Alexx's Patreon Update: January, 2022

[alexxkay]

Holiday depression was, though not absent, at least relatively mild this year, so I only missed a few weeks of work. Finished chapters 9&10, putting me past page 300!

• Annotated chapter 9 of Jerusalem, Do As You Darn Well Pleasey. Highlights:
  • General: This chapter is from the point of view of John “Snowy” Vernall (1863-1926), Alma Warren’s great-grandfather, on the occasion of his daughter May Vernall’s birth. The date is March 10, 1889 (P165p5). Snowy is partially based on Thomas John “Ginger” Vernon (but see notes here).
  
  
  
  • The title is taken from the song “Lambeth Walk” from 1937. (Hence rather an anachronism. Moore may have confused it with a different song of the same title from 1899, which would still be an anachronism, but much less of one.) The song goes, in part:
    

    Ev’rything’s free and easy,
    Do as you darn well pleasey,
    Why don’t you make your way there,
    Go there, stay there,
    Once you get down Lambeth way,
    Ev’ry evening, ev’ry day,
    You’ll find yourself doin’ the Lambeth walk.

  • “Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans” – Successive occupiers of the area. The Trinovantes were a Celtic tribe who controlled the area prior to the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD, after which they were for a time a client kingdom of the Romans. Roman occupation ended circa 410 AD, due to invasions from the Germanic Saxons. In 1066, the Normans successfully conquered England, the last foreign peoples to do so as of this writing. (The name “Trinovantes” is theorized by some to mean “the very new people”, suggesting that they were once an invading force themselves.)
  • “Non Angli, sed Angeli” – Per Wikipedia, the full quote is: “Non Angli, sed angeli, si forent Christiani.– “They are not Angles, but angels, if they were Christian”. This incident is said to have inspired Pope Gregory to send Saint Augustine to convert the English to Christianity.
  • Mr. Dadd” – Mentioned briefly by Snowy’s father in the chapter A Host of Angles, Dadd was as described here. Dadd makes a significant appearance in Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest.
  • “something […] indistinct from the asylum’s worn stone gatepost” – Presumably a Puck’s Hat. In a pre-Jerusalem piece “Objects Discovered in a Novel Under Construction”, Moore wrote:
    

    Reportedly, Victorian patricide and fairy-painter Richard Dadd had an enormous “Puck’s Hat” sprouting from his temple and affecting his behaviour tremendously, while it remained predictably invisible to Dadd’s doctors and captors.
    

  • “the poet Milton who had entered like a current through the sole of Blake’s left foot” – William Blake, in his poem Milton (about John Milton) writes (and draws) about the spirit of Milton descending from heaven into his (Blake’s) left foot.
    

    With thunders loud and terrible: so Milton’s shadow fell
    Precipitant loud thund’ring into the Sea of Time & Space.
    Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star,
    Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift :
    And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter’d there

  • “a fourfold and eternal city” – In Blake’s poem Jerusalem, are the words “fourfold, / The great City of Golgonooza“; in Blake’s Milton, “From Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternal”. Moore / Snowy is of course referring to four dimensions, the ordinary three spatial ones plus time.
  • “[A lifespan was] an even lovelier and more terrible thing when looked at through this end of its breathtaking telescope” – The imagery here seems related to some in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol:
    

    It was a strange figure–like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions.
    

  • “Snowy Vernall springs eternal” – “Springs” here has many meanings. Snowy “springs” up, jumping and climbing things. He also “springs up” in the sense of a newly-sprouted plant. And, with his Eternalist view of time, Snowy is always in the season of Spring (which begins on the “vernal” equinox).

• Annotated chapter 10 of Jerusalem, The Breeze That Plucks Her Apron. Highlights:
  • General: This chapter focuses on May Vernall, whose birth we saw last chapter, as a young woman dealing with her own first child from 1908 to 1909. We also learn about the curious Northampton custom of the deathmonger, a sort of combination midwife and undertaker. May is based on the real-life Minnie May Moore, Alan Moore’s paternal grandmother.
  • “deathmonger” – In a 2009 interview, discussing his family history, Moore stated:
    

    […] what we called around here a deathmonger, which was a phrase that I believe was used only in the Boroughs, though I stand to be corrected, they were the ones who were… because the people in the Burroughs couldn’t afford proper midwives or proper funeral directors, so they had a deathmonger who would travel around and would attend to births, attend to deaths and probably attend to a lot of the stuff in between as well. I get the impression that ‘deathmonger’, if you’d taken it back a couple of hundred years it would probably have been wisewoman or witch.
    

    The word does not seem to be attested to in this usage outside of Alan Moore.
  • “swear an oath they’d not do magic on the child” – There are a few examples of early modern midwife oaths in England. They do include language like “I will not use any kind of sorcery or incantation”
  • “the Nene forked around [the island] to its north, continuing as two streams that re-joined to form one river at the land’s south tip” – The Nene travels from west to east here, not north to south. From this and other references below (P282p3, P283p1), it would appear that Moore had a map in front of him while writing this chapter, but had it turned 90 degrees, so that what he sees as “north” is actually west!
  • “Wars of the Roses” – A series of English civil wars between the families of Lancaster and York during the mid-to-late fifteenth century. There was a major battle in Northampton on 10 July 1460, during which King Henry VI was captured by the Yorkists. To claim that this “decided” the war depends on how you define the war(s). There was a pause in the fighting for several months after the Battle of Northampton, but I would regard the renewed hostilities in late 1460 to be part of the same war.
• Integrating reader comments on various projects.

Projected for next time: Jerusalem, chapters 11 and 12. This should finish Book One!