Note #21, George W. M. Reynolds And Numbers
September 15, 2022
Note #21
George W. M. Reynolds And Numbers
by
R.E. Prindle
While no records appear to exist concerning actual number of copies sold to make Geoge the most popular author of the nineteenth century as is claimed, he does tell us this in The Mysteries Of The Court Of London, Vol. III, Rose Foster, Part 2, p.91:
Quote:
Attired in an elegant deshabille, the beauteous patrician lady was now reclining in an armchair placed at a short distance from the cheerful fire in her bedroom; and when the Earl was readmitted to the chamber and the attendant’s had withdrawn, he availed himself of this opportunity to make revelations which were perhaps less anticipated by his wife than they are by any one of the two hundred thousand readers of this narrative.
Unquote.
So, George interjects himself into the narrative to claim 200,000 readers a week. As it was only claimed that forty thousand or so read The Mysteries Of London per week, and that was considered sensational, it would seem that the popularity of this work must have made it a sensation appearing every week for eight years. It must have worked its way into the consciousness of a substantial slice of England.
Its popularity must have been sustained as by 1909 it was the only work of George’s sill available and that magnificently so. It would appear that Boston USA contained wild Reynolds enthusiasts. By Bostonians an Oxford Society was established that published the work in many editions at the same time, some limited some not.
Of course Reynolds had been a mainstay in the US almost from his first book The Youthful Impostor published in the US in 1836. A major reprint publisher T.B. Peterson of Philadelphia maintained a substantial selection of Reynolds efforts all the way through the eighties. US publishers were mainly interested in Court of London which they divided in strange ways. Peterson published Rose Foster as one volume while making several volumes of others. Peterson, but there were many other publishers also, especially esteemed Series IV The Fortunes Of The Ashtons under several different titles.
Perhaps then the Oxford Society had a fairly strong base to publish what they called The Works that were only The Mysteries of the Court of London. At one point the Oxford Society had a sales office in London and then later combined with the Burton Society, also located in Boston USA.
There are Limited, DeLuxe, cheap hard back and a very nice flexible back editions. Most in ten volume editions and one, at least, in a deluxe five double volumes. Really amazing. Thus, in the early twentieth century then, the Oxford enterprise believed that some several thousand ten volume sets could be sold. Sales were probably active until 1914 when WWI began but when the war ended Reynolds was completely forgotten until fairly recently when interest was revived. This seems rather strange because as late as 1959 I was able to buy Reynolds Newspaper in San Francisco while there was a number of people who revered him as a very radical publisher.
With the print on demand revolution many more titles have bee made available. However they are all facsimile, hence in very small print and double columns but, nice illustrations.
At least we know that Court of London had 200,000 readers a week according to George. If we knew the social status of the buyers that would be nice. At present it is assumed that the lower classes of England were the chief customers. I would question that.
The quality of Reynolds writing is erudite, the vocabulary is extensive and the complexity requires a very literate readership, and not that of the newly literate. England was only about 50% literate at the time. Remember there are degrees of literacy so 200,000 readers would include a very significant portion of the affluent and upper classes.
Of the Oxford Society editions, ten volume sets are not sold to low earners. You have to be fairly comfortable and well educated to afford those. Remember, Boston USA was perhaps the most cultivated city in the US and probably the most Anglophile. Home to Harvard University and the snob capital of America. Reynolds did appeal not only to the impoverished slum dwellers but also to the elite. Over a period of eight years of weekly installments the impact of the novel must have been enormous. Imagine the popularity of Downton Abbey on today’s TV.
History In Its Fullness
November 15, 2021
History In Its Fullness
Origins Of World War One And Two
by
R.E. Prindle
In Flanders Fields
By John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If we break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Prologue.
The above verse was written to honor those fallen in WWI, known as the Great War before WWII. The carnage was terrible. Between seven and eleven million soldiers would die many of them buried in the immense military cemetery of Flanders Fields. As many as forty million Europeans as a direct consequence: A true holocaust and a preliminary to a worse twenty years later, I do not refer to the collateral deaths of the six million.
Oh, sure. ‘History’ tells us that an Austrian Prince was assassinated and that was the cause of the war. That’s a sort of historical white lie. The Prince’s assassination catalyzed the war but it didn’t cause it. The primary cause was racial enmity and the origin was the execution of a Jewish political criminal in 1740.
Because of that execution a series of bloody revolutions occurred killing millions more. 1789,1830,1848. After the ’48 failed the revolutionists determined that a change of tactics was necessary. Then began an asymmetric war of assassination and agitation. Dozens of prominent politicians and significant people hit the ground over the next 50-60 years. The conspirators meant to have a war and by 1914 they had it. The assassinated Prince was the excuse but not the cause.
What caused the war? Race. A long train of events that began, for our purposes on the lone figure of a man hanging from the gallows in an iron cage thirty full feet from the ground. A heinous execution for a multitude of heinous crimes. That man was named Joseph Suss Oppenheimer, by race a Jew. Let us trace the clues that link Suss as the cause of the genocidal two European wars of the twentieth century.
1,
Grievance on Grievance
All EuroAmerican history has been falsified due to the historical sin of omission. While all the actions of all nations but one have been taken into account the deeds of the Jews have been omitted or, at least, misrepresented. Yet the Jews have been most influential of all the nations. That’s an anomaly that demands explanation.
They have and had the smallest population while having no homeland other than the whole of Europe and North America throughout which they were scattered. Sound contradictory? It’s not. While spread primarily over the two continents the Jews maintained a tightly knit group of, essentially, conspirators. They existed under two legal systems, theirs and the gentiles with theirs being supreme in their eyes. The Gentiles had only one which put them to the disadvantage. The Jews could claim two loyalties but theirs took precedence in their eyes.
Their prophet or failed messiah, Sigmund Freud, proclaimed the method of group psychology and its analysis so that any coherent groups’ activities, patterns, can be determined and analyzed. Their psychology is based on the notion of being completely distinct from all other races while their sense of superiority is based on the notion that they were the selector’s choice of all the peoples God created. That is God, himself, did this. As above, so below. God would sometimes come down and have a chat with them. At one time he chatted and pilpuled with his favorite, Abram.
The problem was that no other people believed this story hence they didn’t give the Jews the respect that they thought they commanded. Hence, further, a grievance. One history of the Jews is a list of their grievances. There were many, many, and all had to be revenged. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. God didn’t go along with this last item. He admonished his people that revenge was his prerogative. Revenge belongs to me, saith the Lord. The Jews have disregarded that injunction, preferring their own adage.
Thus the grievance list and their remedy grew. The preferred remedy was genocide. Kill them all. Perhaps first on the list were the Amalekites. For the trivial offence of not allowing the long Jewish train of migrants roaming the desert to pass through their tiny country they were exterminated man, woman and child. No one has seen an Amalekite for thousands of years now.
The particular grievance with the Amalekites was settled rather quickly but as we will see some took perhaps a couple thousand years one that ended in Flanders Fields.
Speaking of more recent grievances that can be grouped under WWI and II let us choose a beginning point of 1290 which was the time that they were expelled lock, stock, and barrel from the Kingdom of England. Woah, that one wasn’t forgotten and it took to world wars to resolve that. Soon after King Philip Le Bel of France expelled his Jews in 1307.
The Jewish relations with the Germans had always been troubled. First they expelled, then let back in, then expelled again. A very frustrating experience. Of course, it was always the fault of the English, French or Germans, never their own activities. The Catholic Church had inadvertently given them a monopoly on usury when it forbade Europeans to loan at interest. Not a realistic ban, on the score of giving the monopoly to the Jews or in developing the economy.
The Jews had taken full advantage of the privilege and were well on the way to confiscation of the wealth of the continent when Napoleon put a stop to it. The Jews lost their monopoly but retained their souls.
Time, the tides and evolution wait on no man, so over these years and centuries we’re discussing, European society developed at a very rapid rate. Might not seem so if you were living during those centuries but it was.so.
The last major expulsion of the Jews took place in 1492 when the Visigoths reconquered the final bit of Moorish territory of Granada. The Victorious Visigoths gave the Moors and Jews the choice of accepting Christianity or being expelled. Many stayed and many left. But after England, France and Germany Spain was the last straw. This was one grievance too far so condign vengeance was declared. This meant one thing: Genocide. The Jews would seethe for four hundred years until…Der Tag.
In the interim there was a lot of life to live. Some twenty-six years in 1517after Spain, the Catholic priest, Martin Luther would rebel against the Church posting his 96 theses and setting off a train of disasters that would result in modern Europe. The Central European religious war as ferocious. Catholics vs. Protestants. This was the famous Thirty Years War that nearly depopulated Germany. You can believe that Central Europe was shattered, the economic system destroyed by 1648 when peace was finally established. Peace of a sort.
Central Europe was impoverished, principalities were small yet political and economic matters were European wide. The aristocrats savagely suppressed serfs, common people, denying them of educations. Only one people could operate over across the borders of Europe and that people was the Jews. So, a relationship developed between the rulers and Jews. The Court Jews provided the essential services of acquisition and distribution. A temporary institution grew up know as Court Jews. They were dependent on the rulers but operated between the rulers and the peoples as a semi-autonomous people but solely able to accumulate wealth..
The factors, or merchants skinned the rulers, their profits were fabulous. In many cases a factor might have an equally fabulous personal establishment as the rulers, sometimes better. Thus, though always separate this separation was more conspicuous as the war ravaged Germans began to rebuild from scratch. Then along came Suss in the 1730s in the German State of Wurttemberg. Here’s our culprit. Suss singlehandedly changed the equation between the Court Jews, he being one, and the rulers. Previously to Suss the rulers had the upper hand. When the factors flaunted their wealth too conspiculously the rulers simply repudiated their debts leaving the factors roaming the streets.
Repudiating the debt may sound extreme but so was the greed of the factors. Their activities was essentially a transfer of the wealth from the rulers to themselves. All the money was ending up in their hands. So an economic redistribution of the wealth was necessary, one might say inevitable.
Enter Suss. The wily Suss, the clever Suss. He was the Court Jew, or factor, for Duke Karl Alexander of the largish State of Wurttemberg in Southern Germany next to Bavaria. Within a very short time, his tenure was only four years he inveigled what we would call a Power of Attorney from the Duke to function essentially as a co-ruler. Within the space of a few years he committed enormous crimes appropriating the wealth of the Wurttembergers for his own use enraging the citizens. Then the Duke unexpectedly died. Suss was arrested tried and executed in an ignoble fashion. This infuriated the Jews already smarting from all the expulsions. Suddenly a plan gelled in their minds.
In the seventeenth century Cromwell of England readmitted the Jews to England. In the late eighteenth century Napoleon emancipated the Jews. That is they allowed to function as citizens without disabilities. But Napoleon demanded a quid pro quo, essentially that the Jews would amalgamate with the French to become one culture but retaining their ‘religion.’ Needless to say, the Jews took the emancipation but reneged on amalgamating with the French. But, how could they? In their terms they were a separate and peculiar people.
Now, about 1800 is when Europe’s troubles really began. After emancipation the Jews immediately set out to revolutionize Europe, that is, to become the rulers.
The Napoleonic emancipation was meant to cover all Europe. Emancipation was complete in the French territories but advanced more slowly beyond the French borders. By mid-century it was more or less complete. Then a new player entered the field, that being the United States of America. Refugees from the ’48 flooded into the US and prospered. Post-Civil War they were well established. Technological inventions opened vast new fields for them. For an instance, the sewing machine changed the way people obtained their clothes. The machines made mass production possible so that when hordes of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe began what amounted to an invasion, the masses of people could find ready employment.
In imitation of the Freemasonic Order, in 1843 the Jews created the Order of the B’nai B’rith which was strictly limited to Jews. Once established the Order became international and was exported to Europe and soon had lodges in all countries. Now coordination of activities became a simple matter from centers of conspiracy. In 1895 the psychologist Sigmund Freud joined the Vienna Lodge where he lectured the faithful on his findings to psychologically manipulate masses, whole countries..
Unlike the goyim the Jews did not reject his findings but embraced them. It was in the B’nai Brith lodge that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were composed during the first Zionist convention in 1897. Freud and Zionism were the steroids needed to produce the Russian Revolution of 1903-05 and the Soviet Revolution of 1917.
Two other events in the wake of Suss formed the Revolution. One was the birth of Meyer Amschel Rothschild of Frankfort just above Stuttgart, Wurttemberg. Suss was from Frankfort, the center of Jewish conspiracy in Europe. After establishing himself as the Duke’s alter ego he spent much time in Frankfort organizing his people. From there he toured London and Paris before meeting his fate. Meyer must have been raised on stories of Suss. He accordingly made plans. As he had five sons, his legendary five arrows, he indoctrinated them in the plan to conquer Europe. As they came of age he sent them to five European capitals from which as kings of usury they controlled or influenced the currencies.
The two most important countries were, of course, France and England, the West of Europe. His son, Nathan, was sent to England while the youngest James went to Paris, the two most important posts.
Being outside Continental Europe England was not affected by the emancipation, in fact English Jews had never been under European style disabilities although along with the Catholics and Dissenters they had limited civil disabilities that put an arms length between themselves and the English. Two nations.
Remember that in addition to Suss France, England and the German principalities had all expelled the Jews and those expulsions had to be avenged.
In 1804 an English avenger was born in the person of Benjamin Disraeli. He was tutored by his father Isaac to be a man of vengeance. To avoid the civil disabilities Isaac himself gave the appearance of rejecting Judaism so that he could find success as a writer at which he succeeded. So that his son Benjamin could function as an English citizen with full rights he had Ben baptized. So while he remained racially stoutly Jewish he could function as a Christian and a mole. When Benjamin came of age he began writing tracts that passed as novels. From1826 to 1836 he established a reasonably good reputation as a novelist. In 1837 he was elected to Parliament. The mole was in place.
Now, Nathan Rothschild who founded the English branch of the clan arrived in England in 1795 with the intent to prosper in the burgeoning textile industry. He failed to make his mark and so went through a rough period during which he became a successful smuggler and apparently made some money which led him to become a banker. His muse was sitting on his shoulder so that in 1807 he scored a coup that gave him some substantiality. By this time his brother James was establishing himself in France, Paris.
Napoleon involved himself in a war in Spain so that the English intervened through Portugal to aid the Spanish. The English General Wellington became strapped for cash to pay the troops and to obtain supplies. Nathan supplied the gold which then had to be sent to Spain.
Even though Napoleon had emancipated the Jews making them French citizens with full rights, and even though part of that deal was that the Jews would give up their evil ways and become truly amalgamated with the French, Nathan and James conspired to use Nathan’s smuggling skills to move the gold through France to Spain helping the English to defeat Napoleon. That avenged themselves a little on France but not enough.
Then in 18i4 as Napoleon and Wellington faced off on the battlefield of Waterloo Nathan performed perhaps the greatest coup in history. He realized that the English currency could be manipulated to his advantage if he could get the news of victory or defeat first. He did. He knew it was victory but circulated the verdict as defeat amongst the City stock brokers. A panic ensued, stock prices plummeted and as they did Nathan Rothschild bought every share he could so that when the official news of victory arrived Nathan had captured the currency of England. He was then far and away the richest man in England. His muse had caressed him; he was on the way and didn’t have to look back. England belonged to the Jews but there was still the problem of civil disabilities and the English were not going to grant them easily and they never did during Nathan’s lifetime. It would take his fully capable son Lionel to do that in collaboration with Benjamin Disraeli in1858..
Whither Europe?
As the nineteenth century began the future was momentous for Europe including North America. An asymmetric war was in process. The Europeans blinded themselves to the actual situation. Disraeli mentioned once that there was a tussle going on between the Rothschilds and the Secret Societies. Robert Blake in his biography of Disraeli scoffs at the notion, as probably Dizzies contemporaries did, thinking that he was deluded. However, Disraeli was receiving information from two different sources, the European conventional sources in which he was directly involved and influencing and the Jewish/Rothschild sources. He thus had a tremendous advantage among the Parliamentarians using sources they didn’t have while at the same time giving inside information to the Rothschilds for whom he served as a mole. A telling anecdote is that on a mission to Paris he was introduced to James Rothschild, the French patriarch. James casually mentioned to Dizzy: I believe you know my nephew, meaning Lionel. Hearing that Dizzy could lean back and feel comfortable. He was included.
He thus had obligations to fulfill. Europeans always wondered how the Jews were so well informed, seeming to have the news before it even took place. They always had men in high places, some were bought while the Jewish officials just shunted the info over. The mistake the French made in the Dreyfus Affair of the nineteens was to accuse him of channeling info to the Germans. The route was Dreyfus to the Synagogue and from there to the Germans or whoever the Synagogue thought fit. So it was with Johnthan Pollard in the US during the latter part of the twentieth century. Pollard funneled reams of material to the Israelis and they used it to their advantage regardless to whom. The info was disastrous for the US Intelligence agencies so much so that Pollard, a Jew, was given a life time sentence. Needless to say, his people got him out after twenty-five years and he went to Israel with whatever else he knew.
The Jews thought that anyone who would put their enemy into positions, such as Prime Minister or inside Intelligence Agencies, must be crazy and they were right.
Disraeli, himself, was a very nasty piece. Naturally, as a foreigner, and Jews were considered foreigners, Disraeli endured slights and affronts. He was asked what he did to retaliate. He said he never carried a grudge, he said that he just brushed them off. He noted their names and wrote them on a piece of paper, put the paper in a box, which must have been chock full and when he looked in the box again, he found that his offenders had disappeared. One can’t know exactly what he meant by that, whether by magic they had slipped from notice or they had serious ‘accidents’ and crossed the bar. I can only speculate but when his closest associate, George Bentinck, died shortly after reaching his and Disrraeli’s objective he disappeared so that Disraeli was able to seize leadership of the party. I think Disraeli’s life was filled with such coincidences. You simply didn’t want to stand in his way.
The same goes for his fellow Jews. If someone was in the way they were eliminated in one way or another. Hence the horrendous list of assassinations after the ’48 and into the war years of WWI and WWII which make up a thirty years war. The asymmetric war then was on. The Jews, the instigator knew it, but the Europeans were slow to catch on. The Jewish bete noir, Germany, was the only country who caught on or at least said they did.
Why Germany? The answer is Jud Suss. Because of Jud Suss, Germany had to perish. After a hundred fifty years or so, the scab covering Suss came off. As the Jews became more confident of taking Germany in the nineteen twenties the issue of Suss was revived by the Jews. They had blood in their eyes. While little information about Suss exists in the West, Lion Feuchtwanger wrote a historical novel in 1926 called simply Jud Suss, that met with great success while Selma Stern wrote a short book about the rise of the Court Jew emphasizing Suss’ career. Then in 1930 Feuchtwanger found financing and made a movie of his book also titled simply, Jud Suss; in the US it was titled Power. In addition in the US a movie was made glorifying the Rothschilds. These movies were meant to vilify the Germans.
This set off a fire storm among the National Socialists. They countered with an excellent movie on the Suss theme and then a magnificent film called The Rothschilds. Evidently in an attempt to set the record straight.
I have said that the Jews wanted to destroy Germany and the Germans lock stock and barrel. This will be unbelievable I believe to readers. However, and this is not interpretation, there was a genocidal plan to wipe the Germans and Germany from the earth that is well documented. In 1940 the plan was released through the American Jewish Committee by its operative Theodore Kaufman in a pamphlet called Germany Must Perish. This was not some off the wall publication but was distributed country wide, reviewed widely, even in Time Magazine and incorporated into Roosevelt’s post-war plans. You can buy Kaufman’s book, it’s still available.
The plan was the if you castrated all the German men, Germans would ‘disappear’ within a generation. And then German industry was to be destroyed completely and turned into a pastoral territory divided amongst the surrounding countries. This is not to be pooh poohed and taken lightly. The National Socialists did not take it lightly. I don’t know how confident they were of winning this massive war but they must have realized that with the Soviet Union on their East and the US, England and France on the West under the influence of the Jews their situation was perilous. So, this threat of genocide from the Jews was not to be taken lightly. Genocide was part of their history. Ask the Amalekites.
