminals the lad was shipped to the United States.  Many of Reynolds criminals are exiled to the US.

There is however no solid evidence to Sweeney’s and Mrs. Lovett’s pies.  Remarkably there is evidence of a predecessor in French history along the lines of Dr. Petiot.  Must run in French culture.

Varney the Vampyre and George W. M. Reynolds

It is quite clear that George read Sweeny Todd and was obviously very impressed.  Rymer also wrote another enduring title from which George profited greatly, and that was Varney the Vampyre.  Both Varney and Sweeney have survived into the present, Sweeney more than Varney.  Not a bad record for Rymer.  Both stories were first published in 1847.  Varney being much longer than the published text was begun almost at the same time as Reynolds’ Mysteries of London while running as long.  Thus in terms of popularity they must have rivalled each other.  That means that Edward Lloyd, the publisher, and Reynolds were in competition.  When Reynolds began publishing the Miscellany in 1846 he might have been an equal to Lloyd while soon having a much better publishing and printing arm.

At present I can find only one reference to Sweeney in Reynolds’ work and that is in The Mysteries of the Court of London written in 1851 or 52.  On the other hand I find four titles that reference Varney.  The most obvious is Wagner the Wehrwolf.  Varney the Vampyre-Wagner the Wehrwolf, a direct appropriation.  So Rymer had co-opted the vampire,  Reynolds would obviously have to co-opt another European legend, that of the werewolf.  Further next he would co-opt the legend of Faust and of the Holy Vehm.  He still wanted a crack at a vampire story but not so obvious as to be noticeable.

For that Reynolds retreated for a couple years to consider then mythologized Varney to come up with the third best of his novels, The Necromancer.  Now, in Varney Rymer has this passage (my copy is the Illustrated Varney the Vampyre published by Pulp-Lit Productions, Corvallis, Oregon pp.1181-82):

Quote:

…There was the grave of Mr. Brooks with its circular mound of earth, all right enough; and the Mr. B was known to have been a respectable man.  He went to the City every day, and used to do so just for the of granting audiences to ladies and gentlemen who might be laboring under any little pecuniary difficulties, and accommodating them.  Kind Mr. Brooks.  He only took one hundred pounds percent.  Why should he be a Vampyre?  Bless him.  Too severe, really.

Unquote.

As concerned with usury as George was, he must have given a sardonic chuckle over that passage.  The passage clearly unites usury with blood sucking or Vampirism.  George then was prompted to work over Vampirism, usury and the Jews in his subconscious.   Thus in 1851 he created the character of Lionel Danvers who, while not described as a Vampire he did appropriate the souls of six women as a blood sucker or soul devourering usurer, allows Reynolds to write a Vampire story while avoiding the imputation of copying Rymer and Varney as he had Dickens and Mr. Pickwick in his Pickwick Abroad.

He also makes a controversial association with a burning question of the day, the character of England’s Jews.  In 1851 Lionel Rothschild was head of the Rothschild dynasty of the Jewish Shadow Kingdom not only in England but all of Europe.  Thus the empire of Lionel Danvers is not only in England but the whole of Europe.  Reynolds expertly combines all three strands.

At one point Rymer says that Varney only wanted the blood of young virgins who said they loved him.  He doesn’t adhere to this tenet in his story but he says it and Reynolds obviously picked up on it to use.  Thus George has Danvers, or Lionel Rothschild and the Rothschild family, sell their souls to the devil for worldly success.  A popular theory for the unresolved and mysterious success of them was that the family had sold its soul to the devil.  Thus, Danvers did in the fourteenth century before the rise of the Rothschilds.

Danvers obtained a caveat from the Devil that he could redeem his own soul if he could find six young virgins who would love him body and soul and die for him, thus giving the devil six souls as the price of his.  After each conquest Danvers then sacrificed the girl to the Devil.

As the story of The Necromancer opens Danvers has just sacrificed the fifth girl, Clara Manners, and begins the conquest of the sixth girl, Musidora Sinclair.  The Sinclair family was closely associated with the Knights Templar and its successor: The Freemasons.  George was a Freemason, actually getting Rymer to join his lodge.  His grade isn’t known, but I would imagine that he was well on the way to the highest grade, the thirty-third.  I don’t know what that has to do with the story but the Sinclairs are central to the Freemasonic story.  Perhaps Sinclair vs. Rothschild gives the triumph to the Sinclairs thus preserving English superiority.

It may be that since the Jews or Rothschilds were struggling  for preeminence in the kingdom that Reynolds translated that struggle into a Masonic contest of Danvers vs. the Sinclairs.  In The Necromancer, the struggle for the soul of Musidora, the real Henry VIII is captivated by Musidora and intends  to marry here, as he  is temporarily without a spouse, but he excuses himself for the necessity of attending to the cares of the realm.

In his absence Danvers/Rothschild transforms himself into a replica of Henry wooing Musidora in Henry’s place.  In this he succeeds, the carries Musidora off to his ruined castle on the Isle of Wight that just happens to be next door to her father’s, Sinclair, estate.  Kingdom and Shadow Kingdom.

He conducts Musidora to his abattoir where the five maidens were sacrificed.  Still he hasn’t captured her soul; in fact Musidora recognizes him  as the seducer of her girlhood.  She repudiates him, as her father and her local idolizer burst into the chamber.  Having failed Satan Rothschild/ Henry VII/ Danvers’ hundreds of year old body crumbles into dust.  Supposedly England is freed from the vampirism of the Jews  much as when Edward III expelled them from the kingdom in 1290.

Compare this to Trollope’s The Way We Live Now of 1875, a mere twenty-five years later.

It appears that Reynolds and Rymer had a fairly close friendship during the fifties.  When Lloyd collapsed Rymer switched to Reynolds’ stable while attending a company picnic or two.  At any rate Reynolds makes a couple of  other references to Varney.  For instance in Varney, the Vampyre has a conscience, regretting his existence so much that he ascends Mr. Vesuvius and throws himself in.

Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii of 1934 popularized Vesuvius and its eruption that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD.  The novel was a great success and most deservedly so as it is as perfect a novel as can be.  Vesuvius has since remained the epitome of the erupting volcano so Rymer has Varney pitch himself into the boiling cauldron.  In George’s novel Faust also of 1847 which couples Europe’s legendary Faust character with the equally legendary Holy Vehm, thus co-opting those two story lines, emulates Rymer by having Faust step off the ridge of Vesuvius thus terminating his contract with Satan.

