Cox's Fragmenta E-Book

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 118

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Some of the funniest and most bizarre news stories printed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Erotic misdemeanours in an Irish bean-field, the recipe for a frog barometer fresh from the French court, a parrot convicted of heresy and burnt at the stake in Spain and a Dutch stage effect for ejecting a wig (by means of a spring) during Hamlet's ghost scene are just some of the masterpieces of understated journalism collected by Francis Cox and contained in his Fragmenta. At ninety-four volumes, Cox's scrapbook has to be one of the largest collections of journalistic ephemera ever. For sixty years during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries he accumulated articles on everything from duels to playhouses, and foreign travel to warfare. Simon Murphy has selected the funniest and most bizarre to create an historical miscellany which will intrigue and delight.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageDedicationINTRODUCTIONNOTE ON THE TEXTSTONE EATERMANNER OF PUNISHING THOSE GUILTY OF A LIBEL IN RUSSIADESCRIPTION OF A NEW INVENTED FROG BAROMETER, LATELY DISCOVERED AT PARISBEANS AND BACONEXTRAORDINARY SAGACITY OF RATSFOTHERGEL’S DROPS FOR NERVOUS FEVERS, AND EXTREME FEEBLENESSLONDON: DUEL BETWEEN LORD MACARTNEY AND GENERAL STUARTSLAVE TRADEBIRMINGHAMRANELAGHSTAGE EFFECT!MAGICAL INCANTATIONPOOLE, NOV, 17.AN ACCOUNT OF A MACCARONIINSANITYA CARDAN APPROVED METHOD OF DESTROYING WEOVILSTHE NATIONAL DEBTCOVENT GARDEN THEATRE THE SPEECHLESS WIFE – FARCEFASHIONJAMES BOSWELL BRIGHTON, SEPT. 29PARTICULARS RESPECTING WOLD COTTAGE PHÆNOMENONCRICKET MATCHEXHIBITIONBOTANY-BAY THEATRICALSDIEDARTS AND SCIENCES PHYSIOLOGYEPIGRAMFOR THE RUPTURED, CROOKED, LAME AND DEFORMEDCRIMINAL INFORMATIONDOCTOR’S COMMONS, JULY 7 CRIM. CON.SKETCH OF A RUSSIAN NOBLEMAN BY E.D. CLARKE, LLDBY ROYAL AUTHORITYSUSSEX ASSIZESBATHING TRUSSESEXTRAORDINARY NAVAGATORDRURY LANEARTIFICIAL TEETHSURPRISING MONKIES FROM PARISDISGRACEFUL TRANSACTIONFOX CHACEROBBERY ON THE RIVERSADLER’S WELLSMANCHESTERROYAL REGULATIONSSINGULAR NAVAL COSTUMEWAYS AND MEANSPOLICEGALVANIC PHENOMENAQUEEN MABDISTRESSING OCCURRENCEA FORTUNE HUNTERSHIP NEWSMIDDLESEX SESSIONS, THURSDAY, JULY 11 TRIAL OF BENBOWERRATUMCopyright

To the conductor of the Sun, Sir,

If an inhabitant of some remote Country, totally uninformed of the Political business of this, but sufficiently skilled in the English language to read the newspapers, was to come into this country, and resort to the public prints for information respecting its Government, Laws, People, &c. &c. it may not be incurious to consider what in all probability his opinion of them would be. I think, then, that it is probable that he would in the first place set it down as a certainty, that the minds of the people were in general but as so many blank sheets, for fools and designing men to scribble what absurdities they pleased upon; so that the Government was of little other use than to furnish a topic for the abusive pens of Grub-street Garreteers; that its magistrates served only as objects of invective for the factious scribblers of the day; and that its Laws were either in themselves inefficient, or their Executive Officers supinely negligent in the execution of them. Senex

Sun, c. 1792–93 (v.7, p.114)

INTRODUCTION

The Fragmenta must be one of the stranger texts to lurk in the depths of the British Library; a leviathan composed of ninety-four folio volumes, each volume containing well over 200 pages, each page featuring disparate clippings from the newspapers of Birmingham and London ordered in a chaotic chronology from the late 1750s through to 1833. The topics that jostle alongside one another vary enormously, stretching from warfare to weevils, from cricket to crime, and from modes of courtship common in Fife to frog-inhabited barometers. All in all, the collection takes up over 20ft of shelving, and is the work – so far as we know – of a single man. Un-indexed, un-indexable and scarcely annotated, it defies interpretation and conventional scholarship. Francis Cox’s enigmatic collection simply begs the question – Why?