I don’t believe that their plan before this genocidal threat was received was to genocide the Jews, but after it was received they definitely decided to eliminate them before the Jews eliminated them. That’s called a pre-emptive strike, which the Jews always employ, and self-defense. The ugly truth comes out. The Suss execution bugged the Jews so much that the US compelled Germany to pardon Suss in the aftermath of the war. The Suss affair dominated Jewish thinking from 1740 to 1940, or 50. Germany and the Germans were almost completely destroyed in vengeance. England, the Soviet Union and the US were merely tools in the hands of the Jews.
To return to Disraeli.
To understand Disraeli one must place him in the proper perspective. He is not English, could never be English. If you’ve seen the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, compare Disraeil with the spaceman Klaatu. Klaatu looks human but he comes from an entirely different planet, a whole different mindset. He cannot think like a human. He is a stranger in a strange land as was Disraeli. His people occupied a space between the English and say, the Gypsies. He knew what the English knew and he knew what the English didn’t know. He operated in two different worlds.
Here is a quote from Disraeli’s last novel, Endymion, that illustrates the difference. Disraeli is talking about the Three Glorious Days of the July Revolution in France in 1930, Chapter VII:
Quote
The men who have won ‘three glorious days’ at Paris, want neither civilization nor religion. They will not be content till they have destroyed both.
‘It is possible,’ he continued. ‘that they may be parried for a time; that the adroit wisdom of the house of Orleans, guided by Talleyrand, may give this movement the resemblance, and even the character, of a middle class revolution. It is no such thing; the barricades were not erected by the middle class. I know these people; it is a fraternity, not a nation. Europe is honeycombed with their secret societies. They are spread all over Spain. Italy is entirely mined. I know more of the southern than the norther nations; but I have been assured, by one who should know, that the brotherhoods are organized throughout Germany and even in Russia. I have spoken to the Duke about these things. He is not indifferent, or altogether incredulous, but he is so essentially practical that he can only deal with what he sees. I have spoken to the Whig leaders. They tell me that there is only one specific, and that a complete one—constitutional government; that with representative institutions, secret societies cannot exist. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that with these secret societies representative institutions will disappear. And so they have today.
Unquote.
Roughly a hundred forty years later, that is as I write in 2021, representative institutions have all but disappeared under the influence of these secret societies. The whole notion of Republics passed through Democracy into Synarchy and that is the actual state of society today. A minority of delirious fanatics is running society.
At another time Disraeli was quoted as saying that a struggle was going on between the Rothschilds and the secret societies. Once again he was scoffed. But who should know better than he? Apparently the English secret service was not so developed as to infiltrate these secret societies. Their blindness allowed a whole new counterculture to develop that today controls the EU and the US.
The Rothschilds knew and they did have the sense to infiltrate the secret societies and indeed to take them over and turn them to Jewish uses. This still will not be believed today as researchers are dismissed as crack pot Conspiracy Theorists. There is no theory involved; it is historical fact.
So Disraeli was working in constitution government while, as he says, he knew the people he was talking about. This raises the question, how did he know them and what was his association with them. As he said that there was a struggle between them and the Rothschilds did the latter use him as an agent to deal with them? There is something here that needs to be explained. He is the most preeminent of men and he couldn’t get his message across but was allowed to run the constitutional government. Things can’t get much stranger than that.
He was routinely denounced as untrustworthy and he was untrustworthy. He repeatedly worked against English interests and in favor of Jewish interests obviously as was explained in his novel of 1847 Tancred. Few people actually read Tancred although it was in their interest to do so. Endymion was more widely read but Disraeli was dead by that time.
He was known as an expansionist and every expansion he secured weakened the British Empire a little more. He obtained a useless appendage in Cyprus that drained England (and Ireland) of more men.
Some of this is too incredible to be true. Such an incident was the acquisition of the Suez Canal Company’s shares.
A little background. None of the biographers that I have read seem to realize the connection between Disraeli and the Rothschilds. It is totally impossible that they wouldn’t have recognized that they were kindred spirits. Disdraeli himself worshipped the Rothschilds. It is highly improbable that Isaac D’Israeli and Nathan Rothschild didn’t collaborate in some fashion. Isaac’s 1933 The Genius of Judaism would indicate that. Isaac is talking about what he considers the very genius of the spirit of Judaism, without reference to any genius of individual Jews. He is also trying to break down the resistance of the English to Judaism.
Nathan Rothschild named his headquarters New Court. That is, a counter court to the Court of England. In other words he Jews were in a contest to replace the English Court. Isaac’s book is moving in the same direction. The appearance of his book in 1933 is an indication that he thought the plan was advancing. By1933 also Isaac would have thought that he could recommend Benjamin as someone to be accepted and encouraged.
Benjamin as a successful author of scandalous ‘novels’ had called attention to himself. Now after 1933 he began a number of unsuccessful attempts to enter Parliament, shifting from party to party and ideology to ideology until he was finally selected in 1937. He was permanently lodged there for the rest of his life.
Nathan died in 1936 succeeded by his son Lionel who was almost the same age as Disreali. As a member of Parliament then he was befriended by Lionel and the two began cooperating but Disraeli was necessarily the junior party. His three 1840s novels, Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred give the plan away while in his character Sidona he lauds Lionel to the skies. Even when he became the Prime Minister, a chief of England he acknowledged Lionel as his superior.
This was no more evident than in the Suez incident. To enlarge the field of action: The Rothschilds acted in concert while the English and French branches of the family were the linchpins. Nathan’s brother James in Paris died in 1866 succeeded by his sons Gustave and Alphonse. The French under De Lessups had built the canal. The canal itself was not for sale but the Suez Canal Company that operated the canal concession had issued shares, the majority of which were owned by the French, the remainder by the Khedive of Egypt. The Khedive had fallen on hard times and wanted to sell his shares for four million pounds.
It is impossible that Lionel and the Gustave and Alphonse were not in communication with each other, perhaps even to buy the shares themselves; if so they realized the impracticability of the notion.
Parliament went into recess. At this precise moment Disraeli thought it was imperative for England to acquire the shares, however as Parliament was out of session the funds could not be voted on. As Disraelj apparently thought it was imperative to get the shares acting on his own authority he went to Lionel and asked him to loan the four million pounds to England.
Disraeli, the Prime Minister of England, went to a mere usurer, which technically was all Lionel was, to ask him to loan the four million. Now, maybe I’m wrong but as Prime Minister Disraeli took precedence over a mere money merchant. Disraeli was offering the deal of a lifetime, better even than Nathan’s coup.
The Jews always talk as though they are thorough Englishmen, Germans, what have you, patriotic to the core. Lionel, coolly looked at Disraeli and asked ‘What’s your collateral?’ This is an English Patriot asking. Disraeli laughed, ‘The British Empire.’ So, this doofus Benjamin Disraeli signed a loan agreement putting the entire British Empire up as collateral for a mere four million pounds. At that point, if Parliament came back in session and refused to honor Benjamin’s act the Jews would have owned the British Empire. As soon as Parliament resumed they voted the four million and retired the loan.
But, for a few weeks loan, this patriotic Englishman, Lionel Rothschild, charged 15% at an annualized rate. One hundred thousand pounds.
Think about it, Disraeli put the Empire in jeopardy to merely buy a commercial company. As with all his foreign affairs the canal led to the assumption of the Egyptian government by England thus spreading the military even thinner. Egypt led to the Ang;lo-Egyptian Sudanese condominium and that led to military operations in the Sudan. It was a sad day when Disraeli became Prime Minister.
Conclusion
Benjamin Disraeli died in 1881 just after he had published his last work, titled Endymion. In reading this it should be apparent that there was the constitutional government, for the aware it is also clear that there were clandestine plotters or, in another name, Secret Societies. History is not made up of only the former but a combination of the latter as well. Given human psychology it is inevitable. Disraeli repeatedly insisted upon it in his book and who was in a better position to know. He even tells you that he familiar with Southern secret societies even going so far as to say that Italy was mined with them.
In Endymion he gives an example involving Napoleon III in England, where he was compelled to go in disguise lest he be assassinated as the French government feared his doing what he did, that is seizing the government and making himself dictator. This book is a good fictional account of how things worked. If you look beyond the fictional paraphernalia the general method is true.
This work was published in 1880 when Disraeli was nearing death. So it has a more relaxed reminiscent feel. It has none of the frenzy of Tancred or the wild exuberance of Coningsby. The book is a roman a clef so most of characters reflect real people. Disraeli himself is Endymion, the beautiful boy toy of Greek mythology. The Neuchatels, New Castles that match Nathan’s New Court are the Rothschilds at the apex of their glory in 1880.
Eighteen- eighty would be a pivotal point in English and European history. The old generation, of which Disraeli was part was dying off. The scene had shifted from the revolutionary mode of 1789, 1830, 1848 and perhaps 1870 to one of assassination and random bombing. Included as a secret society is the freemasonry of Judaism, the Freemasons themselves, the Jesuits and the labor movement. Those groups are above ground but tightly knit confederations who also function clandestinely.
The passage I quote centers around the career of Napoleon III prior to his election as Premier in France and his later usurpation of the government of France. Bonapartism was not a dead letter in this Napoleon’s life. It was feared that he would try to establish a regime which after many trials and tribulations he did. He spent most of his early life in England. According to Disraeli the Jews were instrumental in putting him in office.
According to Disraeli in this portrayal, Lous Napoleon (III) attended Eton school where Endymion was his fag, or servant. At that time he was going by the name of the Count of Otranto, At this time he is the mysterious Colonel Albert, then Prince Florestan and ultimately Napoleon.
The speaker here is Sidney Wilton who was Napoleon’s guardian.
I quote:
‘My unhappy ward,’ said Mr. Wilton; ‘you know, of course, something about him..’
‘Well, I was at school and college,’ said Waldershare, ‘when it all happened. But I have just heard that you had relations with him.’
‘The most intimate; and there is the bitterness. There existed between his mother Queen Agrippina and myself ties of entire friendship. In her last years and in her greatest adversity she appealed to me to be the guardian of her son.
He inherited all her beauty and apparently al her sweetness of disposition. I took the greatest pains with him. He was at Eton, and did well there. He was very popular; I never was so deceived in a boy in my life. I thought him the most docile of human beings, and that I had gained over him an entire influence. I am sure it would have been exercised for his benefit. In short, I may say it now, I looked upon him as a son, and he certainly would have been my heir; and yet all this time, from his seventeenth year, he was immersed in political intrigue and carrying on plots against the sovereign of his country, even under my own roof.’
‘How very interesting!’ said Walershare.
It may be interesting to you; I know it cost me. The greatest anxiety and sorrow, and even nearly compromised my honour. Had I not a large hearted chief and a true man of the world to deal with, I must have retired from the government.’
‘How could he manage it? said Waldershare.
‘You have no conception of the devices and resources of the secret societies of Europe,’ said Mr. Wilton. ‘His drawing master, his fencing-master, his dancing master, all his professors of languages, who delighted me by their testimony to his accomplishments and their praises of his quickness and assiduity, were active confederates in bringing about events which might have occasioned an European war. He left me avowedly to pay a visit in the country, and I even received letters from him with the postmark of the neighbouring town; letters all prepared beforehand. My first authentic information as to his movements was to learn, that he had headed an invading force, landed on the shores which he claimed as his own, was defeated and a prisoner.’
‘I remember it,’ said Waldershare. ‘I had just then gone up to St. John’s and I remember reading it with the greatest excitement.’
All this was bad enough,’ said Mr. Wilton, ‘but this is not my sorrow. I saved him from death, or at least a dreadful imprisonment. He was permitted to sail to America on his parole that he would never return to Europe, and I was required, and on his solemn appeal I consented, to give my personal engagement that the compact should be sacred. Before two years had elapsed, supported all this time, too, by my bounty, there was an attempt, almost successful, to assassinate the king, and my ward was discovered and seized in the capital. This time he was immured, and for life, in the strongest fortress of the country; but secret societies laugh at governments, and though he endured a considerable imprisonment, the world has recently been astounded by hearing that he has escaped. Yes; he is in London and has been here, though in studied obscurity, for some little time.
Unquote.
You will notice that England and Europe sent their hardcases to the US. The US was the great dumping ground of Europe, especially after the ’48 when hordes of revolutionaries descended on NYC, spreading out from there. Collateral damage of that event was that it transformed the US.
As Disraeli points out operatives can infiltrate anywhere. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia they immediately sent operatives into every Western capital. While the Soviet Union was not a secret they used secret operatives who infiltrated every move of any government. Deep operators entirely disguised, posing as good hearted souls trying to make the world a better place intervened to get minimal sentences or even none.
In 1917 a fully operational system in place, surfaced. In later twentieth century the great Jewish spy Johnathon Pollard was hired in the intelligence apparatus and transferred reams of material to his home base in Israel before his screen was penetrated. His material completely disrupted the US’ foreign relations to benefit an Israel that was receiving billions of dollars of aid per year.
The US was devastated so much so that they give Pollard a life sentence over the pleas and protestations of both US and Israeli Jews. It took twenty-five years of incessant agitation but Pollard was finally released to freedom. He presently resides at his home in Israel where he is handsomely rewarded.
These clandestine groups and secret societies have to be taken seriously. Add to this Disraeli’s racial outlook of which he was fully convinced. I quote another passage from Endymion, pp. 360-61 that fully and emphatically emphasizes his view:
Quote:
There is another great race which influences the world, the Semite. Certainly when I was at the Congress of Vienna, I did not believe that the Arabs were more likely to become a conquering people than the Tartars, and yet it is a question at this moment whether Mehemet Ali, at their head, they may not found a new empire in the Mediterranean. The Semites are unquestionably a great race, for among the few things in this world which appear to be certain;, nothing is more sure than that they invented our alphabet. But the Semites now exercise a vast influence over affairs by their smallest though most peculiar family, the Jews. There is no race gifted with so much tenacity, and such skill in organization. These qualities have given them an unprecedented hold over property and illimitable credit. As you advance in life, and get experience in affairs, the Jews will cross you everywhere. They have long been stealing into our secret diplomacy, which they have almost appropriated; in another quarter of a c century they will claim their share of open government. Well, these are races, men and bodies of men, influenced in their conduct by their particular organization and which must enter into all the calculations of a statesman. But what do they mean by the Latin race? Language and religion do not make a race—there is only one thing which makes a race, and that is blood.
Unquote.
Then and now, you couldn’t possibly state it more clearly except possibly with technological discoveries not known in Disraeli’s time.
The man is not always accurate. Mehemet Ali was an Albanian and not a Semite. Europeans acting in concert easily frustrated any plans he had.
Disraeli says that, ‘they have been stealing into our secret diplomacy, which they have almost appropriated.’ So, does anyone really believe that Dreyfus the Frenchman convicted for espionage in the nineties wasn’t guilty? Of course he was. Does anyone not believe that Johnathan Pollard, twentieth century US didn’t ‘appropriate’ reams and reams of secrets and give them to Israeli? A question not worth asking. How can one not believe that Disraeli was not cooperating with the Rothschilds?
‘An unprecedented hold over property and illimitable credit…’ Might as well say they own the world. Disraeli’s enthusiasm gets away from him but he quite rejoices in matters that Jews today deny.
This essay cuts off at 1880 when Disraeli and his generation disappeared. Lionel died in 1879, James was already gone in 1866 while civilization transited from one mind set to another.
Matters are being led however to the first phase of the Great Thirty Years War of 1914-1945 that Falk predicted.
Pt. IX Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
November 24, 2019
Pt. IX: Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
by
R.E. Prindle
George W.M. Reynolds
Now that in parts six, seven and eight we have an adequate time line of Reynolds’ career we can get down into the substance of his major works, Mysteries of London and Mysteries of the Court of London. For those not aware of the extent of his corpus, it is immense with about all of it written concurrently with his two major novels.
For instance, in the four years from 1844 to 1848 when the four series of Mysteries of London were written, George also wrote Faust: A Romance of the Secret Tribunals in 1847; Wagner, the Wehrwolf in 1846-47; The Mysteries of Old London: Days of Hogarth in 1847-48 and The Coral Island or, The Hereditary Curse in 1848 as he ended Mysteries of London and began Mysteries of the Court at the same time. All of these are significant works are of some length.
Also, in 1846, he began to publish his magazine, The Reynolds Miscellany which he edited. While I have not received the copies yet, Gyan Publishers of India offers ten volumes of the Miscellany in five volumes of about eight hundred pages each. I will browse them when they arrive.
Altogether this seems to be a heavy writing load, an impossible load. Yet when one examines Reynolds’ working methods and his careful time management it may have been easily done by him given his large mind. Certainly the load from 1844 to 1848 was, for him, light. He was responsible for turning in eight double column pages, minus illustrations a week.
George IV In Full Regalia
As his mind could apparently be rigidly compartmentalized; as he is said to have written very fast, then his actual work period turning out eight thousand words could be easily done in, say, six hours. He had to keep his whole story in mind for each sequent but, as I imagine, as he turned in an installment his mind, or part of it, immediately began plotting out the next installment so that when his next deadline approached he had the eight thousand words ready and could just spill them out. So, his whole work week by which he sustained his whole extensive family was only six hours long.
The rest of the seven days could be devoted to family matters, exploring the metropolis and reading. George read and studied. His Greek mythology was correct and extensive, and he drops classical references regularly. Oddly he makes few Biblical references. He very obviously was familiar with the British, French and German literature of the day. He was definitely literate in English and French and probably could read German. He takes his inspiration from where he can get it. Could there be any coincidence that the William Harrison Ainsworth depiction of the Gypsy camp in Rookwood is reflected in Reynolds’ passages of Gypsy camps in Mysteries of London? I think not.
As I am discovering, not many people are aware of W.H. Ainsworth. He seems to be virtually unknown, but then, so does Reynolds. Ainsworth was a very successful and influential author of the day turning out perhaps more books than Reynolds while being a major influence on Reynolds. Very good books, too, well worth reading.
While I had read Ainsworth’s name being frequently mentioned I had never read him until just recently. I was fortunate to pick up various sets of novelists of this period at an online auction for next to nothing. Ainsworth was one of the sets. While the books were nearly free, about a dollar each, the shipping from Topeka Kansas was horrendous. So, while I have some reading of the period, I can now immerse myself.
By the way, I have been familiar with the French writers for some time and more recently the German authors while an ardent admirer of ETA Hoffman for a couple decades. While it is clear that George read French with ease, it seems probable that he could wade through German texts also. So, what he did with a full week’s time is of interest.
Obviously, one thing, was how to become his own publisher. In 1846 only two years into Mysteries of London he obviously understood enough about publishing to launch his successful Miscellany at which time he began his ancillary novels to fill its pages. The first issue began with his Wagner, the Wehr Wolf. Undoubtedly the other three novels also appeared in its pages. I will find out soon.
Now, the two major works are immense. I have now read each twice. The first time I caught the most exciting highlights. The second time I penetrated the depth but the stories are so long and diverse a third and fourth reading would be necessary to organize all the characters and incidents. Actually both works are several novels in one. The stories are braided in such a way that that one story branches out replaced by another related story then rejoining further downstream. Each story could be abstracted and edited into a complete novel with certain characters interchangeably distributed throughout. Thus the story in the first series of Mysteries of the Court of Tim Meagles and Lady Diana Lade is completed and finished with Tim and Diana eased out of the rest of the novel.
The Beau w/Cravat
The question in that instance is who was Tim Meagles in real life. I believe he was none other than the Beau himself, Beau Brummell. As Mysteries of the Court is a story of the Regency of George VI and as the Beau had the same relationship with the Prince as Meagles, the two must be related as no other than the Beau had so close a relationship with the Regent.
As my authority for the history of Beau Brummell I use the biography of Capt. Jesse, titled Beau Brummell. The Capt. Published in 1844 and he is speaking first hand while having had an acquaintance with Beau in his exile in France. My edition is from a set called Beaux and Belles of England published probably in the 1890s by the Grolier Society of London, a veritable treasure trove of biographies of the era.
The Beau, a Dandy and Beau, is an example of a social species with a long history in England and indeed probably going back in the annals of time to the transformation of the human species from the anthropoids. It is certain that there were cavemen who wore their pelts better than others and perhaps bathed more regularly. The advent of Mr. Gillette being well in the future. The Beau himself was fastidious, apparently unlike his contemporaries as his fastidiousness is mentioned as exceptional. Make your own judgment.