Faust take place in the Holy Roman Empire in which the Holy Vehm was instituted to take up the slack of the legal justice system.  They sought out, arrested and tried criminals the instituted authorities couldn’t find grounds for prosecution.  Reynolds imagined they became a criminal organization somewhat like the Mafia today.  Faust and Wagner were both written in the same year of 1847 while the Mysteries of London were in progress.

One might suppose that Reynolds was so threatened by the success of Rymer and his Varney that he pulled out all the stops and tried to drown Rymer in a sea of prose.  Eighteen forty-seven must have been an exciting year for the reading public.

Reynolds The Bronze Statue of 1849 may also have some reference to Varney.  By 1851 then  and the Necromancer George had worked out the perfected reaction to Varney

One wonders if Rymer was his only serious competitor.  Other than Thomas Prest I’m not sure I could name another Penny Dreadful author.  I’ll have to check that out in the Wildside Press Catalog.  Wildside and Valancourt seem to be the leading publishers of popular literature of the nineteenth century.

Previously in this essay I mentioned the seventeenth century author Tobias Smollett.  Smollett’s 1753 novel Ferdinand, Count Fathom had a large influence on these late Romantic authors.  Charles Dickens is said to have been highly influenced by him although I find little resemblance.  Count Fathom is virtually a template for George Reynolds.  Like Reynolds Smollett was much concerned about usury.  In Chapter 47 his Count Melvil in desperate straits attempts to borrow money.  None of the English usurers will have anything to do with him because he is not a qualified borrower.  He has no collateral or obvious means of repayment while he intends to leave the country.  As no English borrower could enforce recovery in foreign countries he would have had to remain in England.  Melville is friends with Fathom, in fact he is in his hands.  Fathom then advises him he will have to ‘go to the Jews.’  Here’s how it went. Chapter 47:

Quote:

Melvil having signified his request, “Young gentleman” said the Israelite, with a most discordant voice,  “What in the name of goodness could induce you to come to me upon such an errand?  Did you ever hear that I lent money to strangers without security?”

“No,” replied Renaldo, “ nor did I believe I should profit by an application, but my affairs are desperate; and my proposal having been rejected by every Christian to whom they were offered, I was resolved to try my fate among the Jews, who are reckoned another species of men.”

Fathom, alarmed at this abrupt reply, which he supposed could not fail to disgust the merchant, interposed in the conversation, by making an apology for the plain dealing of his friend, who, he said, was soured and ruffled by his misfortunes; then exerting that power of eloquence which he had at command, he expostulated upon Renaldo’s claim and expectations, described the wrongs he had suffered, extolled his virtue, and drew a most pathetic picture of his distress.

Unquote.

Compare that with Arnold’s introduction of Crawford to the usurer in the Youthful Impostor and Reynold’s treatment of that scene.  In this case Smollett is a true Man of the World who indicates what his countrymen thought, that the Jews were a different species of men, which by the way is what the Jews think, between which the English and the Jews was a great divide. But perhaps not so great as Smollett as an objective observer indicates.  This usurer has a heart of gold. (No pun intended.)

Strangely in this situation, after checking Melvil out the Hebrew (Smollett’s term) not only advances Melvil an astonishing five hundred pounds on his signature but provides him with references to important usurers in Vienna with instructions to supply him with unlimited funds on request.  He is not concerned that Melvil is going to leave England.

Thus while the English usurer loses all authority outside his national borders, the international Jews can confidently expect to collect anywhere in Europe not only through his own ‘species’  but with the cooperation of important nationals of the various countries.

Compare this with the Youthful Impostor who through Arnold borrowed from a Jewish usurer in England while fleeing to France, stiffing the usurer.  The usurer notifies his people who steer Crawford into a business deal then clean him out leaving him penniless.

The whole real national political division is cleansed from academic histories, the mention of Jews being ‘as long suffering.’  Thus history is totally distorted and incomprehensible.

Reynolds as well as condemning usury also condemns the gambling spirit of his time.  Gambling ‘hells’ as they were called.  Apparently this gambling rage arose in Smollett’s time which astounded him.  I append a longish quote of Smollett’s discussion of the phenomenon, Chapter Fifty.  Fathom had been a successful gambler on the continent by knowing percentages, but here in England the spirit infusing gambling had changed to more wild speculation.

Quote:

Besides he perceived that gaming was now managed in such a manner as rendered his skill and dexterity of no advantage.  For the spirit of play had overspread the land, like a pestilence, raged to such a degree of madness and desperation that the unhappy people who were infected laid aside all thought of amusement, economy, or caution and risked their fortunes upon issues equally extravagant childish and absurd.

The whole mystery of the art was reduced to the single exercise of tossing up a guinea, and the lust of laying wagers, which they indulged to a surprising pitch of ridiculous intemperance .  In one corner of the room might be heard a pair of lordlings running their grandmothers against each other, that is, betting sums on the longest liver; in another the success of the wager depended upon the sex of the landlady’s next child; and one of the waiters happening to drop down in an apoplectic fit, a certain  noble peer exclaimed, “Dead for a thousand pounds.”  The challenge was immediately accepted; and when the master of the house sent for a surgeon to attempt the cure, the nobleman, who set the price upon the patient’s head, insisted upon his being left to the efforts of nature alone, otherwise the wager should be void.  Nay, when the landlord harped upon the loss he should sustain by the death of a trusty servant, his lordship obviated the objection by desiring that the fellow might be charged in the bill.

In short, the rage of gaming seemed to have devoured all their other faculties, and to have equalled the rash enthusiasm of the inhabitants of Malacca in the East Indies, who are so possessed with that pernicious  vice  that they sacrifice to it not only their fortunes, but also their wives and children; and then letting their hair down upon their shoulders in imitation of the ancient Lacedemonians when they devoted themselves to death, those wretches unsheathe their daggers, and murder every living creature in their way.  In this, however, they differ from the gamesters of our country, who never lose their senses, until they have lost their fortunes, and beggared their families; whereas, the Malays never run amuck, but in consequence of misery and despair.

Such are the amusements, or rather such is the continual employment of those hopeful youths who are destined by birth to be the judges of our property, and pillars of our constitution.

Unquote.

It seems that Smollett is describing a psychological malady here, a group frenzy, a sort of herd madness affecting upper class society..  It would appear that the malady didn’t exist before the Georgian period of the eighteenth century.  What disturbance in society might have induced it?  Perhaps gambling was associated to the usury of the borrowing mania.  They may be related.

