Alexx's Patreon Update: October, 2021

[alexxkay]

Productivity streak broken :( Hit a major depressive patch, but I'm starting to pull out and get work done again.

• Annotated chapter 6 of Jerusalem, Modern Times. This chapter is from the point of view of a young Charlie Chaplin in 1909, touring with a theater company and enjoying some small success. While he has big dreams, he has no idea how big he's going to get. Highlights:
  
  • Named after one of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous films, which in addition to being hilarious, is a biting critique of capitalism.
  • The phrase “modern times” also signals our transition from Peter the monk’s 9th century in the previous chapter to the at least relatively modern time of 1909.
  • "Karno’s Mumming Birds" - Fred Karno was a theatre promoter of the period. Mumming Birds was a comedy piece in his troupe's repertoire that Chaplin appeared in, at least sometimes playing The Inebriate.
  • "Grand Variety Hall" - I have only found one reference to a Grand Variety Hall in Northampton (in 1888) -- On a Jack the Ripper forum of all places!
  • "Old as me tongue but older than me teeth." - A proverbial way of not answering the question, with an added connotation of "Mind your own business!" While uninformative, it is essentially true, as everyone is born with a tongue, but their teeth come in later. The saying dates back at least to Jonathan Swift's Polite Conversation (1738).
  • The theatre actually had even more names than May lists here.
    • The Crow & Horseshow Inn Music Hall 1855-c.1859
    • Thomas's Music Hall c.1859-c.1869
    • Alhambra Music Hall 1869-?
    • Temperance Hall of Varieties 1878-?
    • Star Hall of Varieties ?-1880
    • Theatre of Varieties 1880-?
    • Palace Theatre of Varieties 1901-1910
    • Palace Vaudeville Theatre 1910-1912
    • The Picture House 1912 -?
    • Vint's Palace 1913 -?
    • Vint's Picture Palace 1914? - 1919
    • The Majestic Cinema 1919-1937
  • "they changed it to the Grand Variety around the time what I was born." - So, circa 1889. The name is not documented in the history I found, but is certainly possible.
  • "If he were to come back here in, say, forty years time and found it was a place that sold, he didn’t know, electric guns or something " - Forty years puts us at 1949. I am unaware what the building was doing that year, but it was torn down in 1950. In recent years, the location has been occupied by a mobile phone store, an idea even more foreign to a 1909 Chaplin than an "electric gun".
  • "Perhaps by then there wouldn’t even be variety halls? Well, that was an exaggeration, obviously" - While not utterly extinct by 1949 (or even today), music halls had already become largely supplanted by movies, radio, and television.


• Annotated chapter 7 of Jerusalem, Blind, But Now I See, which takes place on the same day as chapter 6. Our viewpoint character here is Henry George (AKA "Black Charley"), a black man and former slave from Tennessee who came to Northampton in the 1880s. The centerpiece of the chapter is Henry's learning that John Newton, who composed the hymn "Amazing Grace" and lived near Northampton -- had been a slave trader earlier in his life. Highlights:
  • This chapter covers a lot of ground, so I made MANY maps!
  • “at first he’d took it for the Lord” – Moore seems to have had the same experience. In a 2002 interview, he says:
    

    Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull […] performed on the little park, which is about a hundred yards, two hundred yards from where I’m now. I noticed a chimney pot on one of the houses near the racecourse that’s got this bearded face carved onto it. Which at first I thought was perhaps Jesus or Moses… then I realised that it’s got a cowboy hat and that in fact it was Buffalo Bill. They carved him on to commemorate the race course thing”
    