A brief survey of the origin and provenance of the work elicits no straightforward answers. We know Francis Cox lived from 1752 to 1834 and plied his trade first in Birmingham and later in London as either a linen draper or a brush maker. He was married with two daughters. Few other facts about his life are recorded, and in truth it is unlikely we would be aware of Cox today, were it not for the curious clause in his will (written in August 1834) in which can be found the first extant reference to his magnum opus:

Moreover should the volumes called the Fragmenta be in my possession at the time of my death consisting of one hundred folio volumes for which I have been collecting for upwards of half a century be deemed worthy the acceptance of the Governors I leave devise and bequeath them to the Museum in Russell St. Bloomsbury.

Cox died a little over a month later, and his widow Sarah wrote to the governors to inform them of her late husband’s wish, asking only that she be granted time to look over the collection before it was received by the Museum. Examining the collection became – rather unsurprisingly given its scale – a much more formidable undertaking than she had anticipated, and it was not until August of the following year that the Fragmenta finally entered the collection of the Museum’s library (now the British Library), as a ninety-four-volume set.1 And there it has quite patiently remained for the last 175 years, during which time only two things of any interest have occurred to it.

Firstly it was re-catalogued in 1922, when the volumes were (mis)entered under the following description:

Burney (Charles) DD: A collection of miscellaneous cuttings from newspapers, made for Burney and continued after his death.

The sudden link to the Reverend Charles Burney (1757–1817) makes a strange sort of sense. Burney was a classical scholar and bibliophile, conspicuous during his youth for dismissal from Gonville and Caius College under charges of pilfering books from the Cambridge library and replacing the university arms with his own. His sister later suggested that this lapse in his judgement was due to a ‘mad rage to possess a library’, though others have suggested he sold the books to cover mounting gambling debts. In either case, Burney eventually did gather together an astounding library containing over 13,000 printed books and 500 manuscript volumes, bought by the British Museum in 1818 for the princely sum of £13,500. The collection was valuable, not only for its many classical editions, but also for the collection of newspapers it contained. Burney’s maiden aunts managed ‘Gregg’s-Coffee-House’, and from 1781 they collected the papers for him. These have recently been digitised by the British Library.

Given this mutual conviction of the present and future significance of newspapers, it is not difficult to see how a cataloguer might have considered Cox’s horde as an extension of Burney’s collection, and indeed the strange wording of Cox’s will, ‘should the volumes called the Fragmenta be in my possession at the time of my death’, suggests he half-expected them to be retrieved by another party. Despite the impulse to connect Cox to such an interesting figure, there are no solid ties linking the men. Their divergent methodologies – Cox cut the papers to single articles, often divesting them of both date and imprint, whereas Burney left them whole – also mark the collections as separate endeavours.

The second event of note occurred in 1966 when leading librarian and bibliographer C.B. Oldman wrote a survey of Cox and his collection. That Oldman’s ten-page commentary remains to this day the definitive (and only) work is entirely to his credit, but also perhaps hints at the genuine obscurity of Cox. Despite the efforts of Oldman, the ninety-four volumes are all that Cox seems to have left us – at least for the present.

My first contact with the text was during a seminar at the British Library, when a friend flipped open volume seventeen at random and after a brief snort of baffled laughter read aloud:

Tuesday the Otter hounds of Mr. Coleman of Leominster, killed in Monkland mill-pond, an otter of extraordinary size; it measured from the nose to the end of the tail four feet ten inches, and weighed 34½lb. This animal was supposed to be nearly 8 years old, and to have destroyed a ton of fish yearly.

I was hooked. The dubious yet purported accuracy of the figures, coupled with such questionable newsworthiness, lent the excerpt a kind of bathos. The archaic language (‘otter hounds’) set the article as utterly removed from the papers of today, yet the all-pervasive obsession with extremes (‘biggest’, ‘longest’, ‘most costly’) depicted human nature at its most nosey, vicarious and banal, and what’s more, reveal it as historically constant. As temporally distant readers of Cox’s collection we can go one further than the ‘inhabitant of the remote country’ postulated by Senex: we can scour the newspapers for the idiosyncrasies of time, as well as place. The past may well be a foreign country, but surely there can be few more unique or amusing ways of comprehending an era than to sit down to breakfast with the crumbs of its papers.