After all, what disordered mind borrows money without the means to pay it back at perhaps cent percent compound interest? What monsters prey on their fellow men in that way.  Nor was the money borrowed for any other use than to temporarily maintain an exorbitant lifestyle that must end in prison?  These people were too intelligent to adopt either course and yet they suspended their intelligence and essentially committed suicide.  Usury and gambling.

What changed in English society in Georgian times?  One societal change that did not bode well was when Cromwell readmitted the Jews into England in 1660.

The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 precisely because of their practice of exorbitant usury that was impoverishing the populace.  When the Jews were readmitted the practice of expropriatory usury began again.  Of course, lending at interest was practiced but as Smollett shows it was at moderate rates with collateral so that the borrower  had to put the amount of the loan into the hands of the usurer.  Sort of a type of pawn shop.  English usurers did not lend on expectations as collateral.  But the Jews did.

It therefore follows that gambling hells were a desirable occupation to reap the cash.  The initial influx of returning Jews then increased from 1660 to 1740-50 thus reaching critical mass, got the lay of the land and organized.  Once organized the assault on laws and mores began to accommodate the invaders.  Two competing systems cannot exist side by side in the same ‘house’ without one or the other first dominating then ousting the other.  At least by mid-nineteenth century laws governing these procedures were discovered if not understood and implemented.  In Reynolds’ time Lionel Rothschild was busy attempting to change the rules governing Parliament to suit the Jews thus attempting to form a partnership of Jews and English rather than one people.

Darwin’s Origin of Species explained the competition of species while Gustave LeBon enumerated the hysteria of crowds in 1895 The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind which was amplified and put into execution by Sigmund Freud in his An Analysis of the Ego and Group Psychology of the early 1920s. The processes are clear; they have been explained.  They only need to be applied.

The important thing in social control is to get the money.  Get the money.  Money is where social power begins.

Usury at exorbitant expropriating rates is therefor a big element in getting the money while a gambling mania such as Smollett describes transfers the cash into casino operator’s hands.  Key occupations then have to be occupied.  It follows then that Jews were an important element in usury and gambling down through Reynolds times.  That would explain what mystified Smollett.  The gambling rage had to be incited.

These two problems were not abated by the time of Reynolds but intensified.  As Smollett’s Melvil says:  Jews were regarded by the English as a separate species and he might have added despised.  By Reynolds’ time the Jews had the money and then wanted entrance into the governance of the country.  In this the Rothchilds led the way from a shadow kingdom into the light of day. The founder of the Jewish dynasty was Nathan Rothschild who made the Jews that is his people economically dominant..  Nathan’s son Lionel replaced his father in 1837 at the former’s death, hence Reynolds called his usurer Lionel Danvers, the Lionel pointing directely at Lionel Rothschild who was attempting to change the rules of Parliament to suit Jewish desires.  In other words he refused the Christian oath preferring a Jewish oath so that he could serve as a Jew and not a Christian.

Thus, when Lionel Danvers assumed the form of Henry VIII there was a shadow king and the actual king vying for authority.

At the same time in real life the radical Chartists and Communists were making a frontal assault on the governments.  The Communists succeeded in France where the king was abolished and the aristocrats were disenfranchised.  The Governance was transferred to the Bourgeoisie.  This is exactly what Reynolds was working toward in England.  Thus, he was an enemy of the State and had to be controlled directly.

John Dicks And His Relationship To Reynolds.

I think it should be apparent that John Dicks was transferred from Thoms to Reynolds.  Dicks was a sort of printing and publishing genius as that, as the partnership between he and Reynolds began the company consisted of Reynolds’ writing and Dicks’ printing.  As I see it, by the time Reynolds completed the Mysteries of the Court of London in 1856 he had essentially peaked while his succeeding work was less popular while at the same time the genius of Dick’s printing and publishing became the more important asset to the firm.

By 1856 Dicks was not only publishing Reynolds but various Libraries of English novels published at the lowest possible price to encourage newly literate people to read and buy.  So this was a very large organization employing hundreds of people.  Perhaps Dicks thought he built it and it was his.

Back in 1846 Reynolds had established his magazine Reynolds Miscellany.  The magazine prospered and was very popular but very radical and critical of the government.  Then Dicks formed a competing magazine called Bow Bells that was much more conventional and not critical of the government.  The Miscellany had a strong revolutionary bent.  Bow Bells on the other hand was strictly Bourgeois.  The below quote from Guy Dicks book. The John Dicks Press, gives some idea of the confusion between the two magazines.  The Figaro was apparently a competing magazine.  Reynolds believe that such magazines were put up by the government to undermine the Miscellany.

The Figaro and Reynolds’ Miscellany were in a running battle in 1872 that had started with the Figaro exposing the fact that Reynold’s and Dicks’ two main publications were at odds over their coverage of the royal family, going so far as to describe Reynolds as a disgusting and scurrilous publication—”a paper which no decent person dreams of touching, save with a pair of tongs,”  and moreover it was filthy rag, filled with disloyalty and obscenity, prepared by mischievous pens for the readers of the very lowest and vilest class.

Figaro published these lists to demonstrate the “wicked fraud” of these “unprincipled” traders and “vile slandering of the Prince of Wales” [future Edward VII], the Carrion Journal.

Facts:

Reynolds’s Newspaper:

1. Is printed by John Dicks.

2.  Is published by John Dicks

3.  Is printed at 313 Strand

4.  Is published at 313 Strand

5.  Belongs to G.W.M. Reynolds and John Dicks

6.  Compared the dead child of the Prince of Wales to a rat

7.  Has called the Prince of Wales a louse

8.  Constantly and with bestial coarseness assails the royal family

Now Bow Bells Magazine:

1.  Is printed by John Dicks
2.  Is published by John Dicks
3.  Is printed at 313 Strand
4.  Is published at 313 Strand
5.  Belongs to G.W. M Reynolds and John Dicks
6.  Has just issued a Prince of Wales number with very loyal biographies
7.  Says that “the personal character of the Prince is essentially engaging
8.  Says  “England is equally fortunate with the Prince of Wales in the presence of Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who is a perfect lady and an admirable mother.  She will worthily follow in the footsteps of the Queen, whose social example has always been perfect.

Unquote.

Reynolds’ Newspaper brushed off the Figaro with:  We laugh at its impotent rage. And delight at seeing it writhing under the whippings we administer to its crabby carcass.

Unquote.

Well, what about this?

