The author and actress Mary Robinson (1758-1800) became known as ‘Perdita’ following her appearances in that role in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane in 1779.  She was briefly the mistress of George, Prince of Wales (later George IV), a liaison which gave her lasting notoriety. ‘The Perdita’ (as newspapers routinely styled her) was one of London’s leading celebrities during the 1780s.  She was also a fashion icon, as newspaper reports of the time attest.

Frontispiece from Mary Robinson. Poems. London, 1791.  

The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser of 11 June 1781 recorded her ‘in a most becoming military attire (scarlet faced with apple green)’.  In the autumn of 1781, ‘Perdita’ went to Paris (the centre of the fashionable world) for the first time.  On 15 October 1782, the Morning Herald reported ‘The Perdita has received a dress from Paris, which was introduced this Autumn by the Queen of France’.  The same paper on 21 November 1782 identified it as the ‘Chemise de la Reine’, worn by Perdita to the opera.  The chemise de la reine was a flowing muslin gown without hoops, fastened with a silk sash, suitable for private and country wear – Marie Antoinette was portrayed wearing it by the painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783.  Was this indeed the fashion in which Mrs Robinson appeared at the opera? Or was it, perhaps, closer to the ‘morning dress’ worn by the Queen of France at Versailles, as described in some detail in the Lady’s Magazine for April 1782:

The robe is made of plain sattin, chiefly white, worn without a hoop, round, and a long train.  It is drawn up in front, on one side, and fastened with tassels of silver, gold, or silk, … this discloses a puckered petticoat of gauze or sarsenet, of a different colour. …

Such a gown was surely more suitable for an appearance at one of London’s most elite entertainment venues.  The use of satin and the elaborate trimmings of this gown distinguish it from the chemise de la reine, except that the Lady’s Magazine also tells readers that ‘the dress, … it is said, will be worn throughout the summer, made of lighter material’ suggesting that it might have been an earlier version of Marie Antoinette’s informal dress.

Moira Goff
Curator Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800 

Further reading:
Claire Brock. “Then smile and know thyself supremely great”: Mary Robinson and the “splendour of a name”. Women’s Writing, 9.1 (2002), pp. 107-124
Paula Byrne. Perdita: the life of Mary Robinson. London, 2004
Aileen Ribeiro. The art of dress: fashion in England and France 1750-1820. New Haven & London, 1995

Visit our new exhibition Georgians Revealed

Salim Rashid Suri (1910-1979) was an Omani Sowt singer and ‘ūd player who became famous as the ‘Singing Sailor’.  He developed a truly unique style which took influence from musical sources across the Middle East and India.

Suri’s passion for music was anathema to his family: his elder brother threatened to shoot him unless he stopped singing.  Fleeing to pursue the music he loved, Suri sailed with commercial ships to ports in East Africa, India and around the Middle East.  From the recordings and the testimonies of his children we can begin to piece together his life.

Salim Rashid Suri, drawn by an Omani artist in the 1980s, copyright Saeed al Suri

Salim Rashid Suri was born in Sur, Oman, though he spent most of his life in India, Bahrain and Kuwait.  He began by singing al maidan, a form of sung poetry, accompanying himself on a one-stringed drone instrument, but his reputation resides in his distinctive style of Sowt al Khaleej (‘Voice of the Gulf’), an urban form principally developed and performed by musicians from Bahrain and Kuwait.  Sur was a pivotal trade port connecting Oman with Yemen, East Africa, Zanzibar, India and ports along the coastlines of the Gulf and is still regarded as one of the main centres of traditional Omani music.  Undoubtedly, Suri’s development of the sowt tradition was influenced by the trade links animating the town.

Suri began working on commercial vessels in Sur, later visiting ports in Yemen, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, India and East Africa.  He learned sowt from recordings of the singer Abd el-Latif al-Kuweiti (1901/1904–1975) and from other practicing musicians. His son, Sa‘id Salim Ali Suri, said of his father that ‘he left Sur with a good voice, but didn’t know how to sing’.  It was during his travels that Suri’s music developed and in Aden he first encountered the ‘ūd.