1. And not the 100 stated by Cox’s will. It is perhaps possible that the century was a target he had presaged (with an eye to his advancing age) as a suitable place to conclude.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

A word of warning. This selection is to be read with a pinch of salt, lest the mind of the reader unfortunately become one more ‘blank sheet, for fools and designing men to scribble what absurdities they pleased upon’. The reliability of reports may occasionally have been impaired by an editor’s earnest desire to get a fresh story out to the street, or by a hurried typesetter trying to squeeze a late slug onto the chase … and occasionally inaccuracies may have crept in lacking such honest excuses. The competition was often first to point the finger: ‘On Saturday night the Jacobean Evening-Echo obtruded upon the Public a letter dated Manheim July 31 – thus this wonderful Print receives Dispatches from the distance of near 1300 miles in 48 hours!!’ (v.9, p.52) – as shocking as it once would have been.

It seems such rivalries extended beyond the printed page, and onto the street:

CAUTION – We have received intimation from several Friends and correspondents, that a scheme is nightly practiced by the Vendors of a Paper called the Courier, to injure the sales of THE SUN. These vendors procure all the old papers of THE SUN they can get, and then damp them ready for their purpose; and after it is dark, if any person ask them for this paper their answer is ‘Don’t you want a Courier …?’

The Sun,c.1793(v.8,p.8)

But newspapers were not beyond a little gaiety, and occasionally made light of their own less-than-spotless reputations. The following excerpt was taken from a comic interlude called The DrunkenNews-Writer, performed at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket in 1770. A paper chose to print the scene in which the news-writer enters, drunk, and settles to his business:

Let me see – Yes! Like a wise Caterer, I’ll collect the best materials from the other Papers, that I may serve the more elegant OLIO in my own. (sitsdown and prepares to read the Papers), the PublicAdvertiser – right! I like to take things according to order – the Public Advertiser is like – what? – Egad, it is like a MADE DISH – full of good things, and of the most opposite qualities. Yes! – The PublicLedger is water gruel, without salt or butter – and has neither flavour nor substance. – The Gazetteer, – or, The New Daily Advertiser, – is like an unfilledhogshead – full of sound, and empty: – And the Daily Advertiser – pardon, O ye sons of Trade, if I call the Daily a Basket of chips – for it is dry, and fit for the fire. And so having finished my digression, let me see what these dispatches bring – (reads) ‘The following may be depended on as authentic,’ – Pfhaw! that’s a lie – for I wrote it myself.

(v.4,p.102)

So, now the reader is accordingly warned about the content of the following, I should briefly outline how such a short selection was made from such a vast collection. The short answer is with difficulty and partiality. An attempt was made to derive a method based on one of the rare marked articles in the collection, which perhaps provides an indication of Cox’s own interest as he read. The excerpt is from The Times, on Tuesday 13 August 1822 (v.53, p.243), and relates the events leading up to the suicide of the Marquis of Londonderry. Cox first indicates (with a vertical ink line in the margin) a section which reads:

For the last ten days, the Marquis had been suffering under a nervous fever, accompanied by a depression of spirits. On Friday he underwent the operation of cupping; after which, it appeared that his fever did not increase, though no alteration in the state of mind was perceptible, he still being subject to despondency.

This would be a perfectly natural section of the text to stress; however, further down there is another mark – one far less simple to explain. A great ink cross near the foot picks out a single sentence: ‘We understand, however, that he rose as early as seven o’clock yesterday morning, and drank a cup of tea and ate a muffin, before the fatal event took place.’ The inanity of the breakfast of the suicide seemed of more interest to Cox than the incident itself.

Francis Cox’s selection displays a wide-ranging interest in the politics, sports and entertainments of his day, but it also suggests he had an eye for the comic turn, the absurd, the irregular and occasionally the vulgar. It is this off-the-wall quality that I have attempted to retain in this selection, hoping that in doing so, Cox’s fragments might receive some long-overdue attention, but also that, in some sense, the unique personality the collection implies can endure.

This collection covers roughly the first half of Cox’s ninety-four volumes. Should it prove popular enough, a second part may well be produced.

Variant spellings have been retained throughout, and articles may occasionally have been subject to judicious editing for reasons of space.

STONE EATER