George Stephenson

Author:  Hunter Davies

The above is a photo of the first locomotive ever built.  In 1825, it hauled coal on the Darlington/Stockton line.  George Stephenson, the inventor, was born in 1781, the son of a coal miner in NE England.  His personality was the bootstrap sort;  he was never formally educated, but acquired his engineering skills through home study and genius…  He was a tweaker and fiddler, the kind of person who can never let well enough alone;  so he built the first explosion proof lamp to begin with, saving untold numbers of lives from the explosions that resulted from pockets of methane mixing with unshielded paraffin lamps…  he enclosed the flame with a fine mesh screen which diluted the methane concentration down to safe levels.

At that time, James Watts’ invention, the steam engine, was being used to pump water out of the coal mines, thereby allowing access to deeper levels and increasing production.  Horses were used to haul coal carts from the mines to the waiting barges which carried the coal to London and other locations.  George converted Watts’ engines into static push me/pull you devices which were used to replace horses in ascending and descending hills along the haul road.  After a long period of struggle, he conceived the idea of placing an engine on wheels.  During trials and experimentation, he roused the ire of the local population who threw things and blocked the rails with a variety of foreign objects.  People were afraid of the engines, regarding them as devilish contraptions, but were also concerned about losing money.  Horses were a source of income;  the feeding, nurturing, and general management of them providing employment for many.

The early 1800’s was a time of explosive change in many fields:  2600 miles of canals had just been constructed, allowing much greater access to markets and farms;  population centers were burgeoning and the consequent need for coal to heat houses was also increasing.  Other industries were booming:  cotton production, ship building, overseas trade were all expanding and the wars in France demanded increased production of hard goods of all sorts.  The country was in ferment with new ideas and inventions popping up, constantly disturbing agrarian tranquillity.  At the same time, wages and working conditions were getting worse, with child labor, long hours, and dangerous conditions arousing the ire of workers and their families.  The French Revolution only thirty years in the past, the movers and shakers of the country were nervously demanding more control of the people…  So repression and invention were at loggerheads, so to speak:  a social situation was developing that would not be easily resolved;  and in fact hasn’t been, satisfactorily, right up to the present day:  billionaires versus the downtrodden masses is, as we all are aware, a perpetual reality, seemingly…

Anyway, George didn’t care;  he just wanted to build an engine on wheels.  so he did.  the Darlington-Stockton line was the first viable railroad, but not the biggest;  it was only 19 miles long…  The real fight was over the Manchester-Liverpool road.  Cotton was shipped into Liverpool from global sources and conveyed via canal to Manchester where it was turned into cloth and clothing….  this was a very lucrative business, and one the canal owners didn’t want to lose.  So a big fight ensued between the canalists and the railroadites.  Eventually, permission and money was acquired from both parliament and private donors to begin construction;  there were many physical difficulties:  bridges, tunnels, rights of way, all had to be ironed out so construction could begin.  Then there were the local residents who almost universally were initially anti-railroad.  Even while surveying the route, George often had to work at night to avoid the locals who fired at them, threw rocks or tried to mob the surveyors.  The canalists issued pamphlets claiming  that trains would cause miscarriages, stop cows grazing, make hens not lay eggs, destroy farm land, burn down farmer’s houses, country inns to close, kill birds, pollute the air, destroy fox habitat(a big deal for the squires), make horses extinct, and cause oats and hay to become inedible.  And that was just to begin with…

But after a lot of tribulation, the line was finished and, characteristically enough, everyone who could manage it wanted a seat on the first trip.  Over night, the popular opinion changed from nasty opposition to full and generous support.  So it goes(KV)…

And so it began:  the installation of thousands of miles of railroad tracks all over the country.  There many social results.  Navvies, the underpaid, overworked laborers who did the grunt work invaded country villages, undisturbed for centuries, with their drunken, illiterate habits and personalities.  Ladies of the evening were imported to keep them happy, although drunkenness, unsuccessfully frowned upon, was rampant.  (They were called “Navvies” because of the original surveyors who were initially termed “land navigators”).  On the other side of the social scale were the fly by night entrepreneurs and promoters who made millions from short term speculations.  The worst of these was George Hudson, who rose from dire poverty to become one of the wealthiest barons in the country.  His trick was to sponsor a railroad and use the money to pay for another one at the same time as he paid the original donors token profits.  It was a sort of pyramid scheme, of which similar examples have been evident in the immediate past, and will continue to be developed, undoubtedly…

But George didn’t become wealthy.  His son Robert did well, as he had a fine education and was as good an engineer as his father, but George soon retired and led a quiet and well deserved life in the country.  His last years were comfortable and satisfyingly content, with the occasional visitor who stopped by with a difficult engineering problem for him to ponder over.