In the early 1930s Suri settled in India.  He lived in the port area of Bombay working first as a ‘boiler controller’ on a steamship before becoming a broker and translator helping Arab merchants to buy goods in Bombay and transport them to the ships.  He recorded twelve shellac (78 rpm) discs with HMV, which sold for around 50 Indian Rupees apiece.  Their commercial success was assured partly by the Arab population in Bombay, but also by his interest in Indian music and the use of Urdu in his songs.

Suri left India in the late 1940s and settled in Bahrain where he became a sought-after freelance artist.  By the 1960s, his own record label, Salimphone, recorded widely in the region with musicians such as Abd el-Latif al-Kuweiti and Mahmud al-Kuweiti.  However, because Suri’s records were only suitable for gramophones, the advent of vinyl records (45 rpm) in the early 1960s damaged his business prospects and he returned to Oman in 1971.  There he found work with the Sultan who made the singer a consultant for cultural affairs. Suri performed songs eulogising the ruler and his family which were widely broadcast on Oman’s recently established TV and radio stations.

Suri had come full circle.  As traveller and seafarer his music encapsulated the centuries-old cultural exchange of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Peninsula.  By the time he died in 1979, Suri was being hailed as an icon of the Omani nation for his contribution to sowt al-Khaleej.

Rolf Killius
Gulf History Curator Oral & Musical Culture

British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership Programme

This story is based on an interview with Salim Rashid Suri’s son, Sa‘id Salim Ali Suri conducted by Edward Fox on 21 November 1990 and subsequent email conversations between Rolf Killius and Sa‘id. 

Sa‘id Salim Ali Suri is also a versatile musician and singer. He was born in 1954, received his main education in Bahrain and presently lives in Oman where he moved with his parents when he was eighteen years old. From 1975 to 1978 he studied music in Egypt.

Listen to recordings of Sa‘id Salim Ali Suri.

 

Today's story about little known printer Charles Clark has been contributed by guest bloggers Dr Mary O'Connell & Dr Carrie Griffin.

Inside the cover of BL MS Egerton 2433 is an unusual bookplate poem.  The poem is printed, dated by hand ‘1859’ and is entitled ‘A Pleader to the Needer when a Reader’.  The poem is a humorous warning to prospective readers not to deface the book:  ‘This Book, too, friend, take care you ne’er with grease or dirt besmear it; / While only awkward puppies will continue to “dogs-ear” it!’.  The author identifies himself as ‘one Charles Clark’, living in Great Totham, Essex.

BL MS Egerton 2433 

Clark used the poem as a mark of ownership but he also saw it as a way to materially connect his name to his books and to ensure that he would not be forgotten. The first line of the poem makes this wish clear:  ‘As all, my friend, through wily knaves full often suffer wrongs, / Forget not, pray, when it you’ve read, to whom this Book belongs.’  The poem served Clark’s purpose.  While working on Egerton 2433, Carrie Griffin saw the poem and sent it to her colleague Mary O’Connell.  Both decided to try to find out more about the man who wrote it.

 
Charles Clark - reproduced by kind permission of Essex Record Office

Clark was born in Heybridge, Essex in 1806.  He described himself as ‘a bibliographic farmer’ who loved nothing more than collecting books.  He invented a portable printing press, wrote satirical verse and songs, and spent much more money than he could afford on rare books.  In 1834 he wrote a poem in the Essex dialect, John Noakes and Mary Styles, which was published by the London bookseller John Russell Smith.  This collaboration inaugurated decades of correspondence between the men.  Clark’s side of this correspondence (well over 300 letters) is preserved in Essex Record Office and has been transcribed by Griffin and O’Connell.

Sketch of Clark's home, Great Totham Hall -reproduced by kind permission of Essex Record Office

Clark’s letters to Smith show he was a man who was deeply engaged with the literary marketplace.  While he often lamented living in Essex ‘a shire at which all laugh’, he was dedicated to preserving local knowledge, customs and dialect.  He particularly loved poets who celebrated the rural landscape, and corresponded with John Clare.  The British Library holds letters from Clark to Clare, and also to Clare’s wife (BL Egerton 2249).  Clark felt compelled to write to Clare because he wanted to promote ‘the cause of suffering genius’, and later offered to print an edition of Clare’s unpublished texts – entirely at his own expense.

