Recreating Emily Dickinson's 1883 Black Cake

Isabella reporting,

Last week, quite by accident, I attended a 185th birthday party for American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). While visiting Harvard's Houghton Library to see their current exhibition (more about that in a future post), I was invited to join the festivities by friend-of-the-blog Andrea Cawelti, Ward Music Cataloger at Houghton. How could I resist?

Such a celebration wasn't surprising. The Emily Dickinson Collection at Houghton is the largest in the world devoted to the poet, and contains everything from hand-stitched manuscript copies of her poems to the small desk on which she wrote them. But the centerpiece of this party wasn't a  poem. It was a recipe.

Emily Dickinson's handwritten recipe for Black Cake - the name comes from the dark color created by the ingredients - is a typical 19thc. cake for holidays and celebrations, rich in dried fruit and spices and laced with equal parts of molasses and rum. It's also dauntingly large, requiring nineteen eggs (!) and producing over twelve pounds of batter.

Two intrepid members of Houghton's staff recreated the recipe in all its glory (and beat all those eggs by hand) for the party. Emilie Hardman, Research, Instruction, and Digital Initiatives Librarian and Emily Walhout, Reference Assistant, are the stars of the above video, showing exactly how they made the cake - or rather, several cakes, since the amount of batter exceeded any modern cake pans.

Much like the Rich Cake for Twelfth Night that I featured here last week, this cake needed a month to "mature" and meld the flavors and alcohol. It was worth the wait: I can report that the cake was absolutely delicious, and as  you can see, left, I wasn't the only one to think so.

If you want to try the cake yourself, here's the digital version of Emily Dickinson's original handwritten recipe, and here's the post from Houghton Library's blog with more information about the cake.

An Intricate Love Token from 18thc. New England

Isabella reporting,

Earlier this year I shared a charmingly hand-drawn and intricately folded love token, or puzzle purse, created in late 18thc. Pennsylvania by a now unknown German-American. Called a liebesbrief, or love-letter, the watercolor token was folded in a complicated manner that made it as much a puzzle as a letter.

This week a very similar love token, left, appeared on the Houghton Library blog as a new acquisition for their collection. As with the Pennsylvania German liebesbrief, the identity of the creator of this piece has been lost beyond his initials: E.W. He was apparently a rejected suitor who created the token for his beloved, hoping she'd reconsider his marriage proposal. There's no word as to whether his ink and watercolor plea changed her mind, but I like to think that the token's survival over two hundred shows that she preserved the token - and said yes.

I won't paraphrase Houghton's blog post, written by our friend curator John Overholt. You can read it here, plus see more images and a gif of the token unfolding. But I thought it was fascinating that the two pieces - one created in Pennsylvania, and the other in New England -  were so similar both in their design, and their emotion. No matter the medium, love will always find a voice.

Above: Love Token, maker unknown, late 18thc. New England. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Queen Victoria, a Polka, & 8,000 Soldiers, 1853

Isabella reporting,

The most popular image of Queen Victoria today is the one shown in late 19th c. photographs: a short, stout, elderly woman in widow's weeds, staring grimly away from the camera.

But it was a much different queen that captivated her subjects early in her reign. Victoria was only 18 when she was crowned queen in 1837, and 21 when she married Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. She was painted, drawn, and engraved to show her to flattering advantage as a small, slender, and pretty young woman. The majority of the country would never see her in person, and in those days long before television, this image of the elegant queen was the one that was accepted and revered.

It was also an image used to sell everything from fashionable clothing to soap. The young queen's reign coincided with technological advancements in wood engraving, and color printing (chromolithography) in the 1840s that made illustrated news and culture magazines like the Illustrated London News and Harper's Weekly  both more affordable and more lavish. Gone were the days when prints were laboriously and often crudely colored by hand. Now consumers wanted color illustrations on everything, and publishers were happy to oblige.

These same middle-class consumers were also buying pianos for their parlors and sheet music to play on those pianos. There was an explosion of new social dances to learn - waltzes, polkas, and quadrilles - plus themes from popular plays and arias from the latest operas. To entice buyers, sheet music for these pieces was titled with names that would tie them to popular public figures, political events, exotic locations, and even scientific discoveries, and printed with beautiful illustrations on the covers.

The sheet music for The Camp Polka, above, combines several trends. Printed in London in 1853, the illustration shows the summer camp on Chobham Common in Surrey. The Chobham Camp was the scene of the first large-scale military maneuvers in England since the Napoleonic Wars. Patriotic fervor is usually at its highest right before a war. With the Crimean Wars looming in the future, the spectacle of 8,000 men and 1,500 horses drew crowds of spectators - including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Here the stylishly uniformed queen and prince, riding on spirited steeds, are shown surveying the camp in a neatly arranged show of British might and military prowess. Patriotism, royal celebrities, and horses: what better way to market a polka?

Many thanks to Andrea Cawelti, Ward Music Cataloger, Houghton Library, Harvard University, for her assistance with this post.

Above: The Camp Polka by Chas. d'Albert, sheet music for solo piano. Lithographed by John Brandard, published in London: Chappell, 1853, by M.& N. Hanhart. Harvard University Library. 

A Special Book from Samuel Johnson to Fanny Burney, 1781

Isabella reporting,

As a writer, I'm always intrigued by the bits and pieces of the craft that other writers in the past have left behind, like Jane Austen's humble writing desk and chair or these unbound, first edition volumes of Pride and Prejudice. More rare still are handwritten drafts, manuscripts that have been crossed out and scribbled over in a frenzy of creative inspiration.