Hunter Davies is a well known long distance walker in England;  he’s published books on his peregrinations along Hadrian’s wall, around the Lake District, and, unsurprisingly, along many of England’s train tracks.  The book was well researched and written in a legible style.  It was a general survey of the period;  for more detail, such as the specifications of the various steam engines, cylinder size, cylinder ring design, etc. other sources should be examined.

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Jade Dragon Mountain/The White Mirror

Elsa Hart

Li Du has been exiled from Beiping (this is in 1710) and is wandering about from place to place, an itinerant scholar with nowhere to hang his hat…  He enters the border city of Dayan, close to Tibet, just a week before a grand celebration is to take place, based on a predicted eclipse of the sun, predicated upon calculations made by a local Jesuit with the use of some early astronomical devices…  Li meets Hamza, another wanderer, a story teller with a talent for mesmerizing audiences…  He plays a kind of Dr. Watson role to Li Du, who, happening upon a dead body who was apparently poisoned, is manipulated into discovering the perpetrator before the arrival of the Emperor, which has been timed to coincide with the imminent eclipse.  The two nominated detectives, somewhat against their inclinations, begin questioning suspects and examining evidence, undergoing various extraordinary and/or banal experiences;  time grows short, as the solution must be found before the arrival of the Emperor, whose life must not be endangered…  soon, there’s only a few hours left, and…  well, you’ll have to wait til the book’s end to enjoy the amazing and explosive denouement…

After the satisfactory resolution of the affair at Dayan, Li and Hamza find themselves stuck over night in a remote manor located in the foothills of the Himalayas on their way to Lhasa…  The body of monk has been discovered sitting in a meditative posture in the middle of a small bridge;  he’s been stabbed and there is a strange diagram painted on his torso, resembling a white mirror.  The party with which the two  are traveling are temporarily snowbound -it’s a caravan, actually, with an assortment of guides, merchants, and government agents – and Li is persuaded to undertake an investigation… the plot involves thangkas(Tibetan religious paintings with demons and devils and tigers), caves, hot springs, monasteries, BIG mountains, and a hornet’s nest of internecine political issues.  And soon…  yes, another murder…  when will this nerve-wracking tension end?  only when chance and the superior deductive skills of Li Du resolve the uncertainties and provide the only possible answer.

I really admire Ms. Hart’s writing skills.  You, the reader, have probably noticed through a lifetime of reading, that the personality of the author almost always can be sensed through his/her prose;  and that these personas can range from brutal/sadistic to dreamily surrealistic.  Hart has an original one, in my experience:  somewhat dreamy and otherworldish, she has a very firm grasp of the fundamentals needed for clear exposition and has in addition a profound knowledge of Tibetan/Chinese history, social, artistic, and political…  as well as, apparently, a sufficient awareness of Tibetan Buddhist practices as to permit rational and meaningful discussions of the same in her writing.  She was born in Rome, has lived in China, and was educated at Swarthmore.  It has been a treat, having the opportunity to read her work, especially when compared to that featured in the general run of modern authors.

 

Thoreau: a Life

Laura Dassow Walls

Thoreau was a figure of significant interest to me when I was young.  His insights and writings about nature meshed with some sort of gear train inside me.  And he influenced my thoughts about the world and the universe.  So when I saw this very recent biography of him at the library , I picked it up.  I had read most of Thoreau’s work, and studies by Howarth, Richardson, and others, and so I looked forward to a fresh viewpoint.

My understanding of him was of a kind of gearhead, bumbling about in the New England woods, dreaming up visions of acorns and squirrels.  But Walls has introduced me to a different man.  One who participated in town life, fulfilling an important role as a trouble shooter, a general handyman, a teacher, and as a stitch in the side of the public conscience.  In addition, as this book makes clear, he pursued his internal visions with leech-like tenacity, writing and rewriting his letters, journals, and books, searching for an explanation of the natural phenomena he observed unfolding around him in every venue:  rivers, mountains, ponds, fields, coastlines, and the abyssal depths of the Maine woods.  So he led a two-fold life:  as a citizen and as a philosopher/scientist.  He was a deep reader in philosophy, religion, history and science.  He knew and communicated with movers and shakers from every phase of life:  Louis Aggassiz, John Brown, Ralph Emerson, and a who’s who stuffed with cognoscenti.