The writer in Figaro sees a mystery.  He obviously believes that Dicks and Reynolds were of one devious mind.  I think a correct interpretation of the information we have, that Figaro didn’t’, is that Dicks’ Bow Bells magazine represents Dicks’ real mind.  Having worked out from under Reynolds beginning about 1858-60 the firm, which after all was known as the John Dicks Press, already eliminates Reynolds who may popularly have been thought of  as merely an author the John Dicks Press published.  Many of the title pages of Reynolds’ books specifically state:  Published for the author by John Dicks.  That implies a separation not a partnership.

Perhaps John Dicks was a clever fellow from the beginning.  Anyway by 1869 and the consolidation, and elimination, of Reynolds’s Miscellany into Dicks’ Bow Bells Reynolds was out.  There appears to have been no loyalty to Reynolds; Dicks appears to have used him as a stepping stone.  I think it more than probable that Dicks detested Reynolds.

If one looks at Reynolds last novel, the pitiful, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, Dicks doesn’t even list the titles by Reynolds on the title page.  For all intents and purposes Reynolds past is wiped clean.

On the ad page at the back of the book a list of ‘Dicks’ English Novels, the top author listed is Charles Dickens with six titles, all early.  Clearly an insult to Reynolds.  Then six novels by Bulwer-Lytton, then a foundational novel by Charles Lever, The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, then six by Reynolds none of which is among his best, ending with eight by William Harrison Ainsworth who held a special place in Dicks’ heart.

In conclusion then I think it highly probable that Dicks was a covert agent of government security and he was there to do what he did:  baffle Reynolds’ career as much as possible, finally eliminating him from his legacy. It will be noted that after a large printing about 1880 nothing further was printed until something called the Oxford Society republished the Mysteries of the Court of London at century’s end.  I intend to discuss this publication in my next essay.

Debunking The Biblical Creation Myth:

Water Vs. Dirt

by

R.E. Prindle

One of the great conflicts in the course of the development of the human intellect is that of science vs. religion.  The conflict should not be confused with Evolution that relates to physical changes, while science and religion are mental approaches.  Both science and religion have existed through out history.  As science requires physical confirmation and religion doesn’t science has developed more slowly.

Again science requires confirmation while religion is ‘revealed.’  Thus the Asiatics of the East End of the Mediterranean tended to be religious while the Egyptian and the Greeks tended toward the scientific, as primitive as it might appear.

Somewhen in the Pisces  side of twelve hundred BC the notion of what the religionists are pleased to call monotheism was determined, which was supposed to invalidate polytheism, was adopted as the official stance of the Jews, or Hebrews and succeeded as the official stance in subsequent Western history.

Polytheism is actually primitive science with each god representing a facet of reality.  Naturally rather than disappearing polytheism was transmogrified into the Godhead and the ten emanations or Sephiroth.  Thus the Gods and Goddesses coursed through history gradually becoming what is called collectively Science instead of the Godhead while the various scientific disciplines replace the Emanations or Sephiroth.

Zeus, for instance became the Godhead transmogified and the minor gods and goddesses became the Emanations.  Fundamental actually.

A major problem to the human intellect is the problem of life and that involves the elementals-earth, water, air and fire.  The Greek Pre-Socratics wrestled mightily with this problem while the discussion was universal which also involved the Jews.  In their mythical history they opted for earth as the primary material of life as they saw dirt and humans as solids.  This was a serious error in science, but no problem in religion, as human life is actually based in water being something like 98% with the other 2% composed of atomic elements.

Jewish theory was hobbled by their religious belief that the earth and universe was created at the beginning of the Age of Taurus.  Ludicrous on the face of it.  Thus all of existence had a very short period for development or evolution.

The Jews, or their Hebrew Semitic ancestors, splintered off from the Semitic main body in Mesopotamia at the cusp of Taurus and Aries while retaining the beliefs current of Taurus.  The main body that retained the science of the Sumerians who they replaced in Mesopotamia, were aware that civilization went back a hundred thousand years and before that the age of the Earth was indeterminant.

Circumstances shackled the mind of Western man to the Jewish version of creation, that is of the years of the Taurian Age. ‘God’, that is the Jewish version of ‘God’, said the Jews, came into existence at the same time and he created Man by picking up a clod of dirt and sculpting an image of himself breathing life into it.  So I look like God, you look like God, right?, unless you’re a woman and then you are a clone of the first man fashioned from the material of his rib right?

As I say, circumstances foisted this ridiculous nonsense onto the mind of Western man universally as fact until some time in the eighteenth century of  Pisces  when the science of geology demonstrated the impossibility of the planet being only four thousand years old at that time.

Subsequently we have come to accept, based on scientific rather than religious grounds that the planet may be four and a half BILLION years old.  Thus the Semitic religions fall to pieces.

Here’s a problem that worries lots of people:  where did water come from?  The prevailing ‘scientific;’ explanation is that water came from outer space.  Comets dropped it off.  This raises the problem of why are oceans of water floating around in outer space looking for planets to make a real splash down on?

Personally, I accept the science that water is made right here on this planet.  Space cats are going to have to come up with real proof.  The fact is that the giant iron core of the planet rotates at a different speed than the outer layers.  The outer layers are unstable slipping around the core at a lower speed.  The friction between the core and the slipping outer layers.  The slipping creates a magnetic field called gravity.

The heat and pressure generate chemical changes while the outer layers transmute the different elements into different substances.  Hydrogen and oxygen being the two elements that combine to make water.  The water, then, is extruded onto the surface.  Even today great subaqueous springs continuously extrude to refresh and replenish the water supply.  The low lying lands slowly filled with water to create the oceans.  The water evaporated, as water will do, and various gases including oxygen constitute air.  In the process the elevated part of the planet came to know fresh water.

Here is an astounding fact:  In one billion years, prepare now, the Sun will be 10% brighter making it hot enough for Earth to lose enough hydrogen to space to cause the planet to lose all its water. (Fact taken from Wikipedia.)  Thus while oxygen may remain there won’t be enough hydrogen to form H2O.

There is no need to look to outer space to know where water comes from; it is a natural process of the planet.

Thus the oceans were formed.  In the process of extrusion the various elements (iron, copper etc.) were dissolved in the water.  Therefore water (hydrogen and oxygen) has many trace elements of which about eighteen are used to create life.  This can only happen in water.

Rabbi Loewe, a fifteenth century European Rabbi formed the monster called the Golem, whose role was to kill anti-Semites, out of dirt that he breathed air into its nostrils and brought it to life.  This is magic of the highest order.  Neither ‘God’ or Rabbi Loewe ever created life that way.