Brummel who was named George as apparently were half the male members of England at the time, was the son of a wealthy merchant thus inheriting thirty thousand pounds on his father’s death or however long it took to get out chancery. Beau, surveying the social scene determined that the only society worth having was that of the aristocrats. Having money but no title he did not qualify for their company so the Beau became the Beau, the trendsetter of male fashion and thus gained acceptability.
He also developed into a master snob and as such rose to prominence or, at least, notoriety. His notoriety attracted the attention of the Prince, that is, George IV, later the Regent and then the King in his own right. There is a remarkable resemblance between the two. I post pictures. From these it appears that the two might almost have had the same father. At any rate, Prince and Beau become bonded, much like Meagles and the Prince. Remember that George IV in his own persona is the main character in the story. The Prince then resided in his mansion, Carlton House, on Pall Mall. Let me interject that there is an excellent survey of the Capital titled London by Charles Knight in six lengthy volumes, Cambridge University Press, containing wonderful historical essays on most of the locations mentioned by George- that is, Reynolds. The six volumes were originally issued in parts ending in 1844, One can sharpen one’s understanding.
But, George- that is Brummel- was terribly irked by his inferior position to George- that is the Prince and so he became demeaning and superior, ridiculing George IV in conversations with others so that the Prince, George, became infuriated and broke off relations with George, the Beau. The crowning touch came when he and a fellow ran into the Prince while walking. The Prince studiously ignored the Beau addressing only his friend causing Brummell to caustically remark: Who’s your fat friend? Well, come now. Completely in disfavor now the Beau deteriorated and as a relatively young man was forced into exile in Calais, France. This previous history is all that concerns us in his characterization in Tim Meagle.
Meagles’ story was written a while after Dumas’ very famous The Three Musketeers was published. The Three Musketeers is a fabulous myth. A wonderful creation of the equally fabulous Alexander Dumas. In Meagles and his companion Lady Diana Lade it appears that Reynolds is trying to create a myth to equal the Musketeers and female character, Milady. Indeed, there are such similarities that Reynolds may have considered himself a rival to the great Frenchman.
Read what Andre Maurois has to say in his biography of the three Dumas titled The Titans of 1957, pp. 182-83:
Never in the whole course of French literature has there been anything comparable to Dumas’s output between the years 1845 and 1855. Novels from eight to ten volumes showered down without a break on the newspapers and bookshops. The whole history of France was passed in review. The Three Musketeers was followed by Twenty Years After and that by Vicomte de Bragelone, another trilogy- Chicot the Jester (La Reine Margot), La dame de Monsoreau and The Forty-Five Guardsmen.
Simultaneously with these, Dumas was busy narrating the decline and fall of the French monarchy—The Diamond Necklace…Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge, Memoires of a Physician…Ange Pitou and La Comtesse de Charny. From early on he had planned to annex the whole of history to his romantic domain. “There is no end to what I want to do,” he said. ‘I long for the impossible. How am I to achieve what I have in mind? By working as no one has ever worked before, by pruning life of all its details; by doing without sleep…’ This programme accounts for the five or six hundred volumes which so astonish the reader…. No one has read all Dumas.
Compare Reynolds and his output from 1844 to 1859. He too wished to write the history of all Europe. When Maurois mentions the five or six hundred volumes he means, I imagine, parts. Thus if Reynolds is broken into parts he can account for three or four hundred volumes. The eight or ten volumes of Mysteries of the Court of London can be broken down to eight or ten complete novels all interrelated. Truly the period from about 1840 to 1880 is the height of British and European literature.
Reynolds changes the character of Meagles from Brummell’s own. The Beau according to Capt. Jesse was quite effeminate. Indeed, he never married and apparently had no female lovers. Meagles and Lady Lade seem to have had a platonic relationship until her husband died. They extorted a Marquisate from George III and then as the Beau had disappeared from England they disappear from The Mysteries of the Court.
Indeed, the Beau must have been trying to inveigle his friend, George IV, into making him a Marquis or ennoblement of some kind. Had Brummel been ennobled then he would have been entitled to associate with the aristocracy instead of being a hanger on.
Lady Lade throughout her and Meagles’ episodes dresses in men’s clothing so that she and Meagles appear as two men to the unobservant. As her name Diana indicates she represents the virgin huntress Artemis in Greek mythology or Diana in the Latin; the female archetype of the Piscean Age in Northern Europe. Reynolds repeatedly refers to her as the Huntress and other attributes of Diana, Tim must therefore be meant to be the male archetype of Pisces in Reynolds’ mind, not as the Redeemer but perhaps as the Trickster.
Just as the Beau longs for a title so does Tim. While the Beau retreated ungratified Tim and Lady Diana Lade obtain their Marquisate by criminal or blackmail means. Without going into details here, Tim and Diana have knowledge that would compromise the reputation of the Georgian House. Using this knowledge then they criminally extort their Marquisate from George III.
To some extent then, Mysteries of the Court is a roman a clef. How many of the other novels in the Mysteries of the Court collection may reference actual histories remains to be addressed.
The main theme is a condemnation of the Regent, George IV. Reynolds detests him as well as the whole aristocracy to the maximum. But, how much of that detestation is sheer envy. How much of himself did Reynolds put into Meagles/Brummell? Reynolds himself has the appearance of a Dandy or Beau and Ainsworth definitely was one. He is so vehement one has to wonder about his accuracy. Is this a fictional history of reality or mere raving. It is apparently reasonably accurate. Capt. Jesse who wrote of Beau Brummell while a stalwart member of his class condemns George IV for, as he puts it, teaching the aristocracy to live beyond their incomes, squandering their great wealth frivolously while living the lives of Libertines.
Reynolds then has the spirit of the times correct and while he may perhaps exaggerate he is not false. He himself believes he is writing fictionalized history; that is, fleshing out the fact with probable detailing.
Thus, in what might be termed the fifth and sixth series of the extended Mysteries of London and the Court, although these two series are not related to the first four, the fifth series concerns itself with the years around 1795 leading to the marriage of George IV with the Princess Caroline. The key point being his previous secret marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert.
Reynolds does not tackle his main theme directly but embeds it in a series of stories, or novellas, or novels, peripheral to it while creating a sociological portrait of the times making George’s character confirmed by external events.
Mrs. Fitzherbert had ruled Carlton House and the Prince, as George then was, before the Regency, and enjoyed great privileges. The crisis came when George’s father, demanded that George marry the German Princess Caroline of Hanover, Germany who was something of a rustic. That meant he had to put away Mrs. Fitzherbert whom he found compatible and take up with Caroline who he detested.
He tolerated her long enough to create an heir, the Princess Charlotte and then made Caroline’s life miserable so that she exiled herself to the Continent. In Reynolds’ story, sixth series, she is living in Switzerland twenty years later. As this is 1815 Napoleon has just returned from his exile on Elba to Paris.
Reynolds is a clear writer and as his title indicates he is essentially writing a mystery he reveals clues only as necessary. The sixth series, then, titled Venetia Trelawney tells of Mrs. Fitzherbert’s attempt to regain her position at court through a surrogate, Venetia.
We are not permitted to know this until at the conclusion of the series of book five. Apart from all the subsidiary stories the main burden of the sixth series is George IV’s machinations to injure his wife, Caroline. He attempts to portray her as dissolute and morally corrupt for consorting with her equerry, Bergami. he was a fine figure of a man.
To achieve this goal the Prince, now Regent, goes to great lengths in a more or less improbable scheme. A Mrs. Owen has four lovely daughters who, following the Prince’s instructions, she is turning into courtesans and mistresses of duplicity. The youngest, Mary, refuses the training but the other three go to Geneva to be ladies in waiting for Caroline. There by subterfuge they make it appear that Caroline and Bergami are having an affair. Needless to say the scheme is baffled through the agency of Mrs. Fitzherbert.
That’s the general plan but of course much excitement is created by circumambient subplots that are braided into the main story. Many interesting characters are created. Larry Sampson, the Bow Street detective and his adversary the Hangman, Daniel Coffin. Coffin comes close to being as interesting as the Resurrection Man of the first two series of the Mysteries of London. Doctor Death of the third and fourth series doesn’t come close to the above two as a villain. Coffin is more related to the eighteenth century criminal master mind Johnathan Wild or Conan Doyle’s fictional Moriarty.
Of the six series the third and fourth are the weakest although having brilliant moments and a very good temptress, Laura Lorne. That will be dealt with separately. Having discussed the main story of The Mysteries Of London is the first eight parts of Time Travels there is no need to do so here.
When George closed off the second series of The Mysteries of the Court he said that he was through with George IV but that his head was bursting with ideas for a new series. Now a mystery ensues.
My edition of Mysteries of the Court was published by the Francis F. Burton Ethnographical Society in Boston and an Oxford Society in England in twenty volumes c. 1900 under the general title The Works of George W.M. Reynolds. By works is meant twenty volumes of The Mysteries of the Court of London, that’s all. Thus, the set is divided into four units of five volumes. The first five deal with the coming marriage to Caroline, the second five to Venetia Trelawney and the plot against Caroline. Then a third set issued under Reynolds’ name with his picture on the title page under the title, Lady Saxondale’s Crimes, while the fourth division of five volumes is called The Fortunes of the Ashtons. Thus, if the last two divisions are authentic the total work would be ten thousand pages. However there is no mention of the latter two series by any Reynolds scholar. Neither the Oxford Society nor the Burton Ethnographical Society give any indication of the provenance of the latter two series.
Richard F. Burton is the famous Victorian explorer, most notably in the search for the source of the Nile, and being the first European to penetrate into Mecca. He translated the entire Arabian Nights in seventeen volumes. So he became among the first ethnographers. The Oxford Society was also an ethnographical society. Little can be found on either on the internet.
Burton established his Society in 1843 splitting off from a predecessor. One wonders if Reynolds, ever curious, associated himself with the Burton Society and perhaps its predecessor. His Mysteries of the Court of London may be construed as an ethnographical study. I certainly read it as such. Possibly the Oxford and Burton Societies found the Mysteries of the Court so suitable that they commissioned writers to write the two additional series.
It might be possible that Reynolds commissioned the two series but there appears to be no earlier record of them at this tim, indeed, no record but their publication in the Works of George W.M. Reynolds. There is a story worth investigating in the American publishing house, T.B. Peterson. They were responsible for the publication of several novels written by their stable of authors under Reynold’s name. There is information on T.B. Peterson on the internet.
The firm was located in Philadelphia. They had a huge catalog what literature is in the Penny Dreadful style including a large selection of titles from writers like W.H. Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton and, of course George W.M. Reynolds. They published a two volume edition under the title of The Mysteries of the Court of London. I have no idea whether it included the whole of the two series or a condensed version. They published twenty, perhaps more titles written by their authors under Reynolds’ name, including Ciprina or, The Secrets of the Picture Gallery.
This volume has actually been issued by the British Library as an authentic Reynolds. Possibly T.B. Peterson is unknown to them. Lord Saxondale, who was apparently a little less criminal than his wife Lady Saxondale, Count Christobal, and Lucrizia Mirano, Edgar Montrose or, the Mysterious Penitent, the Ruined Gangster. Peterson really liked The Necromancer while that title was also published by a New York firm.
Anent the Necromancer. I am of the opinion that this book was also not written by Reynolds, or possibly with a collaborator, even though it was published in his Miscellany in 1851. The style isn’t his, the vocabulary isn’t his while in my reading I had the feeling that the book was written by a woman. The detailing just seemed feminine. I think it probable that Reynolds was following in the footsteps of his model Alexander Dumas. Dumas collaborated with Auguste Maquet and others although the books were always issued as Dumas alone.
Perhaps in this case, Peterson called the Necromancer, the Mysteries of the Court of Henry VIII, Reynolds roughed out the story while employing someone else to do the actual writing. At any rate, I do not believe he was the writer or perhaps the sole writer.
Needless to say, Reynolds received no economic benefit because the US did not honor English copyright laws. Nor could Reynolds do anything about the counterfeits written under his name.
So, then, the question is from whence came the final two series and at what date were they written? And perhaps, why? Certainly they were commissioned. Having never read them I am unqualified to speculate but, perhaps, someone might know and be willing to share their knowledge?
Reynolds began the two works in 1844 and so far as we know finished them in 1856. Eighteen fifty-six was three short years before Darwin changed the world by issuing The Origin of Species and making evolution a household word.
By 1856 when the last word of the Mysteries was written Reynolds was already living in the Brave New England whether he knew it or not, and I suspect that he did know. Being wide awake was a new term at the time but I suspect that Reynolds was wide awake. The very face of England was changing as well as tunnels under the Thames. The tunnel probably cost several times what a bridge would have cost and have been more useful.
While writing mysteries of the Court Reynolds turned out twenty other volumes many of great length. Perhaps in the mode of Dumas he was making the maximum use of his time working long and sleeping little. Or, perhaps, as he was accused by Dickens, of employing other writers. Reynolds denies it.
Around him a new crop of novelists were rising, each having become aware of different times and formed by different social conditions. I suspect that although Reynolds remained a best seller throughout the century he became a little old fashioned. Certainly his newspaper kept his name alive and before the public. His politics would always have been ‘avant garde’ although by the turn of the century most of the Chartist demands had been met. The triumph of the Revolution still lay ahead a few years.
Part X a review of The Necromancer follows.
Pt.VI: Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
August 30, 2019
Part VI: Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
G.W.M. Reynolds: Building A Publishing Empire
by
R.E. Prindle
George W.M. Reynolds is an interesting story, almost epic actually. No biography is currently extant. His history must be patched together by certain fragmentary sketches and assembled based on those autobiographical details from his novels in addition to fragmentary researches and solid facts that provide hints to interpret the novels.
As to parentage: His father was George Reynolds, a naval officer during the Napoleonic wars. His dates: 1762-1822. During those Napoleonic wars in 1802 he was commissioned a Captain and given command of the Tribune, a 36 gun frigate with which he was able to capture what researcher Dick Collins says, were several prizes. The proceeds from those prizes were distributed in shares to the officers and crew. Collins gives no idea of the richness of those prizes but we must presume that he received, possibly, ten to twenty thousand pounds overall and possibly more. This is important as when his son assumed his inheritance in 1830 it is possible that he received twelve thousand pounds. Thus, it would likely have come from the proceeds of these prizes.
Prize money would have been in addition to his wages and whatever emoluments that might have amounted to three hundred pounds or more per annum. If Reynolds’ father had invested his prize money and lived on other earnings it would make his having twelve thousand pounds not unreasonable. This is important because the size of GWM’s inheritance is disputed. Dick Collins, for instance, seeks to diminish it to near nothing. Guy Dicks places it at seven thousand. Without any other assurance than the prizes I accept the figure of twelve thousand, if for no other reason than Reynolds was too affluent in France than for there being little or no inheritance.
On his mother’s side, Caroline Frances Dowers, 1789-1830, her father was a Purser Dowers, Purser is his Christian name, who was the commandant of the Royal Naval Hospital in Walmer, Kent. Caroline and George were married in 1813. George W.M. was born a year later in Sandwich, Kent but that location doesn’t figure in his writings while Walmer and Deal, two neighboring towns where Dowers and his guardian Duncan McArthur lived, have prominent places as well as Canterbury with a nod to Ashford.
GWM had a brother, Edward, born in 1816 with whom he was associated through life, serving with the publishing company George created. Shortly after in 1816 his father was stationed on the island of Guernsey where GWM spent the next six years. Guernsey will figure in his novels. It was probably there, next to France, speaking a French dialect that his affection for France arose.
In 1822, the family returned to Kent in Canterbury where his father died soon after. His mother at that time was thirty-three, a young and probably attractive woman. She was appointed guardian of her sons. As a backup guardian a great friend of her husband’s, the surgeon Duncan McArthur of Walmer, 1772-1850 accepted the responsibility on her death in March of 1830 at the very young age of forty-two. Thus, Reynolds was an orphan at fifteen. His being an orphan is important in his writings. George was eight years old when his father died, and fifteen when his mother passed. Excluding his two years of infancy his life had been divided evenly between Guernsey and Kent. Orphaned at eight when is father died and then left parentless after another eight years his childhood must have had a profound effect on his psychology.
In 1828 he had been placed in the Sandhurst Military Academy in Berkshire. Neither Sandhurst nor Berkshire have a prominent place in his novels. His total experience in Kent then takes place from 1822 to 1828 and those years were apparently the most formative years of his life for which he appears to have had a great affection. He was sent to school at Ashford, Kent, a relatively large town equidistant from Canterbury and Walmer-Deal. Whatever happened in Walmer-Deal then happened between 1822 and 1828 but left an indelible impression on him.
In those years George must have associated in Walmer with Duncan McArthur and possibly his grand-father Purser Dowers. George is fixated on these years and these towns plus Canterbury. Walmer especially is connected to his character of the Resurrection Man, Anthony Tidkins, in the First Series of The Mysteries of London. At that time body stealers from graveyards, known as resurrection men were supplying corpses to physicians for dissection in the advancement of science. Dick Collins speculates that Duncan McArthur, a surgeon, bought bodies. In the novel Tony Tidkins was born in Walmer and supplied bodies to ‘the surgeon of Walmer.’ Thus, Duncan McArthur.
This is quite possible if not probable. Reynolds seems quite familiar with doctors and their scientific experiments. The Mysteries of London were written in two series. For some reason Collins thinks that the Second Series was never written but it is readily available today. It comes in two volumes totaling sixteen hundred pages. It doesn’t appear to be well known. However in Volume III, that is, First Series, Vols. I and II and Second Series, Vols. III and IV, Reynolds describes some offices of ‘the foremost surgeon in England’, a Dr. Lascelles that he leased from a cadaverous, hideous criminal Benjamin Bones, also known as Old Death. Old Death was not a resurrection man but looks like he had been resurrected.
There are many alter-egos of Reynolds in the Mysteries and one in Vol. III is the highwayman, Thomas Rainford or Tom Rain as he was known. He is in Old Death’s crummy old house in which Dr. Lascelles, the foremost doctor in England rents rooms. Rainford enters these rooms to find pickled body parts, lifelike casts of human heads and such. Lascelles is a phrenologist in interest. One, then, is led to ask, did Dr. Duncan McArthur also have such a collection and was an eight to fourteen year old G.W.M. Reynolds introduced into such a gruesome environment by his guardian. Where else could he have witnessed such scenes and attributed them to Walmer. The influence in the novels is extensive.
At fourteen then he was entered into the military academy. What happened between he and his guardian after the mother died while he was a few months short of sixteen isn’t clear. It is hard to believe that Reynolds with his literary bent wasn’t restless in a military environment while being exposed at fourteen to that, to me, repulsive environment was negative. It was probably there that he had his first experiences with gambling and drinking.
He wrangled his way out of Sandhurst in September of 1830. One imagines that McArthur and Dowers resisted this but as military men they probably thought they had to give the young fellow his head. He demanded his inheritance then and there which he must have received but with great reluctance. Whether his brother also had an inheritance isn’t clear but as his brother joined George in France he may have brought a fresh supply of money.
As important as 1822-28 were to Reynolds development, the years in France from 1831-36 were equally important. There is no clear account of what happened in those years, only what may be gleaned from his writings and some facts Dick Collins has collected.
What is clear is that the most significant occurrence was that Reynolds was illuminated almost upon landing in France. Reynolds says that he became a Liberal at Sandhurst, by which he means, that among the sons of the aristocracy as an inferior he developed a deep resentment for that faction of society. In France his illumination codified that resentment into a program.
Illumination may be a new concept to many readers but the term and concept arose from the dissolution of the Medieval Order and the rise of the scientific consciousness promoted by astronomers and alchemists. It became apparent to many that the old order was no longer suited to emerging social exigencies as condensed into the 1789 Revolutionary slogan Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Its key components were the elimination of monarchy, the aristocracy, that is the privileges of birth, and the rejection of established religion and priestcraft and certain sexual revisions.
In its evolution in the sixteenth century it took the form of the Rosicrucian Order and Rosicrucianism remained the backbone of Illumination down probably to the present. The Illuminati sect of Rosicrucianism appropriated the word. Thus Reynolds appears to have been initiated into the Rosicrucian Order. At least, in his novel the Wehrwolf he has his hero Wagner leave the Island of the Lotus Eaters in his novel to go to Sicily in which the venerable head of the Rosicrucian Order existed as a 164 year old man with whom he had a long interview, or, as I read it, he was initiated or illuminated. This chicanery was common during the eighteenth century and the formation of Freemasonry that incorporates all these legends.