My remembered association with him had to do, somewhat, with his mechanical propensities.  Ms. Walls was able to discover that Thoreau had invented a better mill for grinding graphite that, when the resulting dust was mixed with a specific sort of clay, made a very high quality filling for Thoreauvian pencils.  At one point, Thoreau’s pencils were considered by draftsmen and artists to be the best available.

Thoreau had his own surveying company.  He surveyed much of the land surrounding Concord, and was hired to map sections as far away as New Jersey.

In addition, as evidenced through his thousands of journal pages,  he studied and struggled to understand the natural world his whole life.  At the end, his grasp of botanical hierarchies and successions, and his documenting of such data, went a long way toward verifying the theories of Charles Darwin.  While Darwin came to his particular revelation studying finches in the Galapagos Islands, Thoreau experienced the same sort of enlightenment on one camping trip while spending the night on top of Mt. Monadnock.  Basically, the realizations of both men had to do with understanding that the natural world, including man, was of a whole, in that every segment from seeds to geology was a part, a participator, and a motivator of the global ecology.  Thoreau’s last studies, having to do with seed movements, were, in some respects, a summation of his life- long thought regarding the true nature of natural progression and the inherent role men play in that progression.

I really like this book.  By the fifty or so pages of footnotes, and by the integrity glowing through the author’s enthusiastic pages, it was evident that the book was the product of many years of investigation and fascination.

Highly recommended to anyone interested in ecology, transcendentalism, or early genius…

Bike Ride

the local smog has prohibited riding for a couple of weeks, so, wanting to get an excursion in, i drove down the Columbia to Pt. Adams road:  a rural, paved street that runs alongside the river, contiguous to a local farming area, and has very little traffic….  my old man’s bike is a reworking of a Trek 27 speed my daughter turned over to me;  i made it into a single speed, put on upright handlebars, made a rack for it, and installed a mattress seat…  it has a carbon fiber frame so is very light, maybe 15 lbs.   riding along about 10 mph, i noticed the equisitum was in full growth;  it’s always nice to see because it is a plant with a very long history:  back to the Mississippean period (about 350 million years ago)…  some life forms have great longevity…  the road over there is not in great shape, so pedaling involves being careful about potholes and minor gulches…  saw a few deer, standing in the fields, watching me go by like they were watching television:  that rapt stare from those large black eyes that seems to suggest so much…  i wonder what their reality is like;  smelling and tasting delights;  i wonder if their feet get cold…  pretty soon i was along a slough, wherein i noticed several Great Blue Herons – they flail about, trying to get off the water, as if every lift off is a brand new experience…  and one white swan, equally clumsy in the take off, but gorgeous and other-worldly in flight…

A small house next to the road produced a nasty little doggie, who was looking forward to a bite or two;  i used the leg lifting maneuver to foil his devilish intent…  i arrived at the end point:  a gate limiting entry to those lucky few with big houses on the river and swipe cards to access same…  so, turning to go back, i stopped at a small grove of poplar and found a dead branch with which to discourage the enthusiastic canine…  when i got back to the same house, the dog was not there and i almost discarded my anti-dog device, but some sixth sense bade me keep it…  and i good thing, too, as a little while later, two Rothweilers with savage intent decided to have a bit of fun…  so, see the old bicyclist steering with one hand, pedaling with maximum output and swatting behind him all at the same time…  without falling off, no less…  momentarily proud of himself, yes he was…

a little further along i saw a skyscraper, disguised as a lumber carrier, relentlessly plowing up the river;  faster than i could keep up with, although the thought did cross my mind of seeing if i could keep up with it…  nooo….  soon the cold wind, blowing about ten mph against me, put observational considerations into abeyance and i went into that mindless doggedness well known to bikists, when pedaling with effort against the invisible tide…  lots of rebuilt boat houses along the way, i noticed, however:  signs of economic well being in that area, anyhow…  so, no more out- of- the- way events getting back to the truck, just the soothing ambience of wind and water, sensing the universe flowing around me, living my infinitesimal part in the grand design…  nice ride…  no flats, the chain stayed on, it was good…

Rambles Beyond Railways/The Cruise of the Tomtit

Wilkie Collins(1824-1889)