So, all of these elements were floating around in the primordial soup, that is to say oceans, where they bumped into each other forming various combinations that bonded into primitive one celled organisms that began to mutate and change into various forms.  Life began in the oceans.  There originally was not much oxygen in the atmosphere  but when it reached about 21% life became possible.  How long ago that was isn’t known.  We know it was when the atmosphere became 21% because that is the percentage needed today to sustain life.  If the oxygen were reduced sufficiently the various forms of life would become sluggish and inefficient; if the oxygen content rose life forms would burn oxygen more brightly and expire.

Thus, humankind evolved in water and assumed the appearance of solidity.  As Isaac Asimov (who was Jewish by the way) said:  Humans are just big bags of water.  No dirt involved.  Another Jewish myth debunked.

A Review:  The Double Life Of Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin

by

R.E. Prindle

Heylin, Clinton:  The Double Life Of Bob Dylan, 2021, Little Brown & Co.

All good things come to an end and Bob Dylan’s ‘Never Ending Tour’ terminated in 2020 after the Great Magical Virus of 2019 arrived.  The world was put in lockdown.  Bob returned home.  He will be 80 years old this May 24^th.  I think it doubtful that he will return the road.  Hopefully he will sit down and draft a second volume of his chronicles.  Probably not.  Vol. I was criticized and he doesn’t like criticism.  Strange that he would put out a three volume set of Sinatra songs.

It almost seems malicious that Clinton Heylin would release yet another biography on Bob that details his early career from 1960 to 1966 when Bob’ personality disintegrated under the strain of too much fame.

Bob was born in 1941 , making him thirteen in 1954, the seminal year of our times when the Supreme Court issued the famous decision of Brown vs. The Board Of Education of Topeka.  Thus the disintegration of the United States began that is almost complete today.  Thus Bob and I were present at the creation of seventy some years of racial turmoil.  The Black-White situation would be central to Bob’s musical career.

To this point in time there has been only one permissible opinion of the importance of that Judicial decision.  I view here my interpretation of that momentous decision and its aftermath.  The matter was not handled correctly but as the starting point of the Negro Revolution reaching a crescendo today the matter should have been thought out better.

The Supreme Court of 1954 was the very opposite of the Supreme Court that Franklin Delano Roosevelt inherited in 1933 at his inauguration.  Then the Court consisted of men born during the Gilded Age, anathema to FDR.  As they continued to reject liberal edicts, one might say revolutionary policies, he became frustrated and made an appeal to pack the Court with enough Liberal judges to override the existing Court and rubber stamp his policies.  As he was always willing to use any means necessary no matter how illegal the country was horrified at the idea of overturning the democratic process. 

But then  a couple Justices died, a couple advisedly handed in their resignations and the Court became Liberal as FDR refilled the vacant seats.  After twenty years of treason, as Joseph McCarthy phrased it, appointments by FDR and Harry Truman turned the Court so Liberal it was nearly Red.  It shifted from interpreting the law to making law, thus usurping the purpose of the House of Representatives, the so-called legislative body.

While I don’t understand Heylin’s notion of a double life of Bob Dylan I do understand the double life of the United States of America.  That double life was the Negro nation vs. the White nation.  All other problems are secondary to that problem for which there is no resolution other than the elimination of one people or the other.  It sounds harsh but it is a fact.

Absurdists today have totally exacerbated the problem insisting that Black people on their arrival in 1619 have been the reason for the success of the US to a point ten years earlier than 2021.  First there was slavery, then the Jim Crow period that ended in 1954 then to the freefall of today.

I was in the tenth grade in 1954 when the Brown decision was announced.  I gave a little shudder as I realized what was ahead for the country.  As I say, the racial problem can only be resolved by the extinction of one race or the other, that is a genocide, that genocide will be achieved through sexual miscegenation.  The direction of the genocide today is against the Whites.  Whiteness must be removed from the planet they proclaim.  Could anything be plainer?   This may seem improbable or impossible as Whites vastly outnumber Negroes.  Not as big a problem as it may seem as will be revealed.

Few, if any,  recognized Brown as the opening shot in the Negro rebellion conducted by asymmetrical methods as well as violent revolution.  Nor, was anybody aware that everything had been planned for the attack.  My home town, Saginaw, Michigan had two high schools, Saginaw High and Arthur Hill.  Saginaw High in 1954 was fully integrated being half Black and Arthur Hill was all White.  I attended Arthur Hill as I lived on the then White West Side.  Within days days of the Court decision a gigantic Black Guy, easily forty years old claiming to be a high school student,  showed up at my French class.  It was clear to me that he had never finished school.

I have no idea why he came to converse with a French teacher.  Perhaps Mrs. Jacobson was a member of NAACP or affiliated in someway, hence a co-conspirator.  I was astounded by the urgency of the guy’s presence while it seemed that the two were acquainted.  At one point I blurted out that he wasn’t a student for which I was physically threated by this giant.  As he was a foot and half taller than myself and four time my weight I chose to make discretion the better part of valor.

When we were playing football with Saginaw High their all Black team was well over eighteen year old  semi-pro players.  Fortunately they were more intent on beating up White kids than winning the game so Arthur Hill miraculously won the game but limped and crawled back to the West Side.  Saginaw was an industrial magnet so there was a steady stream of both White and Black migrants from the South moving North of which Saginaw got its share.  Now, you can say what you want about a Mississippi education vs. the North but the White emigrants had no trouble meeting educational standards and blending right in while the Black emigrants from, say, Mississippi, could not meet educational standards but blended in perfectly with the Black population.  Both were equal within their respective race.

I, therefore, concluded that there were inherent differences of intellectual capabilities since Mississippi was alleged  to have the most wretched educational system in the US; while, on the other hand, the cultural differences were so deep and apparent while  reinforced by  social separation that I realized that it would be decades, if ever, that any integration could take place.  However, the Blacks were not disposed to wait but wanted social and intellectual equality if not supremacy.  The only result could be the dumbing down of the educational system.

At that time reparations was not an issue but when they did become one it became apparent that the only acceptable reparation would be the enslavement of Whites to Blacks.

I took a deep breath figuring the future was going to be impossible and I have been proven right.  War is hell and the race war began with the Brown Board of Education decision backed by the full military force of the US Government, tanks and all.  Blacks may have been inferior in numbers but the full backing of the military and Judicial System the Whites were cowed.