Most famous in the Revolutionary days were Cagliostro, otherwise Joseph Balsamo and the Count de St. Germain, alchemists and magicians. Alexander Dumas has a wonderful interpretation of the career of Cagliostro in his novel Joseph Balsamo. You may be sure Reynolds read it. Of course, such men as these were not what they claimed to be but society was credulous and many took them at their word. After all, with that great European legend or myth of the Wandering Jew sightings of him were common as there were many Jewish poseurs. They wandered and announced themselves and were credited as such. Cagliostro and St. Germain were actually a significant part of the Revolution.
Another impostor of sorts was Adam Weishaupt who appropriated illuminism to form the Illuminati. That group is now passed off as legendary for whatever reasons the Left has, but they did exist and were a key part of the Revolution as Jacobins. Nobody denies the Jacobins.
One must remember that the revolutionary and Napoleonic years were from 1789 to 1815 and Reynolds was born in 1814. He was an ardent follower of Napoleon considering him the greatest man of history. Joseph Balsamo (Cagliostro) and the Comte de St. Germain were still living legends while Reynolds was in Paris. Dumas was writing amazing stories about Cagliostro and the Revolutionary period concurrently with Reynolds’ novels. The French writers he would have been familiar with in the 1830s were all imbrued with the events of 1789-1815. This period was one of most breathtaking events in the history of Europe.
More or less as an aside these first fifty years of the nineteenth century were the formative years from which the succeeding two hundred years have evolved. A work still treasured by the cognoscenti was published in 1841, Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds containing long essays on John Law and the Mississippi Bubble as well as that amazing phenomenon The South Sea Bubble. W.H. Ainsworth wrote a wonderful novel describing the South Sea Bubble. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Reynolds’ read it as he has numerous examples of bubble companies and frauds in his pages. In the early nineteenth century the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon would add his magnificent psychological study the Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind that Freud would incorporate into his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego thus forming the basis of mind control today.
In addition the Regency Period and Reign of George IV were part of his living memories. When he arrived in France very late in 1830, the year George IV died, really 1831 the Revolution of 1830 had just taken place in July 1830- the July Revolution- that removed Charles X and placed Louis Phillipe on the throne. Almost from enthronement the Revolution of 1848 was being planned and a mere eighteen years later took place ending the monarchy in France permanently. Reynolds himself was working toward 1848 probably from the day his shoes hit French soil.
Reynolds was an enthusiastic supporter of the July Revolution and cheered wildly at the displacement of the aristocracy. In his estimation it placed the French high above the English who retained both monarch and aristocracy. He despised the English nobility. That attitude would have been a common one of course but, I believe it likely that Reynolds humiliating experiences at Sandhurst cemented that hatred in his mind.
Sandhurst would have been full of the sons of the aristocracy who would have demeaned mere commoners. Nor would he have had the money to keep up with them.
What drove him to France isn’t clear but those five years were to be the most influential of his life. Reconstructing those five years is not easy although some key events can be dated.
A sixteen year old striking out on his own in a foreign country with inadequate language skills is daring while if he had what to a sixteen year old was an enormous sum of twelve thousand pounds in his pockets sharpers and sponges would have spotted him immediately.
There is a passage in Vol. II of The Mysteries Of The Court Of London that might explain his situation. A sixteen year old orphan girl, the beauteous Carmilla, actually Rose Foster has been cleaned out of her inheritance by sharpers.
Another home! Alas! Alas! ‘tis much more easily said that done; and the orphan felt that it was so, and her heart, as it were, came up into her throat as she reflected that the only true home which she had ever enjoyed had been swallowed up in the grave of her parents.
O God! robbery is bad, forger is vile, rape is atrocious, and murder is abhorrent; but to ill-treat an orphan, to be merciless toward the poor being from whom death has borne away the fond mother and the doting father, never to send them back again, oh, this is abhorrent also, and the wretch who has no pity for the orphan is capable of robbery and forgery and rape and murder.
There is a cri de couer, a hysterical wringing of hands. We can’t reconstruct exactly what happened after Reynolds’ beloved mother died orphaning him completely. What his relationship with his new guardian was we don’t know, but, just as Carmilla was easy prey for the criminals who took advantage of her youth and innocence, it is more than likely that something similar happened to Reynolds in France.
Thus it cannot be accidental that his account of his first adventures in France should have been recreated in his continuation of Dicken’s Pickwick Papers, Pickwick Abroad. It is a novel full of sharpers and spongers preying on Pickwick who may have been a variant of the prosperous Reynolds. This novel is an interesting account of English ex-pats in Paris.
In the post-Napoleonic years there was such an influx of English people into Paris for extended stays that the Meurice Hotel was created to accommodate them by creating as English an atmosphere in France as possible. It would be almost the same as the Jewish and Italian colonies in New York City c. 1900. It is in the atmosphere of the Meurice that Reynolds places his version of Mr. Pickwick for the duration of that famous character’s stay in France.
It is there that Pickwick is surrounded by sharpers and sponges and plain thieves. One wonders how Reynolds saw himself in that mélange. Perhaps with his twelve thousand pounds he is Mr. Pickwick himself though certainly not as a sponge although one gathers the impression that Reynolds was somewhat addicted to sharp practices. Perhaps his first year or two were spent Pickwick fashion. Quite high living for a sixteen year old. Remember though as Mortimer from Master Timothy’s Bookcase returns to England Mortimer philosophizes whether a young man can be a Man of the World. Perhaps that can be interpreted that he had tried and failed in France.
In these five years in France of rapid intellectual development at no time could he have let the grass grow under his feet. He obviously worked in a vast amount of reading. One should keep in mind that in 1839 in England he compiled a book, The Modern Literature Of France, a book of excerpts with prefaces. It is certain that he read and was deeply influenced by Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame De Paris, or the Hunchback of Notre Dame in common parlance. The book was published in the year of his arrival in 1831. He carried the memory of its pages in mind from that time forward. He read the Marquis de Sades’ Justine, and Juliette, and the Philosophy of the Boudoir and was deeply influenced by those books. His rather racy sexual descriptions probably derive therefrom. He praises the apparently horror novelist, Frederic Soulie (not translated into English yet) while making use of his techniques in his own novels.
Paris must have been wildly active while he was resident. Survivors of the 1789 revolution would have been sixty or seventy years old, filled with stories. Reynolds endorsed the crimes of the French Revolution. The Bohemia immortalized by Henry Burger in his 1859 novel would have been in rapid development thus combining the political, art and literary scenes. Balzac, Sue and Dumas as well as lesser light were all writing in the shadow of the Revolution and Napoleonic years. That Reynolds showed interest in the art scene is evidenced by his chapter in Mysteries of the Court of London. Thus his brain was swarming with images and innumerable scenes copped from the French novelists.
Connected to all would have been the process of illumination, the formation of Reynold’s Weltanschauung and his uniting with the Zeitgeist. I have been unable to identify a reference to the Freemasons but the mystic cult of Rosicrucianism seems to have attracted his attention, hence illumination. Reynolds was a very prominent Liberal, touting Liberalism, hence illumination constantly. A Liberalism almost current with that of the twenty-first century. He was true blue.
After three years in France he made his first novel attempt: The Youthful Impostor. I haven’t read that as yet but the title perhaps indicates his feelings about himself. He was probably premature in taking on the trappings of The Man of the World that he so much wanted to be.
He began a bookstore at about this time while attempting to found an Anglo-French newspaper. One can only conclude that they were unsuccessful and left France a year later as a bankrupt. But not before he married Susannah Frances Pierson at the British Embassy. In Volume IV of the Mysteries of London Charles Hatfield and Perdita Hardinge were married at the British Embassy in November. Was this a reenactment of his and Susannah’s marriage? As he seems a little gushy about the event his and Susannah’s marriage at the Embassy must have made a significant impression on him.
In 1836 his French adventure ended as he went broke, returning to England with wife and new son in tow. He was only twenty-two and had lived a lifetime or two in France. The years from 1837-44 seems to have been a period of struggling to re-orient himself. After all having been under the impression that he was rich in 1831 to have gone smash in 1836 and then having to find a way to wealth again must have taken some courage. During 1842-44 he seems to have realized that his early efforts were getting him nowhere so was searching for a new direction. 1844-48 is an expression of that reorientation that ended in the Revolution of 1848 and the elimination of the French monarchy at last.
Even though only twenty-two in 1836 it would seem that some interest in his abilities adhered to him from his French journalistic activities because on his return he found ready employment as the editor of the Monthly Magazine then tottering, and which he revived.
The English loved to sojourn in Paris. In the brief period of peace in 1802 as Venetia Murray records in her An Elegant Madness when the English rushed to France. Then after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 the love affair with France recovered. Indeed, much to Reynolds’ chagrin the English offered Louis Philippe sanctuary in England after 1848. As mentioned the Meurice Hotel was established to cater to English tastes.
As magazine editor in Paris Reynolds published Thackeray’s first appearance in print so it is probable the he had established some sort of reputation that was honored on his return. Reynolds then began publication of Pickwick Abroad in the Monthly’s pages. While usually considered a plagiarism Reynolds’ explains his position clearly:
The founder of the ‘Pickwick club’ which now exists no longer had violated the promise he had sometime since made to himself and voluntarily deviated from that tranquil mode of life it was his intention to adopt when his first biographer, ‘Boz’ took leave of him.
So, as Reynolds apparently saw it, if the first biographer abandon’s a biography a second biographer may legitimately write a continuation. Remember that the club no longer existed so it was Mr. Pickwick himself. A fine line perhaps but Pickwick Abroad is not about the club. Indeed, the grand epic of the Greeks was written by several hands of which Homer’s was just one. There were several continuations written for Chretien De Troye’s Grail story. Not everyone agreed with the notion but Pickwick Abroad was a success giving Reynolds a literary reputation, of sorts, in England.
None of the following six efforts leading to 1842 created much of a fuss. During that time, however, Reynold’s was exploring all of the highways and byways of London and he may have devoted much of his time during his two missing years to that endeavor as well as doing extensive reading. He was certainly well read and aware of scientific, technological and societal developments. It seems clear to me that he had read the psychological literature of his time and knew how to apply it accurately. He apparently visited many insane asylums in both France and England as the interiors of the various asylums seem to be accurately portrayed. He was aware of Dr. Pinel who liberalized the handling of the insane in France. All of this interest in matters combined with his illumination gives an extraordinary depth to his writing making the most of intense experiences giving them almost a visual reality.
While writing Vol IV of the Second Series, the Revolution of 1848 occurred about 40% of the way through in February of that year. Reynolds broke off his narrative to celebrate the event and encourage the Chartists to do the same in England. As he was in the process of writing about his heroine, Laura Mortimer, he has her begin her course in illumination as taught by her music teacher beginning with the Marseillaise and some poems by Victor Hugo. Hugo was a monster influence on Reynolds. Cross fertilization was apparently widespread.
Reynolds, once again taking inspiration from Dickens for the last volume of his early period, Master Timothy’s Bookcase, he then remained unpublished from 42-44. Looking again to France, Reynolds read the early installments of the great Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. Receiving this inspiration his thoughts fell into place and he began to write the magnificent First Series of The Mysteries Of London.
At this point I wish to cautiously introduce a work that appeared simultaneously with Reynolds and Sue, Paul Feval’s own version of The Mysteries of London. While virtually unknown in the US today Feval was a magnificent crime writer inking the stories of the Black Coats. Being aFrenchman his take on haunts that both he and Reynolds were aware are yet quite different but equally as terrifying as Reynold’s.
The First Series of Mysteries of London quickly set Reynold’s on his feet and he was in a position to look forward to building a publishing empire and regaining the dreams of his youth.
The First Series ended in 1846 and it was that year that he established his weekly newspaper the Reynolds Miscellany. The First Series had been stunningly successful, selling in the tens of thousands per week so that perhaps giddy with success he thought his name so familiar and respected the magazine would sell by itself. On the other hand, it was a dream coming true. The first issue began with his novel Wagner The Wehrwolf. The story itself may have been patterned on the success of James Rymer’s Varney the Vampire of recent issue. If so, the story worked, the magazine was a success and continued to large sales for several years before being folded into John Dick’s Bow Bells.
At this time, 1846-48, Reynolds was also getting increasingly involved in the politics that led up to the February Revolution and the Trafalgar demonstration of that April. This shows in his erratic writing of the Second Series. While having high points such as story of Perdita Hardinge the Second Series is a low point in his production. In getting involved in the Miscellany and the Revolution it is clear that he was taking on too much.
A sea change took place in his career when he formed an alliance with the printer John Dicks in 1847. Dicks would remain his printer for the rest of his career being made a full partner in 1854.
Make no mistake, Reynolds great success depended on his relationship with Dicks. Without a relationship such as this, carrying much of the burden, great success is impossible.
He was now able to free himself from his association with Stiff and Vickers who published The Mysteries of London. They appear to have regarded Reynolds’ writing as for hire and kept the copyrights as theirs. This departure does not appear to have been amicable. Stiff tried to undermine the Reynold’s Miscellany while Reynold’s believed that his 1848 bankruptcy was engineered by Stiff in spite. Nevertheless the groundwork for a remarkable publishing empire was being laid.
Nearly all the information on Dicks I take from his grandson Guy Dicks’ and his book The John Dicks Press, self-published in 2005 and reprinted in 2016.
As an amusing aside if you google Guy Dicks what comes up is a series of articles on men’s penises. Guy Dicks doesn’t get a mention.
Guy’s grandfather John was born four years after Reynolds in 1818. He served a fairly long apprenticeship with specialty publishers before joining Reynolds. His most interesting was with the Chinese dictionary compiler Robert Morrison. He came to Reynolds as an expert printer and innovative publisher. He and Reynolds were on the same wavelength although I don’t know whether Dicks was illuminated or not.
Although Dicks was an employee of Reynolds until 1864 when he was made a partner in that year the two men worked working even more expanded the empire. In addition to Reynolds’ novels and the Reynolds Miscellany they created the Reynolds News paper that survived for well over a hundred years. As their business grew and as technological innovations improved publishing methods the firm kept up, changing with the innovations adding huge steam presses that turned out thousands of impressions an hour.
Between the two of them they tried to be model employers much in the style of the twentieth centuries Henry Ford.
Those developments were in the future, in 1846-7 it is clear that Reynolds was writing weekly installments in a rush while trying to establish a publishing empire of his own. His mental energy must have been enormous and his ability to organize his time phenomenal. Let us never forget that he had a wife and large and growing family.
While the Second Series, especially Volume IV, suffers from all this activity, in 1847 he wrote a complete novel of several thousand words titled Faust: A Romance of the Secret Tribunals that is well plotted and tightly written. It also displays a fair amount of historical knowledge and research. This must have been in the second half of 1847 as in 1846-47 he was turning out Wagner the Wehrwolf which is interesting and exciting but a lower quality than Faust. At the same he was writing these three novels there are reference in the Second Series indicating that he was organizing his thoughts to begin the phenomenal Mysteries of the Court of London.
His mental capacity was phenomenal, his mind was so compartmentalized that he could be working on four separate extensive novels while editing the Reynolds Miscellany during 1846 and part of 1847. His wife Susannah must have been managing the family finances while bringing up a troop of noisy children, and also, it might be added attempting novels also. Her novel Gretna Green appeared at this time.
He began his magnum opus, The Mysteries of the Court of London in 1848 and from then on, he was on solid ground with Dicks backing him up in the founding and development of his publishing empire.
While the humiliations Reynolds suffered as a sixteen year old striking out on his own had been extremely painful to him providing wretched memories, with the rise of his empire he redeemed those years and mistakes. When he died he left an estate of nearly thirty thousand pounds thus putting him up in the class of those aristocrats he despised so much. Alls well that ends well, eh George
Pt. II Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
May 20, 2019
Pt. II: Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
G.W.M Reynolds On Vice And Virtue
by
R.E. Prindle
This essay will concentrate on the novels, Robert Macaire or, The French Bandit In England, The Mysteries Of London, Faust, and Wagner, The Wehr Wolf. Their respective dates were 1840, 1844-48, 1845-46 and 1846-47. As can be seen the latter two novels are encompassed by the dates of The Mysteries Of London and they must be related to the greater novel- two side excursions, so to speak.
We know that Reynolds went out on his own in a foreign country at the age of sixteen, going immediately to take up residence in France with a fair sized sum of money in his pocket inherited from his father as he hints in his novel Faust; then in 1833 at the age of nineteen he inherited a bit more through his mother. He was a natural scholar so that he studied extensively in many fields including literature and history. For such a young man, twenty-five and twenty-six in 1839-40 he writes with an astonishing, indeed, unbelievable maturity and knowledge both experientially and from study. Apart from being fictionalized his history seems to be accurate.
He is especially interested in vice and virtue in humanity. The configurations of his interest were formed by his reading of the Marquis de Sade; he read and internalized de Sade’s novels Justine, Juliette and Philosophy of the Boudoir. While de Sade, from whom the term Sadism is derived, is probably known by name only to most. I append here a short biography so that the reader knows how I understand him. De Sade was born in 1740 and died in 1814, the year Reynolds was born so we may assume that de Sade was still something of a sensation when Reynolds hit Paris in 1830.
De Sade’s fame as the source of the term Sadism was well earned although somewhat stale in the 21st century as films and novels have far surpassed his exploits. There is no longer anything to astonish in his novels. His problems began when his parents denied him marriage to the woman of his choice thus causing an extreme reaction. His reaction was so extreme and notorious, causing his parents such grief, that they had him imprisoned where he began writing his novels. Released by the French Revolution, which was crazier than himself, he functioned well. Napoleon, not so tolerant, had him committed to the famous insane asylum of Charenton. This aided immeasurably in making him a cult figure which he remains to this day.
He committed his grief to two most read novels, Justine and Juliette. He posited as a universal reality that a life of virtue led to unhappiness, pain and failure as characterized by Justine; and a life of libertinage and self-indulgence characterized by Juliette led to happiness and self-fulfillment.
When Reynolds read de Sade’s novels between 1830 and 1837 isn’t known. My guess is that he read them sooner than later and the antitheses between virtue and vice worked in him as he began writing.
Author of Mysteres de Paris and The Wandering Jew
An echo of Justine and Juliette can be found in the Mysteries of London. Reynolds transposes the sexes and has two male brothers Eugene and Richard Markham as protagonists. They are associated with two trees. (The symbolism of the two trees isn’t yet clear to me.) A financial disaster hits the Markham family leaving it and them destitute. Eugene, following the path of Juliette’s example opts for a life of crime to repair his fortunes while Richard decides to pursue virtue. They are to meet by the trees twenty years on to compare results.
This gives Reynolds the means to display his knowledge of vice and virtue. He certainly seems to know the ways of criminality. This investigation is continued in the first two novels written in conjunction with Mysteries titled Faust and Wagner the Wehrwolf. The first of his crime novels was Alfred de Rosann, quite astonishing as a novice novel, I will deal with it later, followed by Grace Darling, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands and the Robert Macaire or the French Bandit In England. After a hiatus of two years from 1842 to 1844 when he wrote nothing Mysteries began. Faust and Wagner were written in succession.
The third of his crime novels was Robert Macaire or the French Bandit In England.
One imagines that Reynolds first heard of the famous French bandit at the theater either in 1833 or ’35 or perhaps he saw both. Macaire was a famous French highwayman, but as Reynolds has Macaire tell his sidekick Bertrand, times were changing and the place of the highwayman was becoming as obsolete as buggy whips would in the twentieth century. Thus while Macaire was involved in stagecoach situations his milieu was shifting to swindling and financial crimes. The future was clear. Reynolds has his ear to the ground.
Published in 1840 Macaire was his third effort following Pickwick Abroad. By this novel he has pretty well learned his craft although his powers will grow exponentially by Mysteries. Macaire is tightly plotted and well written with every evidence of Reynold’s powerful mind. It shows little evidence of de Sade, clear evidence, even borrowing, from Frederic Soulie. Soulie was a French writer of ghastly crime/horror fiction who was, at least, an early model for Reynolds.