Mr. Collins and a botanist friend started their walking tour of Cornwall on the southwest side of the peninsula near Falmouth, and followed the coastline down to Lands’ End, to begin with…  Southern Cornwall somewhat resembles Italy, in that it mimics a boot with the heel on the east corner and the toe daintily pointing down toward the Scilly Islands.  Spending nights in local inns, the two meandered and traipsed their way up the west side as far as Tintagel Head and a bit more.  Instead of a running description of their progress, Collins opted to briefly comment on points of interest they discovered and investigated en route.  Among these were St. Clare’s Well, after which the “Poor Clare” nuns were named;  the Trevethy Stone, a multi-ton boulder delicately balanced on a tiny fulcrum to the point where a fairly strong shove would cause it to rock back and forth (this was almost 200 years ago;  it’s undoubtedly fallen off since then…  one might hope, anyway);  Loo lake, 7 miles in circumference, which, in spite of being separated from the ocean by a miniscule sand bar, contained potable water;  Kynance Cove, the site of some over-the-top rock climbing to visit blow holes and sea caves;  Dr. Johnson’s Head, an outcrop resembling the good doctor, situated at Land’s End;  the Botallack Copper mine, located 600′ below the ocean bed…  They attended a play entitled “The Curate’s Daughter”, presented by a traveling troupe, with an orchestra consisting of a clarinet, a trombone, a violin and an ophiocleide(a rare, now, keyed brass instrument somewhat resembling a sarrusaphone);  Tintagel Castle, of which only some ruined walls and half buried foundations remained; and, lastly, Nighton’s Keive, a foliage- choked gulch with a stone hut previously occupied by two lady hermits, and Forrabury Church, a belated example of ecclesiastical architecture.  Then they caught a train back to London…  Wilkie’s prose style dealing with the journey was pretty much the same as in his other works:  educated and civilized, exemplifying the literate, upper class oxfordian or cambridgian educational standard.  Easy to follow and poetically fluid…

The Cruise of the Tomtit, featuring a 36′, 13 ton sailboat, with cabin and the usual facilities was quite a horse of another color…  The three Bobbs(owners and crew) operated the vessel, and Mr Migott and Jollins(note the names) were carried as supercargo.  The intention was to depart at Bristol, sail to the Scilly Islands, and return, hopefully with hull and passengers intact…  after an early morning start, they traveled south (they lacked any navigational equipment) by guess and by gosh, keeping a watch out for presumed points of identity along the coast, tacking back and forth, ever hopeful that they were sailing in the right direction.  Passing the Lizard, they actually got totally lost in the Atlantic and only arrived at the islands by accident, when one of the party scaled the mast with binoculars to see where they were…  After a warm reception from the pilot/owner of the only inn on the largest island, they were lucky enough to catch a southerly gale which blew them all the way back to Bristol.  This seemed rather an alcohol fueled excursion, and Collins’ writing style reflected that…  while clear enough, it still seemed the result of an abundance of teenage riotousness, with colloquialisms and rampant cheerfulness;  a VW full of clowns comes to mind…  They were very lucky and it must have been a fun trip, but i’d be willing to bet Collins had some sobering after- thoughts about the whole affair, once he got back to his sedate, comfortable easy chair…

The Beeman of Orn

Frank Stockton(1834-1902)  Not terribly well known, Frank S. is most famed for his “The Lady and The Tiger”.  His writing style, and mode of thought, tend toward the ironic(sarcastic, sometimes) and the wryly humorous.  Clear, ostensibly shallow, his stories leave a kind of piquant aftertaste, like that experienced when biting into a lemon, having supposed that it was an orange.  At the same time, they have a kind of moralistic flavor, as though originally they were intended to be admonitory, but decided to stop for a picnic under the Irrelevance Tree.  He might be best described as an amalgam of Thurber, Steinbeck, and Lord Dunsany.  He’s a master prestidigitator, in a way, arranging his plots so that they often take unexpected turns at unexpected junctures.  In “Christmas Before Last”, a jolly mariner with his own ship(in the style of the 17th c.) is hijacked by a band of pirates with whom he and his crew after a hesitant battle , swap vessels.  Subsequently, after several more bizarre adventures, they reach port, not at Christmas time as previously planned, but at Christmas a year before.

The first story has to do with an old man living in a house full of bees:  he carries them in his pocket and lives on honey.  A sorcerer tells him that he’s actually someone else and he ought to go find out who he is…  in doing so, he loses some of his bees but saves a baby, who he eventually discovers is himself…  a good example of the sort of tangle dear to the heart of FS…

The second tale deals with a country parson(Minor Canon), his unappreciative flock, and a lonely Griffin.  An unexpected turn concerns the Griffin absconding with a statue of himself so as to have something too admire in the lonely wastes in which he resides.