Bob Dylan, the subject of this article lived away up North on the Canadian border in Hibbing Minnesota, just below Duluth on the Iron Range.  US ore deposits were exhausted because of FDR’s stripping the country of its mineral resources to be deployed in foreign wars not only supplying the entire continent of Europe but the teeming millions of China and Far East.  FDR was a wastrel without a grain of common sense.

Hibbing was in full decline.  The town apparently had no Negroes but was populated by a variety of European immigrants, at that time first, second and third generation.  Bob was part of the Jewish segment numbering three or four hundred people.  His parents were Orthodox Jews, his father representing  the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

The commercial life of Hibbing was in the hands of the Jews so that there was some hostility, perhaps more than anyone wants to discuss, between the two factions.  One gathers that Bob’s father was aggressively Jewish and was resented by the non-Jews.   Consequently Bob had a rough time growing up.  Pictures show him just as an ordinary middle class kid rather preppy and chubby wearing penny loafers.  An emasculated kid’s gear.  At the same time he is described as a wild kid and rather hoody.  Hard to recognize the one style in the other in the pictures.  Certainly in New York he assumed the scruff character.  This latter description would square with his account that he was sent to reform school at Redwing, Minnesota on highway 61.

On the other hand when he had married Sara Lowndes and was living in Woodstock he reverted to the preppy style he had in Hibbing.  After replenishing the earth with four offspring according to biblical requirements he reverted to the scruff personality and went back on the road to resume being the real Bob Dylan.

In 1961 he left Minnesota for the Big Bagel, New York City to make it as a folk musician.  I haven’t seen any of his biographers give him credit for this but the move was both intelligent and quite nervy.  In order to make it in the music business in 1960 New York City was the winnowing site.  The recording industry hadn’t yet surfaced in LA although it would begin to do so soon so it was impossible to get attention anywhere else except maybe Nashville if you were Country.  So Bob took on the Big Bagel and succeeded gloriously.

Rather than just show up in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian center of the US located in lower Manhattan, with the rest of the arriving Greenies he chose to take a couple months  to scope out the scene and plan his attack.  Good strategic move.

I don’t know whether they still do it but every year a contingent arrived from smaller locations in the US where their life style wasn’t accepted, i.e. they were homosexuals or there was no future where they were.  NYC absorbed them all.

Now, this is incredible, Bob says that to make ends meet he became a male prostitute, what Heylin calls a ‘rent’ boy using British terminology.  Heylin, like me, is incredulous, however one would think that such activity would be the last thing one would admit, true or false.  Thus, I have to take Bob at his word in this case although the history of himself that he related to his fellow folkies was pure fabrication.   

Bob arrived in New York as the Negro Revolution was reaching an early apex, only seven years after Brown.  While scoping out the scene he quickly realized the Village was a Jewish, Left and homosexual scene and that a Negro revolution was going on that had to be catered to.  Whether his work on 42^nd St. came in handy isn’t known.  It was known that he was a complete womanizer.

However Bob’s musical education was rooted in Country and Western.  Having read many biographies, I see this aspect of his background, if noticed, passed over.  I am three years older than Bob born on May 26, 1938 while we both came from the same record listening background.  We both have nearly identical mental catalogs of Country/Hillbilly songs.  If you want to notice the importance of his C&W background notice that after he came back from his nervous breakdown in 1967 John Wesley Harding was as a country singer and on his Nashville Skyline album he tips his cowboy hat with a howdy and I’m just a C&W singer look.  He didn’t write that out but that was the import of the picture.

Bob was ideally placed for radio reception of the great Country stations in Hibbing that blasted up from the South and Mexico/Del Rio Texas. (www.THERADIOHISTORIAN.org/xer/xer.hdml)  The station had the best C&W going while the ads touted the most amazing stuff you’ve ever heard and there were lots of items.  Another great station operated out of Waterloo Iowa also with the greatest ads ever.  Moving slightly East, maybe not so convenient for Hibbing Minnesota was the fantastic WCKY-WCincinnatiKentucky.  I could get a staticky Wheeling West Virginia that played the real mountain music.  Bob and his biographer always mention Shreveport Louisiana, home of the Louisiana Hayride but the reception was too poor for me.

I lived in Saginaw, Michigan, son of a hillbilly as the Southern Whites and Blacks came North for jobs.  Hillbilly music was despised.  I mean you didn’t mention you listened to it or you were blacklisted.   Black music was not heard or listened to except for a few White Negroes. Even Detroit, that heavily Black city only played a half hour show that I tuned into a few times but Black music was too foreign for my tastes.  Ertha Kitt and Harry Belafonte were popular Black performers but their music was no way related to Black music, nor was that very popular Black group, The Platters.

The first Black artist to break on through to the other side was the incredible Little Richard.  He blazed a trail that Black artists could follow.

Little Richard unbuckled his seat belt in 2020 at the age of 87 heading for the Top 10 in the sky.  He claimed that he was the inspiration for James brown and many others.  Brown never really broke through, as James Brown and His Famous Flames of the mid-fifties he was going nowhere.  Then, about 1960 Berry Gordy came up with a successful formula for Black music.

When Bob says that back in Hibbing he had been into R&B, other than Little Richard, I don’t believe him. His Hibbing radio station was totally middle of the road.  His Rainy Day Women off his Blonde On Blonde album was his version of Little Richard’s breakthrough Tutti Frutti, very nearly as astonishing.

So, when he got to NYC he had a lot of catching up to do.  It was right about the time he reached NYC that CBS released the two  Robert Johnson LPs that began to turn White bluesmen’s heads.  It should be borne in mind that as important as Johnson’s records are touted to be absolutely no one in the general population ever heard of him and still have never listened to the records as late as 1970 and possibly ever.  Outside of a very limited circle he was unnoticed.  Blues artists may have imitated him to some extent but Johnson inspired no one at the time.

Dylan however says he listened to the albums a couple times and was ecstatic.  Don’t try to find too much Johnson in his music though.  Remember that he recruited Mike Bloomfield, a notable Blues guitarist to play for him then told him not to play that Blues shit but to be more country.  When you’re listening to Bob you’re listening to transmogrified Country.  Once Bob hit his stride with Bringing It All Back Home I loved his stuff.

Back to NYC Folk Music, the most boring stuff ever recorded.  Race is central to understand the US.  New York City was a Jewish town.  It had the largest colony of Jews anywhere in the world.  The Jews looked on NYC as the New Promised Land.  It was theirs.