  • “Saint Thomas Becket quenched his thirst” – Though no longer a public drinking fountain, the site of the well is still encased by a shrine erected in 1843. This well also appeared in Voice of the Fire, chapter 7, The Sun Looks Pale Upon The Wall. Becket himself appears in the Jerusalem chapter The Steps of All Saints.
  • “Britton Johnson” – A real person. The book (and subsequent film) The Searchers was based on his life. He died when he and two others were attacked by a band of Kiowa warriors (not Comanche). His comrades were killed almost instantly, leaving him to fight alone. Britt killed his own horse and used it for cover. When his body was found, it was surrounded by nearly two hundred bullet shells.
  • “Newton who chopped down the apple tree and said he couldn’t tell a lie?” – Henry is correct in his next paragraph’s corrections. Mrs. Bruce is conflating Isaac Newton, who famously (though perhaps apocryphally) came up with his theory of gravity by watching an apple fall, and George Washington, who famously (though perhaps apocryphally) admitted to chopping down a cherry tree as a child.
  • “Gog and Magog” – Originally two names from the Old Testament, complex and conflicting legends of giants named Gog and Magog (or combined into one as Gogmagog) have sprouted up all over. They have been associated with London since at least Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae (1136). Statues of them are alleged to have existed since the time of Henry V (c.1413). I have been unable to connect any historical statues with Castle Ashby directly, but the area did contain two large old oak trees named Gog and Magog, which survived at least until the early 20th century, when Black Charley rode by.
  • “he’s not here […] Reverend Newton is in London at St. Mary Woolnoth’s” – Incorrect. While Newton and his wife were originally buried there, they were re-interred in the churchyard at Olney in 1893, sixteen years before this chapter is set. The tomb bears his self-penned epitaph — placed facing a wall where it is almost impossible to see!
  • “the last verse, which weren’t like the one he was familiar with” – Per Wikipedia:
    

    Another verse was first recorded in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s immensely influential 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. […] Stowe included another verse, not written by Newton, that had been passed down orally in African-American communities for at least 50 years. It was one of between 50 and 70 verses of a song titled “Jerusalem, My Happy Home”, which was first published in a 1790 book called A Collection of Sacred Ballads:
    When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
    Bright shining as the sun,
    We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
    Than when we first begun.

  • “Henry was marked up as a slave […] when he was seven” – As mentioned previously in notes to A Host of Angles, P48p3., the timing of this seem to have been a guess on Moore’s part. In a 2006 interview, Moore wrote:
    

    And on his shoulder he had the brand of the slave plantation in Tennessee that he’d been liberated from in 1863. When, by my estimate, he would have been thirteen. I figure he must have been born about 1850 from the date on his death certificate. I hadn’t actually known that the plantations used to actually brand the slaves. That was a new one on me. And I found myself having to wonder at what age they did it, if he was already branded by the age of 13. When would you brand a child? It’s funny the things you have to consider when you’re writing a novel. What would be a good age to brand a child? You know, you wouldn’t want to do it at two; that’d kill them, wouldn’t it? But you wouldn’t want to leave it too late in case they ran away, or fought back, or something.
    

  • “the day they heard they was emancipated” – While the the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, a variety of military, political, and communication concerns meant that the actual emancipation dates varied widely. Being in Tennessee, Henry George would probably have been freed in late 1864.
  • “what they called the Dern Gate up ahead of him” – There was once a gate in the town walls at roughly the location of Becketts Well. I don’t know when the wall (and gate) came down, but there is a thick line on an 1899 map that might be that wall. “Dern” probably comes from the meaning “gatepost”, though I note it has other definitions connoting secrecy and hidden places.
  • “Newt Pratt’s animal” – Curiously, Moore never identifies this animal by name, though it is referred to a few other times. In case there was any doubt, here’s a relevant snippet from Reg Tero in In Living Memory:
    

    Used to be a fellow called Newt Pratt […]. He was a horse dealer. There was a public house down Scarletwell Street called the Friendly Arms [… a]nd this fellow. Newt Pratt, used to bring a zebra down there on a Sunday dinner time. Used to tie it up outside and he used to give it beer. Bring a jug of beer out to it.
    

  • In Living Memory includes the following text and image, apparently taken from an obituary:

    He bore on his left shoulder his brand of slavery, which was presumably the brand of the owner of the plantation on which he was born, and where he afterwards worked. This brand was a scroll surmounted by two triangles separated by double lines of which the subjoined is a rough sketch.
    
    

    This image will recur frequently in the rest of Jerusalem.
• Integrating reader comments on various projects.

Projected for next time: Jerusalem, chapters 8 and 9.