Tiptree Heath in Essex, one of Clark's favourite places  - authors' photograph April 2013

We are chronicling our attempts to find out more about Charles Clark - Finding Charles Clark .  When Clark died, his library numbered almost 2,500 books, and we know from his letters that several hundred more passed through his hands.  If you have found Charles Clark we would be delighted to hear from you!

Carrie Griffin & Mary O’Connell
University College, Cork, Ireland

 

This is a cautionary tale for all those attempting to grow a moustache for Movember.  Lay of the Red Moustache is ‘a doleful ditty, founded on facts’.  It tells the story of a young military officer who yearns to grow a splendid moustache to impress his lady love.

Images Online

Frenzied, almost, his youthful brain,
On his profile the cornet glares;
With anxious finger, mirrors twain,
Investigates his face for hairs.




He paints on fake black moustaches to see how he would look.

Still he can make – and does -  untrue
Mustaches, growing in a trice,
From a pomatum, black of hue,
Purchased by Truffit’s kind advice.

Unfortunately his own moustache grows red, contrasting with the black hair on his head.

What ecstasy two sprouts of down
Would quickly o’er his soul have shed,
Had magnifying glass not shown
Too plainly they were yellow-red…

He encourages his moustache to grow with unguents including extracts of ‘Northern Bear’.  When he goes to see his love, he colours the red moustache with black pomatum . He whispers sweet nothings into her ear and then kisses her whereupon the black dye transfers to her face –

Seduced by beauty’s lips, and rash
Through love, forgetting wholly this,
A pair of duplicate moustache
Imprints he on her with a kiss.


Images Online 

Oh, never can be deemed a grace,
Though perfect in their arc and hue,
Mustaches on a lady’s face!
But those she wore, not yet she knew.

At that moment her father enters, sees what has happened,  and swiftly sends the young officer on his way -

Unless you leave this roof of mine
Without an instant of delay,
Three flunkeys shall their strength combine
To prove to you the shortest way.

His love rejects him too –

This little billet-doux uproots
His trust: - “My love is chilled as ashes:
I knew how brightly blacked your boots,
But not that you had blacked mustaches.”

The young man flees to India 'in rage and shame'.

On his return, he visits his mother –




He sees his mother shrink, e’en she,
With awe, from his moustache of flame.
His mother shrinks from his embrace,
A troubled look all o’er him flings,
Shrieks – “Oh, how frightful grown your face!
Ah me, those horrid, horrid things!”

He then approaches some young relations -




From unsophisticated sight
Of infancy he hopes, than this,
To win reception more polite,-
Of infant cousins begs a kiss.
Tott’ring on tiny legs away,
(After intense, disgusted, stare,)
Resolutely the children say:
“Oh, never will we kiss that hair!”

So he decides to be rid of his moustache –

He rushes to his razors, glares,
Wild-eyed, and – cuts off his moustache.
They part: those he had dreamed to bear
To him attached, from out the world;
Companions old! – as infants dear,
Loved, cherished, and caressed, and curled.

And finds that instead of fiddling his moustache, he now plays with his nose –

From habit, having no moustache,
He strokes, and twiddles with his nose:
So sore it swells, so red with rash,
Once more the ruddy fringe he shows.

Margaret Makepeace
Curator, East India Company Records

Further Reading
Lay of the Red Moustache (1851) ‘Dedicated, with the highest respect, to the Hussar Officers of England, by one of themselves’ (BL: RB.23.a.17909).

Katie MacIntyre was a fashionable middle class lady of the eighteenth century, and one who was excited by the goods imported from India and China by the East India Company.  These consumer products comprised fine silks, tea of several types, coffee, spices, silks, cottons, muslins and fine porcelain, all expensive items highly prized for personal and domestic use.  Katie was able to secure these luxury wares from her husband John who was in the service of the East India Company.  Letters written to Katie between 1776 and 1777 certainly indicate that he was able to send her a great quantity and variety.  As a merchant John would have been permitted to purchase a certain amount of goods for his own purposes.

IOPP/MSS Eur F 558  ff.20-20v

A letter of 1776 addressed to Katie when she was living in Pimlico, London, refers to the 'cart load of china' John will send.   Chinese blue and white porcelain, or ’China’ ware, was especially prized for its thin, transparent, eggshell like quality and for its delicate hand painted decorations that represented traditional scenes of Chinese everyday life, interpreted for the export trade.  If Katie had a cart load of porcelain, her collection is likely to have included pieces of varying qualities, suitable for both everyday and special use.