Sitting in NYC and despising anything South and West as all New Yorkers do, or did, they looked out at the hillbillies and country folk and laughed as considering them less than human but listening to the music they played from a musicological point of view they thought that they may be dopey but they sure liked the music but that it should be altered to Jewish tastes.  And they were right about the music but wrong about the people.

That is another matter but let’s look at it anyway.  Social attitudes have been altered completely since 1950-60 which period is involved here.  The old country and Hillbilly people have disappeared today subsumed in modern culture but at the time the Hillfolk were considered great comic material.  Al Capp was foremost with his Li’l Abner comic strip in which he was quite vicious in demeaning  the country he called Dogpatch.  At the same time the Barney Google comic strip laughed at the hill people.  The great Gasoline Alley strip laughed at Urbanbillies.

The most demeaning of all was the two books of a creep called Erskine Caldwell.  His books were Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre.  They were positively evil and ‘cultured’ people accepted them at face value while the characterization of the impoverished White formed the image of ‘ignorant’ Whites that persists to this day.  Caldwell was indelible moreso than Al Capp. 

The persona adopted by Dylan, ironically himself a Jew, was that of the despised Hillbilly.  An Okie, the likes of those who invaded LA and Bakersfield/Fresno during the Dust Bowl and Depression.

So, New Yorkers discovered Hillbilly music and Southern Black music at the same time.  They revered Black music that was just as or more eccentric as Hillbilly while the Black people were more acceptable than the White Hillbilly.  No matter they altered the Blues as well as Hillbilly.  Actually both were closely related but done in a different way.  Jewish musicologists grabbed their bulky primitive recording equipment and headed South to record these precious musics before they were papered over by the hand of time.  Most of this was done during the thirties of the Roosevelt years.

If a Black guy was singing some pop song they’d never heard before they threw down their machine, handed the singer a microphone and said Sing into that.  Coming from NYC there was a lot they didn’t know but they weren’t aware of that.  If the Blacks weren’t totally up to date they weren’t hanging back either.  It was that they talked as funny as the White Hillbillies but with a different accent.  The Southerners came from the English/Scottish Border country primarily during the eighteenth century and spoke the uneducated English of their time which was then picked up by the Negroes and became their standard English.  Remember these people came direct from Africa and learned the English the Southern Whites were speaking at the time.  The Negro dialect that sounded funny in the twentieth century was the same English spoken by most of the English of the eighteenth century.

The tapes or records came back to NYC and these Jewish gentlefolk were appalled by the appearance of the singers but liked the songs that they turned down in their originals then adapting the music for Jewish tastes.   They made it pretty boring stuff.  Their crap was going nowhere  until Little Richard Redux in the person of Bob Dylan showed and put some life into them.  It was easy, wasn’t it Bob?

There is some discussion of when Bob decided to go electric.  That is to abandon NYC folk and play the pseudo Hillbilly music that he loved.  When CBS, the label that signed him to promote his first album he came up with a raucus something that was a cross between Sun Records and Little Richard  in his hokey Okie voice called Mixed Up Confusion.  In the lyrics he confesses that his mind, is mixed up and confused.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH2hyQeZo1U

Bob would later confess that the Folk thing was a shuck.  In slang shuck means to deceive and manipulate.  He also said that he chose folk as entry point because it was vacant at the time meaning there was little competition at that time and it was a surreal time in which all the rules were suspended, which was true.  If the folkies could be wowed by songs like Masters of War and God Is On Our Side,  the whole act was vacant and beneath notice which in 1963 was exactly as I saw it.  Bob used the scene as a stepping stone and it worked.

The miracle is that while appearing talentless in 1960, 61, 62, 63 and part of 64 he was able to put together a supreme act for an audience of limited appeal.  What he considers his two song masterpieces, Positively Fourth Street and Like A Rolling Stone are vindictive and nasty in tone, possibly for that reason pulled from Top 40 radio.  The two songs were strong variations of Mixed Up Confusion.  This was not music for general public and for that reason for all the noise Bob made he didn’t sell all that well.  He really wasn’t in the same league as the Beatles.

It is hard to understand the milieux in which the Beatles and Dylan became celebrated.  One is led to believe that there was something out of the ordinary or different to the tremendous buildup the two acts received.  For a couple years nearly every move they made was broadcast worldwide on television news channels.  And one must remember these were acts- shucks.  There may be something to the notion that the world wanted relief from the events surrounding the period of the Kennedy assassination.  Perhaps that even presaged the end of an epoch and the beginning of another. Perhaps when the Beatles emerged from the plane it was the annunciation of a new epoch. Perhaps it represented the end of the Roosevelt reaction to the Gilded Age.

In 1958/59 the mob backed singers Fabian and Frankie Avalon received the same buildup.  Of course, they were Mafia backed with no performing background, non-singers as it were, who needed the buildup to recover the mob investment.  The Beatles and Dylan were authentic acts before their wild promotion.  So far as I know Fabian was the first of the buildups and except for young girls, at whom his career was directed, he was a non-entity.

There was a difference in the build up of the Beatles and Dylan.  The Beatles were a proven commodity in Great Britain while when their LP was released in the US on a minor label it was a failure.  Certainly the Beatles were surprised, even amazed, by their reception in the US at the NYC Idlewild airport.  It was like people, young people at least, were looking for a savior.

The Beatles English record label EMI’s US subsidiary Capitol Records was ordered to pull out all the stops to make the Beatles a smash and Capitol did.  A trainload of girls was recruited  at the airport to give the Beatles a screaming reception.  These four guys stepped off the plane looking like four ordinary yobbos (British for punks), gazed in wonderment and right before our eyes transmogrified into the Beatles, the saviors of the world.  Soon Lennon would make the mistake of announcing that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.  That’s when their heartaches began.  They went away from the US and never again returned.  But they still were the Beatles and that long strange trip into the Sixties began.

Dylan was another case, he was a beat up homme, fairly thoroughly emasculated as was Lennon.  He covered that up with a sort of comic bluster.  I refer you again to Mixed Up Confusion.  It was even more difficult to explain the media attention that Bob got.  He was an American version of the yobbo.  Both the Beatles and Dylan had nothing to offer for their sanctity other than a few songs.

With the example of the Beatles before them, all the groups who were part of the British Invasion exalted themselves as the bearers of a New Dispensation, and yea verily, we believed it, as did the most prominent of the American groups after 1966 with the exception of the Monkees who were a made up corporate shuck with songs from professional song writers hence not to be taken seriously.  They were all yobbos and leaders in that revolution.