As in Mysteries of the Court of London an inspiring incident carried throughout the story ends it. The novel involves an enmity between the practitioner of virtue, Charles Stanmore, and the follower of vice, Robert Macaire. Close to the plots of de Sade’s Justine and Juliette.
The novel opens with Macaire in France holding up a stage containing Stanmore and killing two people while sadistically tying Stanmore to one of the large wheels. If the horse hadn’t remained still as Stanmore remarks he would surely have been killed by the revolving wheel. A sadistic crime in itself.
Papers taken from Stanmore tell of a banker in England who looks ripe for the plucking so Macaire and Bertrand head for England. It is not clear how these two desperadoes pass themselves off as businessmen, especially the clownish Bertrand but they do and Pocklington, the English businessmen invites them in, indeed, ask them to take up residence while in London. He has a beauteous sixteen year old niece, Maria, who falls head over heels for the forty some year old Macaire. As she is to inherit a large fortune Macaire plays the swain.
It so happens that Stanmore also has his eyes on Maria so he develops an inveterate hatred of his rival not realizing that the French bandit and Macaire are the same. Now, it also happens that Stanmore’s father had disappeared on a journey to Lyons in France where he was to establish a new business five years previously. He had waylaid by Macaire, robbed and murdered in a town thirty some miles from Paris on the way to Lyons as will appear later in the story. Macaire was acting as a member of an organized ring of criminals to which he still belongs being one of the leaders.
After mentioning that Macaire is posing as the financial agent named LeBeau who he learns is now on his way to London the two bandits determine to kill him before he arrives to prevent his ruining their plans. Using old skills they waylay his stage on his way to London, brutally drag him from the stage and stab him to death. These two are thoroughly evil men. This is important because while Reynolds is contrasting virtue and vice, he also holds that virtue and vice are equally mixed in a person so that after a life of vice, Macaire will very improbably turn to a life of virtue. But, Reynolds believes he can and it’s his story.
Stanmore becomes suspicious of Macaire and more especially Bertrand so he returns to France to investigate them. His findings lead him to an inn in the town in which his father was murdered. He is directed to the out of the way inn in which the murder occurred. The innkeeper intends to kill Stanmore for his money, but the latter overhears the plot being discussed and in the ensuing struggle kills the innkeeper. Questioning the innkeeper’s wife about his father she points out the place in the inn where Stanhope’s father’s body was immured. Concentrating on opening the wall Stanhope fails to notice that the wife has set the building on fire and fled.
The wife runs for some woods where Stanmore overtakes her. Then borrowing an incident from Frederic Soulie (pronounced Souliay) he ties the woman to a tree while he goes back to main road and inn and forgets her in the rush of events. By the time he gets back to her she is dead, half eaten by varmints.
Macaire has to return to France to account for Lebeau’s absence. Macaire gets into financial schemes and is recognized by the police and arrested. He would have been a goner except for his criminal network. Having pulled off a couple successful escapades Macaire does the necessary repairing to the gang’s den to distribute their share of the booty. This gets an immediate reward when his confederates help him escape from two different prisons.
This brings up the question of Reynolds’ own relationship to the law. Reynolds provides such exact descriptions of various prisons, police quarters, court affairs and prison customs that one wonders how he obtained his knowledge and familiarity. As a newspaperman he would have perhaps entered the various criminal retreats but that doesn’t seem a satisfactory explanation. Dick Collins, an eminent researcher of Reynolds and the period of Penny Dreadfuls gives Reynolds a questionable character.
Collins seems to have ransacked official sources for his information but fails to reference them. In addition to cheating at dice, that rather indicates that Reynolds was one of the shifty hangers on in Paris that he mentions in Pickwick Abroad.
Collins says: Quote: It is alleged- on poor evidence- that Reynolds stayed at the expensive Long’s Hotel in Bond Street and was arrested for trying to steal jewelry to pay the bill.
Unquote.
And there were a series of bankruptcies. One in France in which he was arrested in Calais trying to flee. Then in England in 1939 he spent six months in the Queens Bench Prison for unpaid debt. After becoming a leader in the Chartist movement he displeased the leadership because of unnamed financial schemes. So, let us say that Reynolds was probably flexible in his attitude toward strict probity. One does get that feeling.
One wonders then, was Reynolds personally aware of these criminal hangouts; did he actually mingle with them? His knowledge seems too precise for sheer invention. Also he seems too complimentary of the gendarmes who he says have absolute integrity and are the only upright characters in his novels. Was he trying to stay on their good side just in case?
In any event his descriptions of the prisons from which Macaire escapes are described in minute detail. Having once been caught in the meshes of the French police Macaire seems doomed to remain there as the police are hot on his trail after his last escape.
Now, at the inn at which Macaire had murdered his father, a beautiful young orphan girl, Blanche de Longville, had been placed there by Macaire who for some reason had been made her guardian. She had captured Stanmore’s heart, making him forget Maria, and resulting in a marriage. They were living in a posh area in Paris.
Macaire, quite desperate to escape finds his way to Stanmore and Blache’s mansion to throw himself on her mercy after maltreating through her teen years, expecting what that mercy might be wasn’t clear. Stanmore returns home to find police combing the area and Macaire, his arch enemy, in his wife’s boudoir. However Blanche manages to placate him explaining that if Macaire escapes the police and finds his way to Switzerland he is going to change his ways and end his days as the archetypal French bandit.
So, this Macaire, who had robbed him, possibly condemned him to death by tying him to the carriage wheel, actually murdered and robbed his father, beat him out for the love of the delectable Maria and other crimes too numerous to mention as well as heading up organized crime in France, throws himself on the mercy of Stanmore.
Well, love conquers all, doesn’t it? Rather than offend his wife, Blanche, Stanmore forgives all, gives Macaire traveling money, lets him out the back door and directs the police in the opposite direction, and sententiously pats himself on the back for redeeming a hardened criminal. Reynolds has Macaire living out his days living quietly in Switzerland and that redeems his murders and crimes, for you see good and evil are equally mixed in men. No one is totally bad.
His next novel, Master Timothy’s Bookcase concluded his first period and after a two year hiatus when, one presumes, Reynolds was recharging his batteries, perhaps searching for a more successful approach, organizing himself for the grand charge he began his magnum opus The Mysteries of London, that was a great compendium of crime. He was in fact inspired by Eugene Sue’s Mysteres de Paris but Mysteries of London doesn’t reflect much derivation from that work, however, this was apparently because he couldn’t fit much of it into his story.
Wonderful details preyed on his imagination so that at the same time he was writing Mysteries he also wrote two longish novels, Faust in 1845-46 and Wagner the Wehr Wolf in 1846-48.
Faust is rather an extraordinary novel. Here his inspiration was derived from the European myth of the man who sold his soul to Satan. He combines this story with the story of the German criminal organization called the Holy Vehm. As an adjunct to all he gives an exciting account of the Borgias, Pope Alexander VI, Caesar and Lucretia, or Lucreza as he spells it, Borgia. An amazing novel.
In this novel Reynolds extends his field from France and England to encompass Central Europe—Germany, Austria, Carniola and Italy. Eventually he will draw a circle from England into the Mediterranean touching the Africa of Homer’s Lotus Eaters, through the Dardanelles to Mingrelia or ancient Colchis where the Golden Fleece was kept through the Crimea thus encircling historic Europe. Interesting conception.
Whether he visited these parts during his period in France isn’t clear and his details are fairly sketchy although fairly sharp for Italy. Carniola is an Alpine province of Austria along with Styria and Corinthia. Reynolds probably chose this province for a couple of reasons, the first because as no one had probably heard of it, it was therefore exotic and secondly because a ferocious sexual pervert who lived there in a castle as recorded by de Sade in his novel Juliette. This guy was so incredible that even de Sade hastened away.
Murder, crime and gore in profusion, Reynolds seems in a frenzy to outdo de Sade, Frederic Soulie and Eugene Sue combined and a fine job he does of it too.
Eugene Sue in his magnificent Wandering Jew, that great Armageddon, as his story unfolds the great march of Cholera out of the East that advances at the rate of thirty miles a day closes in on the Paris of 1830 and its revolution of that year. Sue knew how to erase millions of people at a time. What a story, and it goes on for over a thousand pages. Now, if Reynolds did reach Paris in 1830 he must have witnessed the devastation caused by the Cholera epidemic or, at the very least, its aftermath which would have been a topic of conversation. If as Collins suspects he arrived in 1833 he still would have heard stories of the great Cholera terror. If the hints in Reynolds novel, Grace Darling, are correct he places the time of that novel in 1833 so he might likely have still been in England at that time. His descriptions of the Revolution of 1830 in Alfred de Rosann are so sketchy that he may not have arrived in France in 1830 on the heels of the action as he claims.
In Faust he replicates the Cholera epidemic of Sue when Faust orders Satan to create an immense bubonic plague in Vienna and Europe that like the Cholera epidemic rises in the East and rolls over Europe. Thus the spectre derived from Sue’s Rodin makes its appearance in Reynolds. Further both the Cholera and bubonic plague are accurate history. Reynolds’ Faust takes place from 1480 through the first decade of the sixteenth century. Reynolds is very careful with his dates so that events actually occurred in the years he indicates. The bubonic plague he mentions occurred between 1500 and 1503. Interestingly he doesn’t blame fleas from rats in Genoa but, like the Cholera, has it arrive from the East. Current theories indicate that that may have been the case. The first plague of mid-fourteenth century swept through Europe so quickly that there must have been another source than ship rats. In the first place no crew would have been immune to the flea bites hence the Med would have been filled with ghost ships while the spread would have been slower and the diffusion more easily traced. Reynolds always appears to have read and thought deeply.
Faust is essentially a historical novel so that the eruption of Vesuvius in 1485 is accurate but the accuracy of the description of the actual eruption must be fictional. The eruption was however a major one.
So also Reynolds account of the Borgias is historically accurate allowing for description and motives to be interpretations. The villains of Sue’s Wandering Jew are the religious sect of the Jesuits, Reynolds replaces them with the German organization of the Holy Vehm whose description is accurate given a little novelistic license. What we have here, then, in this story is a magnificent contrast between virtue and vice, good and evil. The contrasts are carried out on many levels. The Vehm operates as a government within the government just as the Jesuits were a church within the church. In this case the Austrian government is upright but the Holy Vehm is not. Faust once he has sold his soul to Satan is the representative of a blend of virtue and vice with vice having the upper hand. Faust as the story develops is guilty through his machinations of the deaths of millions. As the representative of vice Faust’s counterpart is Otto Pianella who represents undivided virtue. Faust’s wife represents virtue, or Justine, while Faust’s mistress, Ida, Otto’s sister, represents Juliette or vice. Of course, she is as nothing compared to the mighty Lucreza Borgia, the scariest woman who ever lived.
Reynolds while considered a feminist is, actually, a realist. In general, he deplores the manner in which women are treated but he isn’t so silly as to believe all women are above reproach, thus one has a variety of female types. Lucreza Borgia in the novel is a willful completely evil woman while Nisida in the next novel, Wagner the Wehr Wolf is a ‘strong’ woman but a blend of good and evil. Thus, Reynolds avoids the sappy feminist sentiment of the present.
He was perhaps overawed b Lucreza’s ruthless exercising of her will so that there is no good mixed with her evil. Lucreza was not going to go to Switzerland and while away her time after the Borgias’ power was destroyed.
Mortally offended by de Sade’s dictum that vile living always succeeds on this Earth while virtue always leads to unhappiness, in this novel practicing virtue succeeds while vice fails. Perhaps in Sue’s breathtaking Armageddon in which all the characters but one are immolated, Reynolds changes the end so that each virtuous character lives happily in the end while all the vicious characters die or end unhappily.
The Holy Vehm is destroyed, Ida checks out early, the Borgias seemingly on the way to success are thwarted, first their power is broken, then as fugitives Caesar Borgia after a number of failures is killed in an ignominious battle in Spain while Lucreza suffers a horrible death at the hands of her husband on the island of Lissa belonging to the Duke of Ferrara near Venice. This is one of the most terrifying depictions in the novel. Disregarding Lucreza’s terrible reputation the Duke of Ferrara espouses her with the assumption that she will reform her wicked ways, that is, give up vice.
Apparently, she has until Otto Pianella and his family are marooned on the way back to Vienna by snowstorms in the Julian Alps of Carniola. They put up on Lissa which comes to Lucreza’s attention. She arrests Otto and places him in the Iron Coffin. I won’t replicate the entire story that Reynolds makes as suspenseful as possible, but the Iron Coffin is a large room made of iron shaped like a giant coffin. The walls are moveable and gradually compress down to the size of an actual coffin in which the victim is entombed, where he gradually dies of starvation and dehydration.
As Otto’s situation grows dire Satan appears offering him the Faustian deal. No, no, says Otto, never, never, I put my faith in a higher power. So, in a choice between vice or virtue Otto remains true to God, or virtue. Well, one of Lucreza’s retinue finks to the Duke who is outraged that Lucreza has violated her oath so, at the last moment he releases Otto, justifying Otto’s trust in God, while condemning Lucreza to what would have been Otto’s fate. Thus, the terrible end of the truly vicious Lucreza Borgia.
Now, we are down to Faust himself. Faust had driven a lousy bargain with Satan receiving only twenty-six years of seeming prosperity and unlimited power. Now both hands of the clock, or clysidra, clocks hadn’t been invented yet, are pointing straight up. Remembering Reynolds’ description of the 1485 eruption of Vesuvius Satan takes Faust to the edge of the boiling caldera and after a lengthy triumph and lecture Satan pushes Faust in.
De Sade is repudiated, the results of Justine’s and Juliette’s lives are reversed and Reynolds triumphs over the Marquis de Sade.
While the main novel, The Mysteries Of London, raged on in its contests of virtue and vice, Reynolds began another rather lengthy novel he titled Wagner the Wehr Wolf.
And why not? While good and certainly interesting it doesn’t quite toe the mark made by Faust. Faust was well above the average while Wagner is closer to average but still with all of Reynolds’ inventiveness.
Too few people die and Nisida the villainess is a pale reflection of Lucreza Borgia, but still no slouch as a ‘strong’ woman. Nor is there a Jesuit Order or the Holy Vehm, just a highly organized criminal gang that is terrorizing Florence Italy. Reynolds may have lifted that idea from Dumas’ Count of Monte Christo and the gang in the Italian catacombs. The main story takes place in Florence but changes location to more exotic places including Constatinople, name not yet changed to Istanbul, and Sicily.
Reynolds’ geography embraces a rather large area from England, France, Central Europe, the Balkans, Italy to just off the coast of Africa to include the Greek Islands, Western Anatolia and Mingrelia on the East Coast of the Black Sea, formerly the Colchis of the Argonauts then turning west to the Crimea following in the tracks of the Argonauts and that pretty well encompasses the parameters of historical Europe. One wonders how Reynolds is writing all these novels, maintaining a growing family, keeping up on his reading and accumulating fairly detailed historical studies and he wrote several historical novels, Faust being one.
The adoption of a fantastic Werewolf story seems strange, but then, James Malcolm Rymer, his contemporary Penny Dreadful author was scoring big with his novel Varney The Vampire and would soon after write the classic story of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweeney Todd, a hit musical fifty years ago was the barber who turned his customers into sausages and sold them to another set of customers. Who would believe cannibalism in nineteenth century England?
Varney the Vampire, an incredibly long novel must have nudged Reynolds’ interest in that supernatural direction so he chose to explore another of the great medieval myths or legends of Medieval Europe, that of the Wehr Wolf. So, really, this era produced the subject matter for the next hundred and fifty years or so, Frankenstein, Faust, Varney the Vampire, Sweeney Todd and Werewolves and organized crime. The Curse of the Mummy would come later.
Wagner has a highly organized criminal gang that is central to the story maintaining its connection to the main frame of Mysteries of London. It is a true underworld inhabiting caverns deep into the earth. Whether meant intentionally or not by Reynolds its lower levels rest next to the lower levels of the Catholic nunnery that has an extensive underground. The doings in the nunnery in its underworld are as criminal as those of the criminals only a few feet awaythrough the rock. The two worlds are blended when the crime world is attacked, and the walls accidentally broken through and down. Thus, both the criminal underworld and the equally criminal nunnery were destroyed.
Reynold’s religious interests are intriguing. At this time in his life Reynolds was thirty-two. The Mysteries had solved his financial problems to this moment so his mental comfort zone was probably elevated. He had every reason to believe he could continue his success although the success of his future blockbuster, Mysteries of the Court of London might have astonished even him. At any rate he was relieved of youthful anxieties; he was successfully launched.
How he developed, or found time to develop his religious ideas isn’t obvious to me. Collins alleges that he did write a book of biblical criticism in 1833 when he was only 19 years old and would have had to have been in London at that time. At this point he has the North European abhorrence of the Catholic Church although an apparent strong belief in the existence of God or a deity, however, that could have been a front so as not to offend the reading public. His attitude toward the Moslem world seems to be a tolerant affection. Wagner makes a visit to then Constantinople, now Istanbul, a mere twenty-five years after the Christian capital fell to the Moslems. He forms connections and in order to free Florence from the dominion of the criminal gang he marches a Moslem army to Florence to do it. I must say I read that episode with a certain amount incredulousness.
One imagines that his fantasy was that he could unite the two worlds. The novel was placed in the years following 1516, a mere twenty-four years after the Moorish expulsion from Spain and the completion of the Reconquista. The Moslem slave raids probably hadn’t begun and from this time to 1830 when the French annexed Algeria and wiped out the Corsairs, the Moslem predations on the Mediterranean coast was constant. Eugene Sue’s The knight of Malta is a good representation of the situation and reads as well as Reynolds.
Sue, as Reynolds, was entranced with Byron’s epic poem The Corsair; the sentiments seem to coincide with their own. Indeed, The Knight of Malta can be read as Byron’s poem in novelized form. The opening lines of Byron establish the mental state:
Quote:
O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!
These are our realms, no limits to their sway—
Our flag the scepter all who meet obey.
Ours the wild life in tumult still to range
From toil to rest, and joy in every change.
Unquote.
To a large extent The Corsair forms a part of the mental equipment of all these early Victorian authors.
In addition to Christian and Moslem concerns one considers his evaluation of the Jews as an independent nation living in and on its host; this is difficult because Westerners have been indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that Jews are innocent victims. They are not, not in Hellenic times, not in Roman times and not in Medieval times and certainly not now. During early Christian times they were given the greatest boon that could be imagined: the monopoly of loaning money at interest. Christians, the Catholic Church, laid its congregation at the feet of the Jews to be exploited.
Do not believe that the Jews became money lenders because they were forced to. They have always been money changers. They did so on the porches of the temple where Jesus overturned their tables as sacrilegious. As usurers, even the simplest mind could easily figure out that the entire money supply must inevitably be in their hands. Nor did they loan on reasonable terms but at expropriatory rates of forty or fifty percent for a single day. The West was impoverished so that in Florence first, a State pawn shop was instituted to save both the State and its people financial grief. Other cities followed Florence’s example.
Thus Reynolds introduces us to the Jewish money lender, Issachar. Now, both Reynolds and Dickens had had their run in with Jewish damage controlmen. Dickens was disciplined over his Jewish character in Oliver Twist, Fagin. Reynolds had been dressed down for some remarks in Grace Darling.
Jewish emancipation from the rule of the Catholic Church had begun in France by Napoleon after 1800, by 1840 it was working its way through Central Europe. The Jews qua Jews didn’t become powerful until after Napoleon’s defeat and Nathan Rothchild’s capture of the English currency in 1815. As a result of England’s victory the Rothschilds were in the early stages of consolidating their power. Naturally one of the first steps was controlling the press and publishing, at that time the only effective means of disseminating information. By the time of Wagner Disraeli had published most of his novels and was becoming a power in the State. Both Dickens and Reynolds had heeded their chastening, Dickens submissively and Reynolds with his usual cheek.
Issachar is portrayed as the archetypal Yiddish money changer living in dirty squalid quarters but above the physical portrayal of the usual Jewish caricature he is lauded as the long suffering noble victim, a man of virtue unfairly maligned and Jews so for millennia. Thus Reynolds has fulfilled his obligation to laud the Jews. He describes Issachar as a man of integrity however Issachar is the biggest cheat and crook alive. Nisida’s mother had pawned the family diamonds with Issachar, however, Issachar without hesitation steals the diamonds replacing them with paste. The father being something of an expert immediately discovers the imposture. Issachar justifies himself in some unsatisfactory way and Reynolds blithely goes on about the long suffering Jews.