IOPP/MSS Eur F 558 ff. 23-23v

In a letter written the following year, John made a shopping list of the ‘necessarys’ Katie had requested.  He carefully noted the quantities and different types of Chinese tea – Hyson (a green tea with a particularly pleasant aroma and colour) and Souchong (a black tea with a much stronger, smoky flavour and aroma) – along with the silks, cottons, gingham, Madras and Nankin (or Nankeen) cloth, he sent home.  The initials along the left hand side indicate which member of the MacIntyre family these gifts were intended for.

Such expensive imports could indeed be necessary luxuries for the upper and wealthy middle classes who desired them all the more for the sense of exotic style they evoked.  However technological progress during the eighteenth century allowed British manufacturers to produce goods in greater quantities than before and, inspired by imported products, they were able to create consumer wares of equal style and luxury that were much more affordable to a larger section of the population.

Helen Peden
Curator Printed Historical Sources 1801-1914 

See the original letters in our new exhibition Georgians Revealed, and discover more about eighteenth century stylish goods in context with the theme ‘Buying luxury, acquiring style’.

Our new exhibition, ‘Georgians Revealed: Life, Style, and the Making of Modern Britain’, which opens at the British Library later this week, might not seem to have much in common with the harsh world of Atlantic slavery.  In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price is greeted by a ‘dead silence’ when she asks her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram about the slave trade – a silence which the critic Edward Said famously interpreted as a sign that ‘one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both’.  But the life of Ignatius Sancho (1729-80) suggests otherwise.

Sancho was born on an Atlantic slave ship, was brought to England from the Spanish West Indies at the age of two, and grew up as a household servant in Greenwich (though still, in English law, with the status of a slave – it wasn’t until 1772 that Lord Mansfield’s judgement established the legal precedent that no man could be a slave on English soil).  The Duke of Montagu took an interest in Sancho and paid for his education, and after the Duke’s death in 1749 his widow took him into her service as her butler, leaving him a small annuity which eventually enabled him to set up in business as a grocer in Westminster.  He became well known in London’s literary and artistic circles (Gainsborough painted his portrait; Sterne corresponded with him), and a collection of his letters was published posthumously in 1782.

Sancho blazed a trail for black Africans in Britain.  He was the first black man to vote in a British parliamentary election, the first to publish any critique of slavery and the slave trade – preceding by some years the autobiography of the ex-slave and anti-slavery activist Olaudah Equiano – and the first to be accepted into London literary society.  Even Thomas Jefferson, who complained that his letters were the product of a ‘wild and extravagant’ imagination, admitted that Sancho held ‘the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgement’.

The British Library has recently acquired the archive of Sancho’s letters to his friend and patron William Stevenson.  These are the only manuscripts by Sancho that are known to survive, and the largest single collection of letters by any black Anglo-African of this period.  In one unpublished letter, Sancho describes himself as ‘an Affrican – with two ffs if you please – and proud am I to be of a country that knows no Politicians nor Lawyers’.  To learn more about this exciting new acquisition, come along to the British Library Conference Centre this Friday, 8 November, at 18:45, when Prof Vincent Carretta, editor of Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (2004), will be giving a public lecture on ‘Ignatius Sancho: Britain’s First African Man of Letters’.

Arnold Hunt
Curator, Modern Historical Manuscripts 

 

Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic participant in the Hallowe’en celebrations which took place every year at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.  Images of the Queen perpetually dressed in black widow’s weeds, looking stern and ‘not amused’, are at variants with the contemporary newspaper reports of her joining in the merriment known as ‘Queen’s Hallowe’en’.

Queen Victoria from Our celebrities - a portrait gallery (London, 1888)  Images Online

Preparations were made at the Castle for days beforehand.  As darkness fell on 31 October, the Queen drove out in an open carriage carrying a lighted torch.  She was followed by a procession of over 100 royal servants and tenants from the local farms with their families who also carried torches.  They marched through the grounds accompanied by a piper.  At the front of the castle was a huge bonfire made up of boxes and packing cases kept throughout the year especially for that purpose.  As the fire burned, a hobgoblin appeared pulling a cart containing an effigy of a witch.  There was a guard of fairies carrying spears.  The torch bearers gathered into a circle and the goblin threw the witch onto the bonfire watched by the Queen, her family and members of the Royal household.  Reels were then danced to the ‘stirring strains’ of Ross the Queen’s piper.  In 1874 the celebrations were supposed to end with a dance in the ballroom but this plan was dropped when some the revellers behaved in ‘a rather disorderly manner’ at the bonfire.

