Portrait engraver and draughtsman Abraham Blooteling was born in Amsterdam in 1640. He was the pupil of the engraver Cornelis van Dalen. In 1660 he appears in Paris, where he was apprenticed to the well-known engraver Pierre van Schuppen, himself of Netherlandish birth. This explains the French character of his engravings. 

Blooteling came to England in January 1673 on the order of Prince Rupert, then living at the court of Charles II. He was a key figure in the transfer of Dutch mezzotint to England, where the technique was adopted with such success that it later became known as the ‘English Manner’.  The subject matter of his mezzotints includes religious, genre and allegorical scenes, but his portraits after works by Peter Lely and Anthony van Dyck were particularly admired. 

Increasingly, Blooteling divided his energies between London and Amsterdam. He certainly continued to work for the English market, and quite possibly continued to make London his main base. In his later career he acted more as a publisher than as an engraver. The Hollstein catalogue of prints lists 143 engravings and 138 mezzotints and the National Portrait Gallery holds sixty-eight portraits associated with the artist. Blooteling died in 1690 in Amsterdam.

Painter Egbert Jasperszoon van Heemskerk was born in Haarlem in 1634. He settled in London about 1674 and made a career as a genre painter. His contemporary reputation was that of a prolific and skilful painter of tavern and drinking scenes, peasant feasts, and Quakers-meetings. He frequently introduced his own portrait into his pictures. 
The loutish tone of his work was appreciated by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, for whom he painted a number of works. Rochester was a member of the drunken Merry Gang at Charles II’s court. His attachment to Heemskerk’s work was in line with his personal behaviour. Heemskerk’s work was also reproduced in engravings, especially mezzotint. He died around 1704, but his reputation endured.

The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is the oldest of the capital’s orchestras and the first British orchestra owned by its players. As a self-governing body, LSO gave its first concert on 9 June 1904, conducted by Hans Richter (the first principal conductor until 1911) at Queen’s Hall, Langham Place, Westminster. Since 1982, the orchestra has been permanently based in the Barbican Centre. Among conductors with whom it is most associated are, in its early days, Hans Richter, Edward Elgar, and Thomas Beecham. In more recent decades Pierre Monteux, André Previn, Claudio Abbado, Colin Davis and Valery Gergiev have been working with the orchestra. Simon Rattle will take up his position of musical director from September 2017. The creation of LSO was the result of a musical uprising in which immigrant musicians played a prominent part. 

At the turn of the twentieth century there were no permanent salaried orchestras in London. Musicians were contracted on an individual basis. Since there were competing demands for the services of performers and no binding contracts, a player was free to accept a better-paid engagement at any time. He (it was male dominated profession) would simply hire another player to deputise for him at the original concert. In September 1903, Robert Newman, the manager of the Queen’s Hall, and the conductor of his promenade concerts, Henry Wood, unilaterally decided to end this chaotic system. In response, approximately half of its players resigned from the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Musicians were not highly paid, and removing the opportunity of more lucrative engagements was a financial blow to many of them. Some of the leading players decided to form their own orchestra. 

The principal movers of the initiative were horn players Adolf Borsdorf, Thomas Busby, and Henri van der Meerschen, and trumpeter John Solomon. As performers these men were highly regarded and referred to as ‘God’s Own Quartet’. Busby organised a meeting in which he set out the principles. A new ensemble named the London Symphony Orchestra was to be run on co-operative lines, something ‘akin to a Musical Republic’. Members would share in the orchestra’s profits at the end of each season. The proposal was approved unanimously. Newman held no grudge against the rebels, and made the Queen’s Hall available to them. He and Wood attended the LSO’s first 1904 concert which included the prelude to Die Meistersinger, music by Bach, Mozart, Liszt, Elgar, and finally Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. German music ruled the capital.