It is generally thought therefore that Reynolds was genuinely sympathetic to the Jews. I’m not sure that’s true. I think he was just doing to wise thing so he could go on publishing.
For story continuation, we have Wagner, a ninety year old man, living deep in the Black Forest of Germany with his beauteous grand-daughter. Reynolds is very keen on sixteen year old beauties. They abound in his stories. According to Dick Collins Reynolds married his wife Susannah when she was seventeen. Collins says Reynolds may have been her second husband, she having already been taken to wife at 14.
Clara, Wagner’s granddaughter and main support, disappeared one day no one knew where. Wagner is unable to support himself and about to expire when a demon appears offering to restore him to youth. This a much better deal than Satan offered Faust in the previous novel. All Wagner has to do is spend one day a month as a wolf. He knows the day because his fate is based on the lunar calendar. The contract ends when Wagner fails to honor it. As can easily be seen this, on the face of it is good deal, what makes it a great deal is Wagner also gets a substantial guaranteed annual income. Wagner may be old but he is no fool; he signs the deal.
Now a sprout of forty with cash in hand Wagner need no longer skulk about the woods of the Black Forest where all things strange happen. Anyone who is up with German stories of this period knows there are so many desperadoes haunting these woods that they are no place for a fun loving young Wehr Wolf. Wagner hies himself to Florence, Italy where the climate agrees with his clothes.
There he runs into his granddaughter Clara. It wasn’t easy to pass himself off to her as his grandfather but like any young guy of independent means Wagner is a smooth talker.
He then finds some digs and runs into Nisida, the daughter of a Lord who, in fact, turns out to be the reason that Clara disappeared from the Black Forest. He has persuaded the virtuous and beautiful Clara to abandon her virtue and become his secluded mistress. Daughter Nisida learns this determining to kill Clara and therein hangs the tale.
Reynolds throws in the description of some of Wagners transformations which are exciting and well done. On his monthly rampage Wagner merely tears through the countryside like a tornado.
The other part of interest is at the end when Wagner establishes contact with the Rosicrucian Order in Sicily. This perhaps establishes Reynolds’ own religious position. He is a Rosicrucian. He is said to have been a Deist so that fits. I rather accept that Rosicrucianism was his faith. Having studied the religion somewhat I consider myself a Rosicrucian also if one needs a label. And we all do.
Between 1844-48 then Reynolds has launched his career successfully with his Mysteries of London, worked through his French period and examined a major legend of Germany and Central Europe.
In Part III I will deal with Dickens early output in relation to Reynolds.
Immigration, Al Smith And The 1928 Election
February 24, 2019
Immigration, Al Smith, And The 1928 Election
by
R.E. Prindle
People don’t seem to realize that time and changes pass quickly. What was applicable yesterday will not apply to today or tomorrow. Nothing changes society more rapidly than immigration. While attention is applied to race and religion it might better be applied to manners and mores. Whether you think immigration is good or bad immigration changes reality very quickly while all one’s reactions are predicated on a vanished state of affairs.
The cultural changes, that is manners and mores had been occurring at a rapid rate during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century driven by immigration. By 1921 and 1924 unlimited indiscriminate immigration had been limited to more or less controllable numbers. Nevertheless the damage had been done. While the attempt was made to limit the most different mores and manners by favoring Northern European immigrants it was too late. The two chief groups of immigrants, the Irish and the Jews had acculturated enough to challenge the traditional English and Protestant supremacy.
Thus, led by Al Smith, a Catholic Irishman who surrounded himself with Jews the two nationalities were ready to challenge the Anglo-Protestant majority. Note that the Jews are considered a distinct nationality with their own manners and mores acting in their own interests. He, Al, or they chose the inappropriate moment to challenge the Anglo-Protestant majority as the country was in a period of roaring prosperity, had two presidents, Harding and Coolidge and were to be followed by Herbert Hoover who in the circumstances there was no chance of defeating. And so it was that Herbert Hoover became the last ‘American’ president. Hoover was followed by Roosevelt to whom the Jews transferred their alliance while the Irish were forgotten. Thus the Liberal and Jewish combination have written all histories and distorted the old American contribution to founding the US.
Now, in the 1928 election the Jewish-Irish faction could not accept their loss on any other grounds than the bigotry of Anglo-American voters. In fact, Al Smith was merely a New York City machine politician who, used to campaigning in New York chose as his theme song ‘The Streets of New York’ and spoke with a heavy New York City accent. His manners and mores were those of his home town. To the rest of the country those manners and mores were humorous.
The New York accent alone would have made him unpalatable to the rest of Americans who thought that NYC had an economic stranglehold on America. And then the to thrust The Streets of New York into their faces was sheer folly.
Being Catholic, of course, didn’t help Al with the Protestants but it surely was a charm for the Catholics who were the largest religious denomination in America. But there appears to have been no block voting along religious lines. The Economy ruled.
Whether Al’s Irish background swung the electorate against him is open to conjecture but I would put more weight behind that than the religion. At that point, 1928, there was still a strong antipathy between the Anglos and the Irish. Even in 1956 in my home town the antipathy was noticeable. Apart from Jack Kennedy’s being a Democrat and offensive because of his father’s criminal background his Catholicism and nationality was a factor in my voting against him in 1960. The Irish came over to what they call the New Island in large numbers during the potato famine in Ireland in the eighteen forties and beyond. There was immediately a huge conflict between them and the Anglos in which bloody battles were fought largely aggravated by the Irish. Thus the Irish-English conflict was carried to American shores.
With the Irish came the notion that immigrants rights were superior to nativist rights. Hence the political organization known as the Know Nothing Party that arose to oppose Irish violence was demonized out of existence for its efforts to protect American manners and mores and some kind of control of their destiny. They lost that control as the Irish formed a sort of competing government called Tammany that seized control of NYC and retained it until Jimmy Walker the last Tammany mayor was booted out of the country in the early thirties. It was as though the Irish had control of London.
The Irish were then replaced by the Jews who seized both NYC and New York State. As an immigrant group, the Jews, although the smallest national supplier of immigrants also came as the highest percentage of their nation and thus had equality of numbers with the other national immigrants. There were more Jews in NYC than in any other city of the world. The only place with a higher number was the Russian Pale of the Settlement that covered millions of square acres.
The vast majority of Jews arrived from 1890 to 1914. Like the Irish the Jews created a national enclave, or colony, in NYC. By 1913 they were able to effect a socialist revolution by electing Woodrow Wilson as presidient. This revolution, for such it was, has been unrecognized by Jewish and Liberal historians but the Wilson Administration, turned out in 1920, after a hiatus of the twelve years of the Republican Interregnum would morph into the fully fledged socialist presidency of Franklin Roosevelt beginning in 1932 and ending only with his death in 1945. Thus Roosevelt was the undeclared president for life.
So, Al Smith represented the end of Irish dominance in the affairs of NY and the hope of national dominance in a Jewish-Irish coalition. If that attempt had succeeded immigrants would have seized control of the United States of America. An entire new set of manners and mores would have replaced those of the original settlers. Immigration has adverse consequences like it or not.
While there was a conflict then between the Catholic and Protestant religions and between the English and Irish and Jewish nationalities the election itself was determined on the basis of extreme economic prosperity that Republicans could claim as their own and, indeed, it was called the Coolidge Prosperity after the middle Republican president of the Interregnum- Harding, Coolidge, Hoover.
Then came the deluge. Collectivism replaced Individualism and Socialism replaced Laissez-faire, which had been the system of the nineteenth century Gilded Age. A new set of manners and mores appeared based on an immigrant ideal with its symbol of Ellis Island.
A similar transition is occurring today.
Thoughts On Mr. Bezo’s Pecker Problem
February 10, 2019
Thoughts On Mr. Bezos’ Pecker Problem
by
R.E. Prindle
https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f
Let’s keep the ball rolling on this issue that Mr. Bezos has brought to our attention. We have little idea of the behind the senses activity so we can only deal with what is public.
It seems that the Mr. Bezos owned Washington Post has been attacking Mr. David Pecker’s publication the National Enquirer, itself owned by a corporation calling itself AMI.
The sin of the NE as identified by Mr. Bezos is being in contact with Saudi Arabia. This seems strange as the Saudis are publicized as one of our stalwart allies, second only to Israel. It is difficult to see the offence even if it relates somehow to Pres. Trump. Yet this seems to be the basis of Mr. Bezos’ and the WP’s complaint.
There does seem to be some involvement with government investigators between Mr. Bezos, the WP and the Mueller outfit.
Mr. Bezos make this incomprehensible statement:
Quote:
Federal investigators and legitimate media…suspected and proved that Mr. Pecker has used the Enquirer and AMI for political reasons.
Unquote:
I have always held Mr. Bezos in high regard for his unbelievable commercial success but here he makes the incomprehensible statement that it is wrong that newspapers have political reasons in publishing. Has Mr. Bezos never heard of the Editorial page? Are not stories and their characterizations used for political purposes? Do not newspapers endorse and recommend their favorite candidates? Good Lord, doesn’t Mr. Bezos own the Washington Post and use it for defaming Pres. Trump?
Actually, he does know it. (One wonders if Mr. Bezos doesn’t also own the Medium site, the site on which he chose to expose himself.) Mr. Bezos calls his ownership of the WP a ‘complexifier’. In other words it compromises him.
Quote:
Even though the Post is a complexifier for me, I do not regret my investment. (The Post loses tens of millions of dollars a year; some investment. More a vanity and/or political project.)
The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship (note the word) of the Post and my support of its mission, which will be unswerving (and) remain unswerving…
Unquote.
Very well, but can’t Mr. Pecker say the same about his relationship with the National Enquirer. Is the NE really any less legitimate than the WP? Is Mr. Bezos mouthpiece any less reprehensible in its political ‘mission’ to discredit Pres. Trump?
Mr. Bezos then says:
Quote:
Back to the story: Several days ago, an AMI leader, (Editor I presume Mr. Bezos means) advised us (us being whom?) that Mr. Pecker went “apoplectic” about our investigation. For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to be a particularly sensitive nerve.
Unquote.
Why should it? Didn’t Pres. Obama make an obsequious bow from the hip while placeing his hand in the Saudi king’s hand as a sign of fealty?
There we have the crux of the matter. Mr. Pecker’s counter attack. Apparently fighting back is not kosher to Mr. Bezos.
After having been married to a lovely lady for twenty-five years, and building the most successful gigantic business on the planet Mr. Bezos decided he needs a hot babe and so he went out and bought one (for lack of a better word) not only that he bought a married one.
In this romance Mr. Bezos, who is perhaps one of the top ten tech wizards in the world inexplicably sent and exchanged pornographic photos with his Hot Tamale. These emails and photos were then given or sold to the NE by someone.
Mr. Bezos believes that the Pres. somehow hacked them. Where they came from is beside the point but the NE categorically denies they got them by hacking. Using Occam’s Razor the most obvious suspect is the Hot Tamale. After all if you had bagged a guy worth 150 billion dollars wouldn’t you want the world to know? What Hot Tamale wouldn’t? Anent that we have heard no objections from the husband and no filing for divorce.
In frustration the NE tried to negotiate with Mr. Bezos offering to squelch publications if he gave up his unwarranted persecution of them on the WP.
Mr. Bezos chooses to call this offer extortion and blackmail. Mr. Bezo’s will hopefully pardon a knowing smile on our part.
One wonders at what strategic moment Mr. Bezos will choose to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. I think you just killed your chances, Sir.
Part I Take 2: The Sixties And The Negro Revolution
January 23, 2014
Sixties And The Negro Revolution
by
R.E. Prindle
Men in positions of great power have been forced to realize that their aspirations and responsibilities have exceed the horizons of their own experience, knowledge and capability. Yet, because they are in charge of this high-technology society, they are compelled to do something.
–Fletcher Prouty: JFK, The CIA and Vietnam
Society chooses not to see the most obvious things. Living back in the fifties any idea of a Negro revolt or race war was carefully hidden even if any White person even suspected what was going on in the Negro mind. Writing here in 2014 many things about the Negro revolt that were unrecognized or supposedly debatable have become clear. In my account then I will relate to the past, the present of the Sixties and the future being realized today.
The Negroes have always claimed that racism is endemic to White Americans. This attitude misses that the point of the actual differences between Homo Sapiens and Homo Africanus species. If the species were undifferentiated then ‘racism’ could be claimed but where the two different species have obvious different capabilities then the problem is shifted to another plane.
We are told that the African was the first edition, Homo 1.0, of Homo Sapiens which implies that the Last Homonid Predecessor to the Negro was sub-human. Unfortunately the record of all the immediate predecessors to Homo Africanus have disappeared from the Earth without a trace. We have a multi-million year gap between ancient homonids and Africanus, so we really don’t know when the supposedly sub-human and the human begins. We are told that only 2% of our genes differentiate ourselves from the Chimps which is all very well and good but what was the genetic difference between the LHP and Africanus? A gene or two? And if a gene or two can make a difference between sub-human and human who is to say that Africanus is not the LHP?
But I digress a little but meaningfully. From the Negro point of view then endemic ‘racism’ is true and if not, it should be. As White mental capabilities are of a higher order than that of the Negro the disparate impact of White Supremacy is unavoidable. There is a biological difference in mental capabilities that cannot be eliminated. What differentiated the LHP and Africanus cannot possibly be any more than that. If both were stood side by side one must assume that there would have been no noticeable difference. Perhaps skin tone.
The fact was made even more apparent during the Sixties when violent and criminal programs were enacted by Liberal Whites for the benefit of Africanus or in another word, the Negro. These programs were expanded over the subsequent decades until the Negro ideal of the first being last and the last being first is being realized through the manipulation of political and legal mechanisms today. Thus the least capable is subordinating the most capable.
This program was being effected by the efforts of such people as the president of the Ford Foundation in 1966, McGeorge Bundy. He, the former military advisor of Kennedy and Johnson, knew nothing of military matters, and knew even less of the Negro having known none and quite possibly never having spoken to one determined to ‘lift’ the Negro to White standards. The concept of disparate impact had not yet been invented. One can quite easily see that Liberals considered the Negro inferior else how could they be ‘lifted’ to White standards. That’s the inherent ‘racism’ Negroes complain of.
McGeorge Bundy neither knew nor made any attempt to understand the Negro psychology which he presumed was exactly like White psychology but less so. It was readily admitted and unchallenged that Negroes had an inferior education and hence less well prepared than Whites for the challenges of modern society. The reason was advanced that Negroes were behind because the amount of money spent on their schooling was less than that spent on Whites. Never mind that the money spent on education for anybody in the nineteenth century was infinitesimal whether White or Negro yet the nineteenth century still made incredible scientific advances.
It was decided that the more spent the sooner the gap would be closed but in an absent minded way the gap was always admitted and denied by no one. In that context of White Supremacy the Sixties began with Kennedy’s creation of the pet Liberal idea of the Peace Corps in which White youths recently graduated from college with no worldly experience were sent to ‘underdeveloped’ peoples to lift them up and bring them into the White way of doing things. There seemed to be no attempt to understand how the Uplift Gospel was perceived by the poor colored peoples of the world.
In this way the Negroes were seen as a sort of domestic Peace Corps project in which Whites would teach the Negro to do things the White way. In the eyes of the Negro this was White Supremacy run amuck, an attempt to strip them of their Negritude, which it was. At the same time they could not compete on an equal basis so that the attempted entitlements granted Negroes to remedy the situation enraged the Whites.
Yes, both sides admitted the inability of the Negro to compete in a White technological world where standards were set to ensure the highest standard of public benefit. Negroes rejected he meritocracy in favor of a Negro spoils system. Thus to ensure Negro placement not only were Negroes given an IQ handicap of 20 points or so but standards were lowered to ensure inclusion thus decreasing public benefit for all. The downward spiral had begun.
The downward spiral was much forwarded by the Civil Rights Movement of the post-Brown decision in the fifties and sixties. While the movement was largely the work of New York Jews there was little dissent among Whites who considered the Movement as just as WWII. I never met anyone who, publicly, at least, disagreed with it. For myself I viewed it with much foreboding as I had Brown vs. The Board Of Education. There was too much ill will in Negro grievances for the issue to be settled amicably as events in these years surrounding 2014 are showing.
2.
While Negroes speak of the legacy of slavery, slavery is not the real issue. Negroes were always slaves, slavery was the norm in Africa. One of the first White explorers to penetrate West Africa the incredibly naïve Mungo Park, speaking of eighteenth century West Africa of the Bulge noted that seventy-five percent of the sub-Saharan Africans were slaves to other Africans and were disposable as their owners wished.
Nor were modern contacts with Whites the first that had been made with Africans. Roman roads led through the Sahara from the Med coast into the southern jungles. Even earlier the Carthaginians made long voyages of discovery down the coast of Africa even circumnavigating the continent. These were voyages that took years to make. It was the ancient custom when stores ran low to stop to sow and reap crops so as to continue while water replacement was probably necessary every few days. In addition there were numerous shipwrecks.
Several tribes on the coast of the Bulge have legends of White lawgivers arriving who gave them the rudiments of social and political organization. Apparently previous to these White visitors the Negroes were merely savages huddling around fires.
Thus to some extent the Africans had been semi-civilized learning many Mediterranean legends and religious ideas which accounts for the remarkable similarity between Med and African legends while such legends may have formed the basis of the Yoruba people of Nigeria’s religion that forms the basis of the New World Negro religions going by the name of Voo Doo, Santeria etc.. Whites must have always played a major role in the development of Africans.
When the Semitic people began enslaving Africans isn’t clear but with the coming of Moslemism in the seventh century AD and their sweep across North Africa and the Sahara brought them into contact with the West African tribes. The Moslems, or Arabs, then began a slave trade leading from the jungles and Sahel across the Sahara that existed for a thousand years. Not being particularly tender the slavers either couldn’t tend to their cargo because of the extreme desert conditions or they didn’t care so that the track was littered with a thousand years of bleaching bones.
In the East very early the Arabs worked their way down the coast until they established their southern post on Kilwa Island at the southern end of what is now Tanzania. In whatever manner the East African Arabs turned black so that being an Arab became a cultural matter rather than a racial one. The Arabs then nearly depopulated the Sudan by their centuries long raids. They generally took the women and children leaving the men behind.
It was in this area that the African as opposed to Arab tribes took to extending female lips by inserting plates and elongating necks with copper rings in the hope of making their women ugly enough to dissuade the slavers from taking them.
Further South having depopulated the coasts the Arabs moved into the interior across then Tanganyika, now Tanzania, then into the Congo basin where they met the incoming Europeans from the West.
The explorers described the long trains of captured Africans linked by neck yokes making the long thousand mile trek from the Congo to the coast opposite the slave entrepot of the fable island of Zanzibar.
For those who survived the trek there awaited the sweltering ‘tween decks voyage across the Indian ocean on small Arab dhows to be sold in Arabia, the Middle East, Iran and for many India.
The slave trade of Europeans began as a workforce for Brazil and the Caribbean islands including Haiti. Those not sold in the Caribbean were carried to the US North and South. The Negroes who went West were the favored ones occupying the virtual paradise of the Antilles or the fabulous fleshpots of the then British American colonies soon to be the US. No better thing ever happened to Negroes.
Nor is it to be supposed that slavery was confined to the South or limited to Negroes. Not long after New World slavery began Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland where he rounded up tens of thousands of male and female Irishers selling them into slavery in the Antilles where they labored in the fields cheek by jowl with the Negroes. There are apparently settlements of these ex-Irish slaves in the islands today.
Negro slavery existed in all the colonies North and South in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as into the nineteenth century. The repeal of slavery began in the Rhode Island colony in 1652, Massachusetts and New Hamphire in 1783, Connecticut in 1784, Pennsylvania in 1847 and New York in 1848.
In 1808 the Federal government made it illegal to import slaves. Canada outlawed slavery only in 1819.
Indentured servants who we were taught were kitchen help or like service were in very many instances actual slaves. Originally used in the fields they died in large numbers from exposure. Negroes used to torrid temperatures while walking around naked were brought in to replace them but both races worked the fields cheek by jowl where much miscegenation undoubtedly took place.