From Under the Window: Pictures and Rhymes by K. G. (London, 1879) Images Online  

Queen Victoria wrote about Hallowe’en at Balmoral in her 1877 diary, describing how she hurried back from a drive to be in time for the parade.  Her daughter Princess Louise walked at the side of her carriage carrying a torch and looking to the Queen like one of the witches in Macbeth.  Prince Leopold and Victoria’s favourite servant John Brown were also there with torches and the procession had ‘a very pretty effect’.

Margaret Makepeace
Curator, East India Company Records


Further reading:
British Newspaper Archive
For example -
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser 6 November 1874
Aberdeen Journal 31 October 1933 – with an extract from Queen Victoria’s diary
Western Gazette 29 October 1937

Despite the media’s promotion of Black History Month every October, every month is BHM here in the British Library.   As the curator in charge of our UK publications in this regard, I’ve uncovered numerous books and magazines that you wouldn’t find with obvious keyword searches of our catalogue. 

Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus (1964) is about Jamaican novelists, while David Katz’ People Funny Boy (2000) is a biography of the famous reggae producer, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.   Even some local government agencies have done their share of documenting the African Diaspora in Britain too : London’s Wandsworth Council published Gloria Locke’s Caribbeans in Wandsworth (1992), while the Nottinghamshire Living History Archive printed up Louise Garvey’s Lives of Black Nurses in Nottingham (2002).

 

From Tropic August 1960 (P.P.7615.kf)

But it’s the magazines and newspapers that are special.  In 1948, Edward Scobie published Checkers – “Britain’s Premier Negro Magazine,” presenting a mix of music, stage, literature, politics and fine art.  That year the Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury with almost 500 Jamaican émigrés, launching decades of immigration from the Caribbean.  But although the community presence in Britain goes back centuries beforehand, there wasn’t yet a big enough readership to support such a magazine.  So Checkers folded after five issues, in January 1949.

Five years later, A.P. Pulleyn-Holden published, Bronze (PP.5939.BFA), with editorial help from Mr Scobie and the dance teacher Buddy Bradley, who’d helped everyone from film star Fred Astaire to bandleader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson.   Although they kept readers up to date about Black progress in politics, sports, and finance, the team at Bronze excelled in featuring popular musical acts, including singer Lena Horne, calypso artist Marie Bryant, the best-selling pianist-singer Winifred Atwell, and even the future Avant Garde jazz saxophonist Joe Harriott.  Still, this periodical lasted just six issues (1954–1955).

By 1960 the prospect of publishing appealed to Charles I. Ross and so, with Edward Scobie (again), Patrick Williams, and Molly Douglas, he established Tropic.  This title was more ambitious, with African and West Indian politics in an increasingly post-colonial world, Black cinema, the BBC Overseas Service, and even short stories. Almost two decades before Rock against Racism they were campaigning for Music against Apartheid.  And in the spirit of friendly competition, they promoted Claudia Jones’ West Indian Gazette (1958-1969).  Although Jones established what we now refer to as the Notting Hill Carnival, Tropic didn’t get to push it.  Their role was replaced by Flamingo (PP.5109.bq), with Edward Scobie again at the helm, which published 1961-1963.

 

From Tropic April 1960 (P.P.7615.kf) 

This was an era of journalism demanding that movie makers “Cut Uncle Tom films,” railing against “Landlords’ Terror Tactics” and BBC TV’s demeaning Black and White Minstrel Show, and asking “Why not a coloured Miss Universe?”  Niche mags came later, such as Grass Roots (1971), Black Echoes : Today’s Music Weekly (1976-), Wealth : The Black Business Magazine (1986-), and Vibes & Voices (2006-). 

But as the mainstream Black press didn’t re-appear until The Voice, in 1982, we are grateful for these earlier ventures.

Andy Simons
Curator, Printed Historical Sources