In this collection there are eight stories populated by kings, queens, princes, princesses, magicians, dwarves, and a full range of other fairy tale denizens and characters with unusual talents and inclinations.

Stockton was a sometime journalist and his output wasn’t limited to short stories.  His novels are written in the same kind of unpredictable fashion, the otherwise standard characters displaying startling and peculiar quirks at unpredictable intervals.  Some of them may be found at the Gutenberg website.  His most well regarded book was probably “Rudder Grange”…

I’ve found him to be a welcome anodyne when overly depressed by current events…

A Sicilian Romance (Ann Radcliffe)

Count Vereza falls in love with Julia Mazzini but her father, principally occupied with increasing his power base, wants her to wed a well-connecred Italian nobleman, the duke deLuovo, noted for his brutal behavior.  She runs away and has adventures in the Sicilian hinterlands, which, in Ms. Radcliffe’s version, is chock a block stuffed with ruined castles and monasteries, interspersed with quaint little villages occupied by helpful peasants.

The landscape portraits are frequently quite effective;  Ms. R has a genius for bringing a Gothic scene into needle sharp focus.  A typical sunset is seen through a stone arch, remnant of an ancient castle, featuring a golden sunset over a dark, heaving ocean.  Other portrayals are evocative:  monks in black robes sliding sinuously through dark and winding corridors dimly lit by torchlight;  the coast of Calabria, glowing in early sunrise, looming from the sea mist like a ghost ship…

Lots of activity:  storms, shipwreck, banditti, plotting prelates…  There were so many episodes of subterranean passages and caves with secret doors, that Escher’s print of the unending staircase sprang into my consciousness…

After seemingly interminable  chases, captures, and rescues from banditti, evil dukes, corrupt monks, etc., the plot concludes with multiple murders and suicides.  The star-crossed lovers get married and live happily ever after, together with the long suffering mother and sister.

i enjoyed this book quite a bit.  At first the writing was rather stodgy, but soon recovered and became quite readable, with, as indicated, admirable descriptions of woods, water, trees, and mountains.  Not to mention caves…  Lots of caves…

 

Three Ralphs (Ralph the Heir/ Anthony Trollope)

The first one doesn’t really count, because he’s deceased by the time the plot gets under way.  He was the owner of an ancient squirearchy and had two sons, Ralph and Gregory.  After he died, his brother, also named Gregory, inherited the estates.  This latter Gregory fell in love with a German and they had a son out of wedlock who they named Ralph.  The younger Gregory became the local parson and stayed single.

So the situation in the beginning is that the land owner, the older Gregory, was desperate to make his bar sinister son, Ralph, who was sober and responsible, the legal heir to the estate but the other Ralph, the other Ralph’s cousin, legally would get everything, as he was the son of the older owner, Ralph.  Ralph #2 was not a bad sort, but rather a waster and he soon spent all his money (the bit that he’d inherited from his father, the old Ralph) and got into debt due to excessive spending in London.

A large portion of the plot plays around the attempts of one of the creditors, Neefit, to get spendthrift Ralph to marry his daughter so as to make a lady out of her.  Polly, the daughter, only wants to marry someone she falls in love with.  Eventually she becomes attracted to a local bootmaker’s son, Moggs.

There are other plot-lines:  Sir Thomas Underwood, reclusive lawyer, has two daughters and a niece living in this house, so he spends most of his time at the office.  The ongoing drama becomes a bit Oscar Wildeish, with misunderstood intentions, desires, and assumptions.  In addition to these complications, there’s a political element in which an election in a local borough, Percycross, is described and condemned as a hot bed of corruption and bribery.  Trollope goes into considerable detail, recording the nefarious ways in which the crooked politicos rig the election.  Sir Thomas has been persuaded to run, and Moggs also.  They both become sadly educated as to the immoral and illegal practices common to borough politics.

Anyway, the emotional juggling between the Ralphs, Gregory the younger, and the three Underwood girls eventually gets straightened out and everyone lives hap…  Well, i can’t definitely say that, but I think so, anyhow…

Trollope has things to say about pride, love, honor, tolerance, ambition, and quite a few more ethical and moral qualities, most of which are accurate and resonant, in my opinion…

This novel was easier to read than the Barchester series was.  The prose was clever, with shorter sentences and the situational developments were more concisely described with less of the aggravating repetition found in the earlier works.  I think one can observe the maturation of Trollope in this respect;  this was one of the best novels he wrote.

I enjoyed reading this book quite a bit in spite of the complexity.  Maybe i’ll give the Paliser series a try.  Sometime…