The date of the passage of laws banning slavery does not mean slavery in those places ended on that date as clauses extended existing bondage for several years. It is more than likely that some slaves existed in all or most states in 1863 the date of the Emancipation proclamation. That proclamation did not outlaw slavery per se merely emancipating the slaves in the seceded States.
The key event in US slavery took place in the French colony of Haiti culminating in the massacre or enslavement of the Whites in 1804.
The Haitian slaves had originally revolted in 1791. A cadre of revolutionaries had arisen in France sometime in the 1780s who made it a point to agitate the Antillean slaves including Haiti. The Haitian revolution was successful as the Jacobins in France outlawed slavery in the French empire in 1794. The agitators then turned their eyes toward the slavery in the new United States of 1793.
The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 if not directed at these Jacobin agitators were used against them. The Acts expired in 1801 during Jefferson’s term so agitators were then able to function freely. Thus the Abolitionist movement began in the North especially among the East Anglian descendants of New England.
In this air of anti-slavery agitation the seven year old republic was alarmed at the news of the San Domingo Moment of 1804 in Haiti when the Negroes rose up and slaughtered the White men of the island. The White women were given the choice of death or becoming sex slaves to the Haitian men. Most chose life under this condition. Those who didn’t were gang raped and tortured to death. The horrors true and imagined caused a frisson of fear to run up the backs of Americans North and South. As noted slavery was still legal is many Northern States at the time.
While the Jacobins had outlawed slavery in 1794 Napoleon reinstated it in 1802. In the resultant reaction the Negro revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture led the slaves to victory over large French armies. Toussaint then became as or more famous than his contemporary George Washington. He was celebrated in poems and stories by such worthies as William Wordsworth of England and John Greenleaf Whittier of the United States.
As the noted historian Matthew J. Clavin details in his wonderful history Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution the Abolitionists kept Toussaint’s reputation alive while exciting the country into what might well have been a revolution forcing the Southern States into secession to protect not only their interests but their lives.
With the success of the first Haitian slave revolt Napoleon may well have thought New Orleans was next so rather lose it all for expense chose to sell the Louisiana territory to the US for some recompense. Either the US was uber confident in its ability to manage the situation or they weren’t yet well informed on the Haitian situation. In any event the choice was between the devil and the deep blue sea. Imagine an alternate history in which Negroes revolted from French rule in New Orleans forming a Negro empire opposed to the US.
It should be remembered that New Orleans was the northern anchor of the French Antillean empire that stretched from there down through Haiti and the islands to South America. In the event then Whites and possibly Negroes with their retinues of slaves fled to New Orleans causing irruptions in what was then the United States. And of course many Whites fled to cities of the East Coast carrying their stories with them north of the Mason-Dixon line.
With the results of Haiti in mind Jacobins or Abolitionists entered the South between then and 1860 to agitate the Negroes to murder the men and possess their women as they had done in Haiti. This was a very serious problem in the South undoubtedly influencing the desire for Secession.
There was small difference between the acts of the Abolitionists and Robespierre’s Jacobins in France. Their attitude was to motivate Liberals from their day to this. If the Abolitionists hadn’t been restrained post-war by leveler Northern heads it is not impossible that they wouldn’t have taken the guillotine to every Southern head. That would have meant the genocide of millions. Believe me those guys were savage and insane, possessed by an irrevocable idee fixe that continues to this day.
The Southerners realizing their peril organized the first Klan waging a guerilla war against Northern carpet baggers and Negroes to assure their own survival. They fought hard while their Northern allies restrained the looneys in Washington. One of their kind, a current professor at UColumbia in NYC named Eric Foner, has labeled the Civil War/Reconstruction as America’s Unfinished Revolution which he is working to complete today.
Thus one can say the hostilities begun in 1860 are continuing into the present. The Southerners succeeding in their counterrevolution established the period of Jim Crow to contain the Abolitionists and Negroes. The net result of both Haitian Revolutions then was the near total suppression of Negroes for a mere seventy-seven years. The Negro counter reaction has been waged now for sixty some years.
Toussaint L’Ouverture then could be seen as the Che Guevara of his time. If T-shirts had been the mode his countenance would have been seen everywhere, at least North of the Mason-Dixon line. As it was, in the mode of the time, Wordsworth and Whittier composed poems in his honor. The Abolitionists roamed the South promoting another San Domingo Moment.
The radical wish was proven in the Reconstruction period after the war. Reconstruction was perhaps the most shameful period in world history, dwarfing the Jewish holocaust of more recent memory. The Abolitionists of the North were absolutely barbaric in their treatment of the Whites and their adoration of Negroes who were but little removed from savagery. There was a small difference between the acts of the Abolitionists and Robespierre’s Jacobins in France.
The genocidal mindset of the Haitian Negroes in 1804 has been carried forward from then until today when Negroes aided by their Jewish allies are calling for the total extermination of one billion Whites. What is the psychology behind that?
3.
I think the answer is contained in the term White Supremacy.
As I have said the Arab slavers in Africa became black so that one had black Arabs enslaving black Africans. The Arabs were thus on the same intellectual level as the Negroes while the Negroes had been enslaving and eating each in much the same way for hundreds if not thousands of years.
What the world learned to its chagrin during the colonial period in Africa is that Whites are more capable than the coloreds. The fear that motivates Negroes, Jews and the rest of the coloreds is that they are actually less mentally capable than the Whites, hence in personal terms, inferior.
The term White Supremacy is actually self explanatory. The fact was that and is that Whites- Aryans- are intellectually superior. This is totally obvious to the naked eye although the scientific evidence of genetics indicates the same thing. Whites then, whether they wished to or not, looked down on Negroes as inferior while holding themselves aloof forbidding White women to even look at Negroes. This attitude especially concerning women angered Negroes more than can be said.
So much of White culture and inventive ability must have seemed like magic to the Negroes. Physically there wasn’t much difference. One on one without guns the White man and Negro were more or less equals. Thus when the explorer Stanley with his gun held before him was admonishing a group of Negroes, one out of sheer frustration of this runt speaking to him as he did, snatched the gun from Stanley’s hands. At that point Stanley’s power would have vanished had not his Negro gun bearer snatched the gun back handing it to Stanley restoring his power.
Thus the difference in the Negro mind was technological or intellectual superiority which he disregards as a trick or magic. The mental disparity make the two species unequal hence the insistent demand for equality at any cost. So far the appearance of equality has only been obtained by tilting the field in favor of the Negro.
Imagine the Negro fresh from the jungle stepping into a civilization he couldn’t possibly have imagined as he landed in the colonies. He must have been overwhelmed and shamed. The Jews certainly were when they were transported to Babylon where the scope of that civilization and its architecture made Israel and its comparatively shabby temple that they were so proud of appear insignificant.
Consider the country rube’s first look at New York City. I had seen big cities like SF, LA, Chicago and Philly but I mean to tell I was overawed by the endless streets of skyscrapers and the intense hustle and bustle.
As far as Magic goes just consider that little hand held device the Smart Phone. Not only can you call anywhere in the world, carry an entire encyclopedia in the your pocket, send letters by email and unbelievably take photographs and transmit them instantaneously anywhere in the world and if you’ve forgotten where you’ve parked your car the Smart Phone will locate it for you and show you where it is. Magic don’t you think?
Who invented such a device? White people. Who can use it? Anyone, even if you’re fresh from the jungle. It’s operation is that simplified. That’s what White people can do and others can’t.
Like it or not Negroes can’t. We know it; they know it too. So as much as they rail against White Supremacy its there and all they can do is eradicate it by exterminating Whites.
So the hatred is not really rooted in slavery; they have always known slavery but in fact that they can never be equal so, if you follow, the lack of equality is the real and only issue. It cannot be resolved in the Negro’s favor.
4.
By 1877 the Southern Whites had re-established White Supremacy placing the Negro back under control for seventy-seven years until Brown vs. The Board of Education released them to murder and plunder once again.
Along the way the war always simmered along sometimes bursting into a boil. The war years of 1914-18 and the early twenties were especially volatile. On the one hand Marcus Garvey established his Universal Negro Improvement Association and on the other with White men off fighting in Europe industrialists encouraged Negroes to move North to replace Whites in the factories. What has been called the Great Migration began.
While Marcus Garvey was trying to organize global Negroes and actually succeeded in establishing branches in forty some countries the migration of Negroes North was instrumental in strengthening his hand.
In the UNIA battle Whites succeeded in stopping Garvey although Garveyism had a lasting effect worldwide. The Northern invasion was stoutly resisted by Whites in the twenties as battles erupted in sites such as Chicago, Oklahoma City and especially East St. Louis, Illinois. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled in East St. Louis Negroes occupied the town. It was theirs and has remained so.
Warfare cooled down after the battles of the early twenties. The next big eruption occurred in Detroit during WWII when there was a massive battle.
As usual Negroes returning from WWII came back with different notions of race relations. They were reluctant to observe Jim Crow. Their Liberal allies had their back. In 1954. Jim Crow was defeated by the Brown vs. Board Of Education Supreme Court decision and actually implemented by Pres. Eisenhower which he didn’t have to do.
The Court determined that it could make laws without the aid of the legislatures. Henceforth the courts became social arbiters rather than legal interpreters. Fairly low level judges could on their own initiative and according to their own prejudices declare any law or the voter’s will null and void by their simple say so. The White side of the war had been legally emasculated. Why anyone would observe one man’s opinion has always been beyond me.
Thus as the war turned into the period of the Civil Rights Movement of the struggle White warriors were not only taking on the White Liberals and Negroes but the whole legal and political order. The federal government in almost a repeat of the post-Civil War Reconstruction sent armored divisions of the Army into the South to impose the illegal Supreme Court decision on Southern White school children.
At the same time emboldened by the Supreme Court decision Negroes in the South arose in an assault on White Jim Crow rule most especially in Alabama.
Virtually unnoticed at the time the racial balance in the war’s most important battlefield, NYC was quietly shifting. After the war Whites began moving out of New York City while hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans were being airlifted into the city along with other hundreds of thousands of West Indian Negroes. By late century there were more West Indians than their were US born Negroes in NYC.
Thus by 1965 while the population of the city was unchanged a million and a half Whites had left and a million and a half Puerto Ricans and West Indians had replaced them. Gigantic ghettos sprang up in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.
Thus by 1960 the situation had become quite combustible.
Part One: The Sixties And The Negro Revolution
December 23, 2013
The Sixties And The Negro Revolution
Part One
by
R.E. Prindle
Men in positions of great power have been forced to realize that their aspirations and responsibilities have exceeded the horizons of their own experience, knowledge and capability. Yet, because they are in charge of this high-technology society, they are compelled to do something.
–Fletcher Prouty, JFK, The CIA And Vietnam
Writing here in 2014 many things about the Negro revolt in the Sixties that were unrecognized or supposedly debatable at the time have become clear. In my account then I will relate to the past, the present of the Sixties and the future being realized today.
The Negroes have always claimed endemic White racism. From their perspective this is true as the disparate impact of White supremacy is unavoidable. The attempt to deny this superiority through Affirmative Action which gives Negroes a handicap of 20 IQ points or so to make them equal admits the fact of the disparity between the two species.
This fact is also apparent by the efforts of people like McGeorge Bundy who assumed the reins of the Ford Foundation in 1966 to ‘lift’ the Negro up to White standards. Bundy neither knew nor made any attempt to understand Negro psychology which he presumed was exactly like White psychology but less developed. In that context the Sixties began with Kennedy’s creation of the Peace Corps in which White youths with no worldly experience were sent to ‘underdeveloped’ peoples too lift them up and show them how to do things the White way. There seemed to be no understanding of how the rhetoric of ‘uplift’ was perceived by the poor coloreds.
The Negroes were seen in much the same way as a sort of domestic Peace Corps in which Whites would teach Negroes manners, so to speak. In Negro eyes this was racism, White supremacy, and destested.
Yet, both sides admitted the inability of the Negro to compete in a White world when standards of ability had been created to ensure the highest standards of public benefit. Thus to ensure Negro placement not only were Negroes given a handicap of 20 points or so but standards were lowered thus decreasing public benefit of all.
While Negroes always speak of the legacy of slavery, slavery is not the issue. Negroes were always slaves, slavery was the norm in Africa. The traveler Mungo Park speaking in the eighteenth century West Africa thought that seventy-five percent of the sub-Saharan Africans were slaves disposable as their owners wished.
It might also be appropriate to point out here that the African social structure such as it was had been given to them by White men. Along the coast of the Bulge several African tribes have legends of White men coming and instructing them in the rudiments of social order. This implies that African society before that was on a hunter gatherer basis.
These legends of White law givers were undoubtedly derived from ship wrecked sailors probably from many different historical periods probably beginning with the Phoenicians or Carthaginians who made many forays down the African coast while they are thought to have circumnavigated Africa. It is not improbable that a crew or crews spent several months in the areas as the voyages took years to complete so that crews had to stop, sow crops and harvest them, replenishing their stores before continuing. Thus Whites must always have played a major role in the development of Africans.
The Arabs had been making slave raids since at least the eighth century in both West and East Africa. At the least tens of thousands of African slaves died on the long trek from the Sahel across the Sahara to the Mediterranean shores. The whole of the Sudan was thought to have been depopulated by 75% by the slavers. It was there that women had plates put in their lips, had their necks stretched using copper rings, to make them ugly so as to discourage slavers.
Further South in Kenya, Tanganyika and the Congo, Arab slavers sent long lines of slaves in neck yokes and chains on the thousand mile walk to the coast opposite the island of Zanzibar which was the trading bazaar. A very large percentage died on the trek and a still larger number amongst the midships passage to India and the Persian Gulf.
Yet the Negroes make no complaint about their savage treatment by the Arabs. Why? Quite simple. The Arabs were White to start but from the eighth century Arabs in Africa bred with the Africans becoming Negroes themselves but retaining the Arab identity. Negroes could understand enslavement by fellow Blacks which was normal; it had always been that way. In many ways the Arabs were on the same intellectual level or only slightly higher than the Africans but better organized than the non-Arab Negroes so there was no real conflict on the racial level.
Even the Ugandan chief Mtese speaking in the second half of the nineteenth century remarked that he noticed that the finer Arab trading goods came from White Europeans. There was an intellectual difference between Europeans and Arab/Negroes. It was a marked difference in intelligence. Nor did the difference pass unnoticed by the Whites. Thus there was a racial divide the Whites refused to regress to and which the Negroes couldn’t cross.
Whites rather consciously or not considered the Negroes a lower form of evolution somewhere between apes and Homo Sapiens. While Liberals of the Sixties decade would never have admitted to this attitude they nevertheless had it. Thus the tried to ‘raise’ the Negro ‘up’ to their level. The Negroes resented the attitude.
The Negroes always hated and resented the Whites for their attitude as they were treated like so many farm animals on the plantations everywhere in the world. Slavery would never have ended except for the English conscience. White people trafficked in Africans for a couple hundred years before the British ended the practice voluntarily at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of course, not everyone, including the Americans, recognized British law so that the English spent millions and large human resources in the attempt to enforce their edict.
Slaves continued to pour into America until in a disgraceful war White Americans slaughtered each other while expending most of the wealth they had accumulated in the previous two centuries. The beneficiaries of the internecine slaughter were the Negroes. Then the Northerners attempted to enslave the Southerners to their Negro ex-slaves.
The British passed an anti-Slavery act in India in 1843. How long it took the practice to die out, if it has, is not clear.
In Brazil slavery was abolished only in 1888, twelve years from the twentieth century.
Slavery has never been abolished in Arab lands, discretely carried on today while they have slyly re-imported the practice into Europe and America.
The Negro revolution began in Haiti just after the turn of the nineteenth century. Haiti was part of the French colonial Caribbean stretching down from New Orleans on the North American continent through Haiti and the numerous islands leading down to South America.
The Negroes rose up and slaughtered every White male. As a sign of their resentment at White superiority that put White women out of reach of the Negro they allowed the White women to live so long as they gave up their pretensions of superiority and bedded Negroes. Most did. But those that didn’t were raped and tortured to death.
The French have always loved the Negro more than other Europeans. In their colonies there was a large mulatto population created by White men impregnating slaves that also owned slaves while there were numerous free Negro slave owners. Thus it was that the majority of Negro slave owners in the US after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 were in New Orleans. It may be a coincidence that the French sold Louisiana shortly after the Haitian rebellion or perhaps they read the writing on the wall.
While slavery was relatively benign in the Eastern states where owners did not have the right of life and death over their slaves in New Orleans the Negro slave owners were in the habit of working their slaves to death finding it cheaper to buy more. What good is an old useless slave anyway, hey?
Indeed, breeding farms arose in Kentucky, the site of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When the Negroes were of an age they were sold down river to New Orleans which gave rise to that American expression.
Nor were all slaves Black. Free labor is free labor black or white. A large proportion of eighteenth century slaves were White, called indentured servants, who were treated as slaves working in the fields cheek by jowl with the Negroes. Nor were they necessarily released after their term of indenture. Excuses for expenses incurred could always be invented.
In the seventeenth century in Ireland Oliver Cromwell rounded up tens of thousands of Irish and sold them into slavery in the Caribbean where they remained slaves unto death. Children and others were abducted from English streets to be sold into slavery. The hero of Stevenson’s kidnapped was given as a reward to the ship’s captain to sell in America.
To return to the main narrative. The Negro rebellion began in Haiti and spread from there to Negro revolts on the US mainland. The Negro revolts were interrupted by the War Between the Whites. The revolt in a sense succeeded during Reconstruction abetted by the Northerners. The White counter-revolution threw off the Northern/Negro yoke in 1877 thus actually ending slavery in the US while beginning the counter suppression known as Jim Crow. The species were strictly segregated.
The racial war has never ceased although assuming different manifestations for differing circumstances. The Negro has always been aided by Northern Liberals and after 1900 by the Jews who had immigrated in their millions. WWI gave many opportunities to Negroes who were not used as troops. The war was fought by Whites against Whites thus allowing Negroes to replace their manpower in the Northern factories. The great internal migration from South to North had begun. Of course it was attended by ferocious racial warfare, usually referred to as riots. Abetted again by WWII the internal Negro migration proceeded turning into a flood during the fifties and sixties.
The Negro revolt has been characterized as America’s Unfinished Revolution referring to the failure of Reconstruction, or the supremacy of the Negro. In 2014 we are near another civil war to complete the revolution. The key event in this phase of the revolution was the Brown vs. The Board of Education Supreme Court Decision of 1954 that is said to have effectively ended the Jim Crow period.
If we consider the reality of the situation, the Negro view and the Liberal view the Supreme Court decision was a disaster. I can’t even characterize it as well meaning. It completely failed to take into consideration the realities of the situation.
Any historical perspective beginning only with the Northern imposition of Reconstruction on the South a mere eighty-nine years previously and the end of Reconstruction just seventy-seven years previously would surely alert you to the fact that the wires you were holding were live at both ends. To have ignored that was foolish. Couple that with the fact that most of the Africans had arrived after 1820 and had never been acclimated from the jungle to civilization. Mark Sullivan in his wonderful ‘Our Times’ states that in his early years ‘charming’ Africanisms such as wearing feathers was still in existence. That means that the Africans of 1954 had been excluded from the mainstream by Jim Crow for seventy-seven years. They had little concept of how the majority lived or acted or even the nature of government.
Also, by the Liberals own reckoning since they thought the Negroes’ schools and hence education was woefully substandard, they were several years behind comparable White education. They believed the Negro couldn’t get a quality education unless they were admitted to White schools. It is difficult to understand how they thought they could integrate the two class level to class level. At best they would have had to start with five years olds and begin with that generation. As it is, several generations later the educational gap is still in existence.
On a realistic scientific basis it is not possible to close the gap. Like it or not the Negro, at the very least the First Born of Homo Sapiens, is the evolutionary beginning point of Homo Sapiens while as a more probable situation they may be the Last Hominid Predecessor, or Homo Africanus, hence entirely incapable of advancing intellectually.
The Africans themselves resent being treated as the Liberals’ pets or being thought to need to be elevated to White levels which was precisely the Liberal goal then and now. The back lash at the Negro level had to be. Reaction to the Brown decision would surface ten years later in, for our purposes here, NYC when Community Control of the schools surfaced. Negroes wanted all Negro schools with all Negro teachers while setting their own curriculum. This position effectively negated the Brown decision rendering all the socially destructive hub bub of militarily enforcing the decision on Whites completely unnecessary. By the Sixties the racial animosity was unstoppable.