The loyalty was to the Beatles and Dylan.  Being so rapidly exalted, well above their status in life, going from poverty to millions upon millions of dollars, had a devastating effect on their personalities.  The Beatles, with the exception of Lennon with his Jesus fixation, handled the fame, the situation well with cool heads, or seemingly so.  Dylan had a very difficult time of it.  That problem is the central issue of Clinton Heylin’s The Double Life of Bob Dylan.  Heylin chronicles Dylan’s descent to his nervous breakdown in 1966 when Dylan was overwhelmed by difficulties of fame.  Essentially he retired from the business at the height of his fame after composing the three records that indelibly established his reputation as a savior:  Bringin’ It All Back Home, Highway ’61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde.  The Lyrics sounded deep and knowing but meant nothing, reflections on his sex life, while the music sounded new and exciting.  Without electricity Bob was dull.

If you want to see the real Bob Dylan, reverting in 1964-65 you need to watch the Pennebaker film Don’t Look Back in its original form before Bob suppressed it and replaced it with different material.  Pennebaker’s version is an accurate portrayal of the actual situation if you analyze it nearly frame by frame.  In the movie Dylan and his yobbo entourage are staying at London’s premier Savoy Hotel.  Loaded on booze and drugs the raucous party is disturbing the sedate hotel.  I stayed there once, didn’t like it. 

Now these yobbos are completely out of their element and wish to show their disdain for ‘the rich.’  A couple loonies decide to throw the glass shelves from the bathroom out the window into the street.  Dylan completely drops his disguise shedding his entire Bob Dylan persona to return to the emasculated Bobby Zimmerman as he pleaded with them to not do that. Groups were famous at the time for trashing hotels and they were going to trash the Savoy.  Very uncool.  That is the real personality behind, as Heylin would say, the shades.  The situation deteriorates badly when the manager comes up to request that they hold it down.  Naturally the yobbos start taunting the guy.  Only Dylan’s reputation and perhaps Grossman’s  intervention save Dylan from being expelled from the hotel.

So, Robert Zimmerman had to develop and then had to maintain the character of Bob Dylan that Zimmerman had created.  He became increasingly distressed as he realized his dream augment by massive does of alcohol and drugs.  Alcohol had been a problem since high school.  Some say he was a heroin addict and I’m sure he dabbled but his main drug was the drug of NYC, methamphetamines.  

As far as amphetamines went Bob was violating no laws. Amphetamines were legal to 1967 a year after Bob broke down.  NYC was awash in amphetamines.  Andy Warhol’s crowd at the Factory lived on the drug until that scene too crashed, worn out by exhausting agitation.  Several Dr. Feelgoods, led by Max Jacobson who injected then president Jack Kennedy, a true meth head, and everyone who was anyone.  Jacobson’s history is very interesting.  Read Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes, Dr. Feelgood:  The Shocking Story of the Doctor Who May Have Changed History.

Jacobson had combined meth with vitamins in his massive shot.  It was apparently believed that the vitamins negated the deleterious effects of the amphetamines.  Many were the celebrities who discovered otherwise.

As Bob was headed to his confrontation with the realities of fame and its obligations, the whole of the rock scene, the hippies, what was known as the counterculture was also dealing with harsh realities and not doing it very well.  Bob, at least, realized his limitations thus relying almost completely on the integrity of his manager, Albert Grossman who was betraying his trust as he found otherwise. 

In the early years of his success he refused to deal with monetary matters leaving them up to Grossman.  Dylan wisely wanted to concentrate on building his career of song writing on which, after all, his career rested.  An artist’s obligation is to his art and there isn’t time or space in his life to trifle with mundane matters.

Grossman like all managers was seduced by the huge amounts of money he was dealing with and like Elvis’ manager Colonel Parker he wanted a bigger and bigger percentage and finally Parker and all other managers cursed their unlucky star that they couldn’t have it all.  With Parker and Elvis the day of reckoning never came; with Bobby his eyes were opened with the inevitable feeling of betrayal.

Unlike most managers Grossman didn’t necessarily make Bob as Bob proved himself a major talent.  The raw material was there but it had to be made accessible.  Bear in mind this is a Jewish affair.  Bob surrounded himself with his fellow Jews while his fellow Jews sought him out.  Bob at one time was associating with the notorious terrorist unit the Jewish Defense League and the criminal Jewish Defense Organization.

Bob’s performance and voice would have depressed his chances had not his song writing saved him.  Now, in the music business song writing royalties is where the money is.  BMI and ASCAP are the two organizations that monitor and collect the royalties distributing them to the writers, after skimming the top of course.  That is they get paid 50% of the royalties and writers share is 50%.  Grossman’s deal with Dylan was a 50-50 share of the remaining 50%.  That is each was to get 25% of their 50%.  Then in violating Dylan’s trust Grossman also took 50% of Dylan’s 25% share of the whole leaving Dylan with just 12 and a half percent of the 100 percent.  When Dylan was finally convinced that Grossman would do this to him the split occurred.

Now, put in terms of a gold mine Dylan was the goldmine.  Grossman was the extractor and refiner.  Grossman did work like a beaver and got Dylan’s songs into so many cracks and crannies that he fairly earned his twenty-five percent but an extractor and refiner has nothing to do without a gold mine.  Grossman was a prospector who found the mine and wanted all.  But, all artists get screwed by their managers either intentionally or inadvertently.   Some say Grossman made Dylan.  The fact is Dylan might never have made it without Grossman’s management.

By 1966 Dylan was worn out and knew that he was at the end of his rope and then he learned that Grossman, perhaps wisely believing that one should make hay while the sun shone, lined up a string of dates that when Dylan saw it he knew he could never make it through.  He hit the wall.  I can’t be certain that I detect a note of glee in Heylin’s literary voice but he does cut the story off there.  Bob Dylan the First was dead.  He was no longer busy being born he was among the walking dead.

He retreated to Woodstock, marriage and fatherhood while he reorganized his mind to be reborn.  However, his muse had left him never to return.  The second Bob Dylan was on a long weary trail when he abandoned his wife to renew the endless search for a new self. During the seventies and eighties he wandered but without a muse was not very interesting.  Then in desperation he became a wandering minstrel on his Never Ending Tour.

That tour ended in 2019 destroyed by a virus.  I earlier in the essay said that I didn’t think he would resume performing.  Just a few days ago I received an email from BobDylan.com advising that Bob was going to stream a concert on 7/18/21.  Tickets were priced just short of thirty dollars.  I bought one.