Even now in the computer age, there are several stages to transforming a manuscript into a finished book. Revisions are made by editors and copy editors as well as the author her/himself, plus additional notations by the production team. The final step is the galleys, or page proofs, that show exactly how the pages of the finished books will look. Today this all takes place through an electronic exchange of track-changes, but in the past the process involved flopping reams of paper mailed back and forth in padded brown envelopes. (It wasn't so distant a past, either; I have not-fond memories of racing to ship edited galleys to the FedEx office before closing.)

After the book was published, all those various versions and edits of mine went into the recycling bin. I imagine that 18th or 19th c. authors and printers probably did their version of recycling, too, by sending the old galleys to be remade into new paper. They weren't considered worth saving, and very few survive today.

One that did is shown here, above, and features a work by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). Dr. Johnson was perhaps the most famous literary figure of 18th c. Britain, and among the many hats he wore were essayist, editor, poet, literary critic, biographer, and lexicographer. One of the highlights of my tour last week of Houghton Library, Harvard University, was visiting the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson, right, with curator John Overholt. The comprehensive depth of this collection of books, artwork, manuscripts, and letters is truly breathtaking, and even if you cannot visit for yourself (Houghton Library is open to the public for tours on Friday), you can view highlights on the collection's website.

These are the proofs to Dr. Johnson's Life of Pope, from Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, published in 1781, and later to be known more simply as Lives of the Poets.  I love being able to see Dr. Johnson's comments and corrections in the margins, exactly the kind of final corrections and changes that every writer makes.

Ordinarily the proofs would have been used and then discarded by the printer. According to John Overholt, however, these survived because the novelist Fanny Burney (1752-1840) asked Dr. Johnson to save them for her so she might read the selection early, without waiting for the final published edition, as a personal ARC (advanced reader copy.) Not only did Dr. Johnson retrieve the edited proof from the printer, but because he had also been trained as a young man to be a bookbinder, he bound the proof himself as a special gift for Mrs. Burney – and a special gift, too, to those of us living today.

Many thanks to John Overholt for his generous assistance with this post.

Above left: Proofs for the Life of Pope from Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, by Samuel Johnson, 1781. MS Hyde 50 (4), Harvard University.
Lower right: The Donald & Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
All images courtesy of Harvard University.

A Brilliant Starry Messenger, 1783

Isabella reporting,

The night sky is unfamiliar territory to most modern Westerners. A sky filled with stars and planets that was once so familiar for telling time and location is today lost in the brightness of electric lights. Rare celestial events like comets, meteors, and fireballs are relegated to a passing notice on the Weather Channel (or worse, in a song by Pitbull.)

But to our ancestors, the sight of an unexpected ball of fire shooting across the heavens was a strange and unsettling thing, a divine portent of a coming war or the downfall of a king. Starry Messengers: Signs and Science from the Skies is the name of a wonderful exhibition currently on display at Harvard University's Houghton Library, and features examples of how early modern scientists, artists, and writers tried to explain and understand the stars and skies above. The exhibition runs through May 2, and is free and open to the public; click here for more information, and also watch the excellent short video here.

I was particularly fascinated by the story that accompanied these two images on the exhibition caption:

"On the evening of August 18, 1783, a fireball streaked across the British night sky, breaking up in the atmosphere and vanishing over the course of a minute. The summer heat meant there were a number of observers outside at the right moment. Remarkably, a gathering on the terrace of Windsor Palace included both the physicist Tiberious Cavallo and the artist Thomas Sandby, each of whom recorded the event in his own way; Cavallo in the pages of the premier scientific journal of the time, and Sandby in a beautifully atmospheric painting of the event, turned into a hand-colored etching by his brother Paul."

The illustration, right, that accompanied Cavallo's scholarly account in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1784 no doubt explained the stages of the fireball's self-destruction to his learned readers. However, the Sandby painting, above, (click on the image to enlarge it) captures the magic of the event, showing a group of party-goers turned celestial observers gazing up into the sky from the terrace. Unlike some of the earlier illustrations in the exhibition that show people recoiling in fear from comets, these individuals are calmly regarding the fireball with true Age of Reason solemnity.

I like that Sandby included two well-dressed women in the group, and that they are watching solemnly, too, without any signs of female hysterics or fear. What did they make of the sight, I wonder? They certainly weren't going to report their reaction to the Royal Society; women were not admitted as Fellows to that august group until 1945. Did they rush to tell their friends and family and mantua-maker the next day? Did they write letters describing what they'd witnessed? Did they rely on the men around them for explanation(that one fellow pointing his hand was probably a know-it-all), or were they sufficiently educated themselves to understand what they were seeing?

Alas, no one knows. But don't be surprised if a heroine in one of my next books happens to be walking on the terrace of Windsor Palace on a warm August night....

Many thanks to John Overholt and Andrea Cawelti for their assistance with this post, and for my tour of Houghton Library; I am still in a blissful Nerdy History Girl daze.

Above: To Sir Joseph Bankes, President of the Royal Society, London, this plate, from motives of respect and esteem, is inscrib'd. London: P. Sandby, 1783.
Right: Royal Society (Great Britain), Philosophical transactions, 1784.
Both from the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Images via Houghton Library.