Part II follows.
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization
January 12, 2013
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization
A Review Of
Lothrop Stoddard’s Eponymous Title
by
R.E. Prindle
Lothrop Stoddard
Stoddard, Lothrop: The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman, 1922, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, First Edition.
In the name of our To-morrow we will burn Rafael
Destroy museums, crush the flowers of art,
Maidens in the radiant kingdom of the Future
Will be more beautiful than Venus de Milo.
Quoted by Stoddard p. 202
A perennial problem in Burroughs’ studies is what did he believe? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Was he an irredeemable bigot? Shall we just say he was not of a contemporary Liberal frame of mind. If you listen to Richard Slotkin author of Gunfighter Nation and a professor at Case Western Reserve at the time he wrote his book a couple decades ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs was an evil man responsible for all the evil in the US from 1912 to the present. Slotkin even sees him responsible for the My Lai massacre of Viet Nam.
Himself a Communist Slotkin can overlook all the crimes of the Soviet Union in which tens of millions were exterminated to find the ultimate evil in the killing of a few dozen people in Viet Nam.
Slotkin, who rampages through his history disparaging any non-Liberal writers as atavistic bigots firmly attaches Burroughs’ name to two scholars, Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his historical studies of the twenties. He considers the two hardly less evil than Burroughs. To someone less excitable, perhaps, or lessLiberal, the two writers have written responsible and astute studies. I certainly think they have.
When I first read Slotkin I rejected the notion that Burroughs had been influenced by either. Ten years on I have to retract that opinion. It is now clear that Burroughs read both while being heavily influenced by Lothrop Stoddard, especially his 1922 volume, The Revolt Against Civilization. While the studies of both Grant and Stoddard would at best supplement Burroughs already developed opinions The Revolt can easily be seen as a template for Burroughs’ writing after he read it. While the study complemented his own developed social and political opinions I am sure that Stoddard’s explication of the history provided Burroughs with many new facts. Based on its opinions that appeared in ERB’s novels I would place the reading somewhere about 1926 or 1927.
Contrary to what some admirers want to make him ERB was what today would be considered a very conservative man, today’s Liberals would be anathema to him. He was decidedly anti-Communist, a Eugenicist, while not bigoted he was not a Negrophile or Semitophile. He was essentially a man with a social and historical outlook that was formed before 1900, a pre-immigration outlook formed while the Indian wars were still in progress. In short he was a man of his times.
Thomas Dixon Jr. to whom he is often compared was one of the most successful writers of the period who carefully examined both the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as the growing Socialist/Communist movement. He was not a bigot as he is always construed but a man of his own people. Burroughs was influenced by his work and thought well of him. He did not abhor him. ERB read many of Dixon’s novels and admired the movie based on his books, The Birth Of A Nation. He sympathized with Henry Ford in his struggle for the welfare of America and read the Dearborn Independent, Ford’s newspaper. In short, Burroughs was a stand up guy.
Now, what evidence is there he read The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman? Let’s begin with this quote, p. 34 et seq.
Quote:
Down to that time the exact nature of the life process remained a mystery. The mystery has now been cleared up. The researches of [August] Weisman and other modern biologists have revealed the fact that all living beings are due to a continuous stream of germ plasm which has existed ever since life first appeared on earth and which will continue to exist as long as any life remains. This germ-plasm consists of minute germ cells which have the power of developing into human living beings. All human beings spring from the union of a male sperm-cell and a female egg-cell. Right here, however, occurs the basic feature of the life process. The new individual consists, from the start, of two sorts of plasm. Almost the whole of him is body plasm – the ever multiplying cells which differentiate into the organs of the body. But he also contains germ- plasm. At his very conception a tiny bit of the life stuff from which he springs is set aside or carefully isolated from the body-plasm, and forms a course of development entirely its own. In fact, the germ-plasm is not really part of the individual; he is merely its bearer, destined to pass it on to other bearers of the life chain.
Now all this was not only unknown but even unsuspected down to a short time ago. Its discovery was in fact dependent upon modern scientific methods. Certainly, it was not likely to suggest itself to even the most philosophic mind. Thus, down to a generation ago, the life stuff was supposed to be a product of the body, not differing essentially in character from other body products. This assumption had two important consequences. In the first place, it tended to obscure the very concept of heredity, and led men to think of environment as virtually all important; in the second place, even where the importance of heredity was dimly perceived the role of the individual was misunderstood, and he was conceived as a creator rather than a mere transmitter. This was the reason for the false theory of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics,” formulated by Lamarck and upheld by most scientists until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, Lamarckianism was merely a modification of the traditional ‘environmentalist’ attitude: it admitted that heredity possessed some importance, but it maintained environment as the basic feature.
Unquote.
Now there you have the argument of God in Tarzan And The Lion Man of 1933 nearly word for word. I hink it unlikely that ERB actually read Weisman who published following 1900 and who ERB may never have heard of, so his source was in all probability Stoddard.
Stoddard’s presentation nicely straddles the change of consciousness from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It sounds a trifle naïve to our ears but was cutting edge at the time. Weisman’s theories were a big step in the direction of the discovery of DNA a short 26 years after Stoddard’s study.
It is important though to remember that more than fifty percent of the US population today rejects the concept of evolution while being more Lamarckian in outlook than might be supposed. We are as a whole not quite as advanced as we think we are.
As a quick affirmation of the influence of Stoddard on ERB on pages 95-96 he gives an account of the famous Jukes family of degenerates that appeared in ERB’s 1932 novelette, Pirate Blood.
Stoddard was well aware of what was happening historically and presently and one can see that he passed that understanding on to ERB. Almost as though writing today, on page 237 Stoddard writes:
Quote:
Stressful transition is the key-note of our times. Unless all signs be faulty, we stand at one of those momentous crises in history when mankind moves from one well-marked epoch to another of widely different character.
Unquote.
Extremely prescient observation in 1922 while his study has been borne out in detail. The chapter titles give a clear outline of the contents:
1. The Burden Of Civilization
2. The Iron Law Of Equality
3. The Nemesis Of The Inferior
4. The Lure Of The Primitive
5. The Ground Swell Of Revolt
6. The Rebellion Of The Underman
7. The War Against Chaos
8. Neo-Aristocracy
As can be easily seen novelists such as Rider Haggard, ERB, Edgar Wallace as well as many others from 1890 to the 20s were grappling with the problems indicated by the chapter titles.
The natural tendency in humans is to be rather lax in mental activity. Precision calls for an active mentality and concentration. Not everyone is capable of this, yet, beginning in the nineteenth century such mental qualities were increasingly necessary. Such disciplines as Chemistry and Physics didn’t allow for personal vagaries or individual style. One couldn’t bend the disciplines to one’s own desires, precise measurements were necessary requiring mental concentration. A little bit off and who knows what might happen. In a way then the Overman and Underman were created. Either you could or you couldn’t and if you couldn’t you slipped beneath- an Underman. Higher civilization was impossible for you.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Burroughs addressed this problem continually. In his character Tarzan he resolved the problem giving his creation a split personality, in a loin cloth he was one man, in a tuxedo he was another. Two separate gorillas in one and always a beast. In real life society split into two possibilities- the Over and Underman.
Worse still scientific methods were able to measure the ineffable, the unseen. In chemistry sub-tiny atoms were able to be detected and their sub-miniscule weights actually measured. Measurement is the bane of the Underman. A Mole contains 6,022 x 10 to the 23rd power of atoms, an incredible incomprehensible number that still might weigh 12 grams or less. Astonishing. Beyond the comprehension hence belief of the Underman. As the process can’t be seen it can’t be believed.
In human intelligence the Englishman Francis Galton began to devise measuring devices of intelligence in 1865 shortly after Darwin announced Evolution in 1959. Thus uncertainty about mental capacity was eliminated. As Stoddard calls it, The Iron Law Of Inferiority. Biology and measuring excluded something like eighty-five percent of the population from the ranks of the most intelligent. Without that high measurement of intelligence 85% of the population was automatically excluded from the possibility of higher attainment while at the same time being prejudged.
Big strapping fellows, all man, were relegated to manual labor while wimps like perhaps, John D. Rockefeller, became billionaires. Not right, the big strapping fellows said, but not measuring up in intelligence, which they couldn’t see, they were condemned to the shovel for life.
Intelligence measuring tests were improved between 1865 and 1920 although not as accurate as could be desired. Men entering the armed forces in WWI were an excellent testing group. Of 1,700,000 tested intelligence levels were fairly accurately determined. It was then discovered that only four and a half percent were very bright with another seven or eight percent bright, while the huge bulk were C+ to C- descending from there.
One imagines Burroughs read this with extreme thoughtfulness.
So, now as the bulk of the good things were going to those who could do, what were those who couldn’t do about it? The great issue since 1789 has been equality; the Underman demanded equality as a first condition. He could organize. He could sabotage. He could rage. And that is what the Underman has done.
The Communist Party was formed. And what was their chief demand? Equality. Absolute equality. As they couldn’t rise to a natural equality then the only other feasible solution was to bring the Superior intelligences down to their level. Thus they raged against that great equalizer, education. Screw science, screw physics, screw chemistry, screw biology. Who needed what you couldn’t see and that especially included intelligence measuring?
One of ERB’s bete noires was the I.W.W.- The Industrial Workers Of The World, syndicalists. Imagine his reaction when he read this:
Quote:
Viewed in the abstract, technical sense, Syndicalism does not seem to present any specially startling innovations. It is when we examine the Syndicalists’ animating spirit, their general philosophy of life, and the manner which they propose to obtain their ends, that we realize we are in the presence of an ominous novelty,- the mature philosophy of the Under Man. This philosophy of the Under-Man is today called Bolshevism. Before the Russian Revolution it was known as Syndicalism. But Bolshevism and Syndicalism are basically one and the same thing. Soviet Russia has really invented nothing. It is merely practicing what others had been preaching for years- with such adaptation as normally attend the putting of theory into practice.
Syndicalism, as an organized movement, is primarily the work of two Frenchmen, Fernand Pelloutier and Georges Sorel. Of course, just as there were Socialist before Marx, so there were Syndicalists before Sorel. Syndicalism’s intellectual progenitor was Proudhon, who in his writings had closely sketched out the Syndicalist theory. As for Syndicalism’s savage, violent, uncompromising spirit, it is clearly Anarchist in origin., drawing its inspiration not only from Proudhon but also from Bakunin, [Johann] Most, and all the rest of that furious company of revolt.
Georges Sorel
“Revolt!” This is the essence of Syndicalism: a revolt, not merely against modern society but against Marxian Socialism as well. And the revolt was well timed. When, at the very end of the nineteenth century, Georges Sorel lifted the red banner of Syndicalism, the hour awaited the man. The proletarian world was full of discordant and disillusionment at the long dormant Marxian philosophy. Half a century had passed since Marx first preached his gospel, and the revolutionary millennium was nowhere in sight. Society had not become a world of billionaires and beggars. The great capitalists had not swallowed all. The middle classes still survived and prospered. Worst of all, from the revolutionary viewpoint, the upper grades of the working classes had prospered, too. The skilled workers were, in fact, becoming an aristocracy of labor. They were acquiring property and thus growing capitalistic; they were raising their living standards and thus growing bourgeois. Society seemed endowed with a strange vitality! It was even reforming many of the abuses which Marx had pronounced incurable. When, then, was the proletariat to inherit the earth?
The Proletariat! That was the key word. The van, and even the main body of society, might be fairly on the march, but behind lagged a rear guard. Here, were, first of all, the lower working class strata- the “manual” laborers in the narrower sense, relatively ill paid and often grievously exploited. Behind these again came a motley crew, the rejects and misfits of society. “Casuals” and “unemployables”, “down-and-outs” and declasses, victims of social evils, victims of bad heredity and their own vices, paupers, defectives, degenerates, and criminals- they were all there. They were there for many reasons, but they were all miserable, and they were all bound together by a certain solidarity- a sullen hatred of the civilization from which they had little to hope. To these people evolutionary, “reformist” socialism was cold comfort. Then came the Syndicalists promising, not evolution but revolution; not in the dim future but the here and now; not a bloodless “taking over” by “the workers” hypothetically stretched to include virtually the whole community, but the bloody “dictatorship” of The Proletariat in its narrow revolutionary sense.
Here, at last, was living hope- hope, and the prospect of revenge! Is it then strange that a few short years should have seen revolutionary Socialists, Anarchists, all the anti-social forces of the whole world grouped under the banner of Georges Sorel? For a time they went under different names syndicalists in France, Bolshevists in Russia, I.W.W.s in America but in reality they formed one army, enlisted in a single war.
Now, what was this war? It was, first of all, a war for the conquest of Socialism as a preliminary to the conquest of society. Everywhere the orthodox Socialist parties were fiercely assailed. And these Socialist assaults were formidable, because the orthodox Socialists possessed no moral line of defense. Their arms were palsied by the virus of their revolutionary tradition. For however evolutionary and non-militant the Socialists might have been in practice, in theory they had remained revolutionary their ethics continuing to be those of the “class war”, the destruction of the “possessing classes” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The American economist, Carver, will describe the ethics of socialism in the following lines: “Marxian Socialism has nothing in common with idealistic Socialism. It rests not on persuasion, but on force. It does not profess to believe, as did the old idealists, that if socialism be lifted up it will draw all men to it. In fact, it has no ideals; it is materialistic and militant. Being materialistic and atheistic, it makes no use of such terms as right and justice, unless it be to quiet the consciences of those who still harbor such superstitions. It insists that these terms are mere conventionalities; the concepts mere bugaboos invented by the ruling caste to keep the masses under control. Except in a conventional sense, from this crude materialistic view there is neither a right or wrong, justice nor injustice, good or bad. Until people who still believe in such silly notions divest their minds of them they will never understand the first principles of Marxian socialism.
“Who creates our ideas of right and wrong?” asks the Socialist. “The ruling class. Why? To insure their domination over the masses by depriving them of the power to think for themselves. We, the proletarians, when we get into power, will dominate the situation; we shall be the ruling class; we shall determine who is right and wrong. Do you ask us if what we propose is just? What do you mean by justice? Do you ask if it is right? What do you mean by right? It will be good for us. That is all that right and justice ever did or ever can mean!
Unquote.
People ask what Burroughs believed? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Well, Burroughs’ beliefs can be extrapolated from the above quote as well as Stoddard’s whole book. If Burroughs could have expressed himself concisely he would have written The Revolt Against Civilization. You don’t have to look any further.
There could be no more ardent anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-IWW than ERB. The book was published five years after the Russian Revolution, a mere three years after the narrow quelling of the Communist disturbances of 1919 while in 1922 the Harding administration was putting the finishing touches on the suppression of that Communist revolution in the US. Make no mistake the crimes of 1919 were part of an American Bolshevik revolution. Things would not return to what Harding called normalcy but it would be a reasonable facsimile that would endure until the engineered great crash of 1929 opening the way for the Communist revolution of FDR in the US.
These were perilous times ERB was living in no less than those of today. One can’t be sure when Burroughs read Revolt but many of the same themes almost in quotation were employed in his 1926 novel The Moon Maiden. And from the Moon Maiden he went to the more sophisticated approaches of his great political novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man.
As Stoddard thinks the Underman breeds at a very fast rate while the Overman limits his family the obvious consequence is that people of intelligence decrease rapidly in relation to the Underman. Of course Stoddard has all kinds of tables and charts to prove his point. As this was published in 1922 the results are heavily skewed to prove the English are the top of the heap; a result not uncongenial to Burroughs’ sensibilities.
One imagines that as of induction time in 1917-18 a great many of the recent immigrants at least had underdeveloped English language skills that affected the results but at this point it no longer matters; the general idea has been proved sound.
As we have a war between the Underman and the Overman and make no mistake, as far as Sorel and the Syndicalist/Bolshevik ideology goes it is a war to the knife, it may be asked what Stoddard’s formula for the Overman’s success might be.
This returns us to the Underman’s great fear that science, that is objective analysis supported by an array of facts will condemn him to the virtual condition of servitude. It might be surmised that this is an intolerable but inescapable conclusion unless education and science are destroyed reducing the more intelligent to the masses.
Stoddard then relying on Darwinian and Weismanian evolution and the notion of Eugenics introduced by Francis Galton resolves the problem by ending the reproduction of the ‘defective’ classes, that is, forced sterilization. Forced sterilization was actually employed. It is interesting that he never brings in the issue of race thus on the surface his book is neither racist for anti-Semitic. However as the book assumes that the superior intelligences are English or Nordic the text qualifies as anti-Semitic in Jewish eyes and hence has been placed on the Jewish Index Of Forbidden Literature.
One may be horrified at the Eugenic solution to the intelligence problem but one must be equally horrified at the Underman solution to their Overman problem. Liquidation is more horrifying than sterilization and Liquidation was employed by the Underman in Russia and will be employed again if they can consolidate their gains in the US and Europe today.
The problem is that while being founded in reality it is impossible in execution. The human mind is too subjective to be trusted with such a great responsibility. Many statues were placed on the books commanding forced sterilization and many such were executed.
Schools classes were organized based on supposed mental aptitudes. How objectively I will demonstrate by my own example. Until Jr. High in my home town schools did not systematically differentiate based on mental capacity, however at the end of the ninth grade just before I.Q. testing in the tenth there were three options, Trade School for those deemed not of academic ability, in other words destined for the labor force, and once in high school a division between business, that is white collar, and college prep. This was still a process of self-selection thus I signed up for high school however someone changed my papers to trade school.
Thus when I showed for classes at high school, I was told I was enrolled at trade school. Now, this was the fight of my life, and for it. I was told I was in trade school and to get out. I said I wasn’t leaving and sat down where I waited for four days for the situation to resolve itself. My argument was that the law required that I be given an education and it wouldn’t be at trade school. Whatever the behind the scenes machinations were I was reluctantly allowed to enter but they then insisted it would be business level while I demanded college prep. With an unexplained prescience I was told that I would never go to college so I should be in business. Nevertheless I won that struggle too.
I am sure that if enforced sterilization had been possible at the time I would have been compelled to undergo it.
Now, here’s the kicker. Came time for I.Q. tests and I placed in the upper four percent. I have no idea what the reaction to that was although my critics had to tone down their act. So human passions invalidated the whole Eugenic idea.
In other words there is no equable solution to this terrible human dilemma.
In that sense the solution offered by Aldus Huxley in his famous comic novel Brave New World is of some interest. In Huxley’s story he enlists science, chemistry, to produce different levels of mental competence. The zygote is nurtured in test tubes while at certain levels of development certain chemicals are introduced limiting the development of the fetus. Thus the labor problem is solved by creating classes only capable of menial tasks. The upper classes are bred like race horses to various degrees of excellence. Huxley was tongue in cheek to be sure but, actually the only solution to this otherwise insoluble problem.
Stoddard didn’t introduce any ideas to which Burroughs wasn’t already familiar and in agreement. At best Stoddard’s superb research and explication clarified ERB’s understanding for him. I don’t know how familiar he was with Georges Sorel. Today Sorel is unknown except to specialists although I am beginning to see his name pop up so with the Communist regime of Barack Obama perhaps the way is being prepared for Sorel’s extreme measures of exterminating the Overman.
At any rate I have come to the opinion that Richard Slotkin is correct in thinking the Burroughs had read and was in accord with both Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. However Slotkin evaluates their work through the distortion of his own Communistic lens which is only valid to those of his point of view.
His view does not make Burroughs a racist or anti-Semite. It makes him an objective and accurate observer and analyst of the situation of his time. As indicated above Burroughs absorbed Stoddard’s information, that point of view and used it to create his wonderful works of the late twenties and first half of the thirties. If one bears Stoddard’s book in mind while reading those novels it will make them make great sense while presenting his view of the political and social situation
Of course the novels are not confined solely to dealing with these issues; Burroughs had a much more far ranging mind, both subjectively and objectively.
Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization is a major study as relevant today as the day it was written. The last ninety years have only borne out his theses. The Revolt Against Civilization is well worth a read, perhaps two. At any rate you will have an accurate idea of Burroughs’ social and political beliefs.
I, Dynamo 