Henri Louis van der Meerschen was born in Brussels on 30 September 1866. He attended the Brussels Conservatoire studying under Louis-Henri Merck. There he earned the Premier Prix with distinction in 1885 after which he was invited by Bruges-born Eugène Goossens to become a member of the celebrated Carl Rosa Opera Company at Drury Lane. This company had been founded by Hamburg-born Karl Rose with the aim of producing operas in English. The British premier of Puccini’s La Bohème and Madame Butterfly were among his successes. He was also the outstanding performer of Wagner at the time, presenting The Flying Dutchman (1876), Rienzi (1879), Lohengrin (1880), and Tannhäuser (1882) to an English audience. Having joined Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra, Van der Meerschen was one of the four rebels who initiated the foundation of LSO. 

In 1914 the LSO had just reached its tenth birthday. Financially sound and artistically refined, the orchestra was acknowledged to be among the finest in the world. The outbreak of war intervened. Conductors and musicians cancelled tours and performances because they were unable to travel; some members of the orchestra were enlisted. In spite of difficulties, LSO declared that it would continue playing concerts. By 1916 the situation became more problematical. Grave news from the front spread gloom and pessimism at home. The Zeppelin bombardment of London kept audiences indoors. At the start of the year conscription had been imposed. By July 1917 thirty-three members of the orchestra (about a third of its male membership) were sent to the trenches for active service. An increasing number of female players acted as their replacements. 

Traditionally, the LSO had strong German roots and preferences. In 1915 it had initiated a successful ‘Three Bs Festival’: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. An attempt to repeat the treat in 1916 hit the brick wall of a hostile press and public opinion. In September 1916 the Pall Mall Gazette attacked the orchestra in a crusading series of articles for the overwhelming presence of German music in their repertoire. It argued that those in London ‘who have felt war in their skins are not to be drugged with sound, however sweet’. LSO was forced to present a more patriotic, if not jingoistic program of performances. 

Edward Elgar, who had been LSO’s principal conductor during 1911/2, was living in London at the outbreak of war. In 1914 he was asked to contribute to an anthology called King Albert’s Book to raise money for Belgian refugees affected by German occupation. Brussels-born playwright, poet and translator Émile Leon Cammaerts had moved to England in 1908. He translated works by John Ruskin into French and selected a number of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories in La clairvoyance du père Brown. In 1933 he was appointed Professor of Belgian Studies at the University of London. He married actress Helen Tita Braun (stage name: Tita Brand), a daughter of the Wagnerian diva Marie Brema (who was born Mary Agnes [Minnie] Fehrmann, the daughter of merchant from Bremen in Liverpool). Elgar set Cammaert’s poem ‘Après Anvers’ to an orchestral accompaniment. It was premiered under the name of Carillon by the LSO on 7 December 1914 at the Queen’s Hall. The composer himself conducted and Tita Brand recited the poem. It roused anti-German spirits at the time and was revived for the same reason during World War II with a new text by Laurence Binyon.

For resident German musicians in Britain the war years were a bitter and painful experience. Impresario Alfred Curtis was born Alfred Schulz-Curtius around 1853 in Germany. He settled in London in the early 1870s. He founded a music and artists’ management agency at no. 44 Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus, in 1876. He was the first to bring Richard Wagner’s music to the London public. In 1882, he arranged the British staging of the Ring Cycle under the Hungarian conductor Anton Seidl. During decades of professional activity, Schulz-Curtius organised dozens of concerts in London’s venues and worked with many of Europe’s major conductors and performers. At the beginning of the First World War he was arrested and interned as an enemy alien, despite of having become a naturalised British subject in 1895, and changing his name by deed poll to Alfred Curtis in September 1914. He died in March 1918.

Adolf Borsdorf was one of the leading figures in the rebellion against Newman and Wood in 1903/4 and the subsequent foundation of the LSO. Born on 25 December 1854 in Dittmansdorf, Saxony, he studied French horn at the Dresden conservatory and played in a military band. In 1879 he moved to London where he stayed for the rest of his life. He was appointed Professor at the Royal College of Music, South Kensington, when it was founded in 1882. He was playing principal horn in the orchestra that Henry Wood conducted at the first Promenade Concert in the Queen’s Hall in 1895. He was also in the orchestra when Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel was given its first English performance in 1896 with the composer conducting. Enjoying an international reputation, he used his influence to secure Hans Richter to conduct LSO’s first concert. 

The intensity of anti-German feeling during of the First World War would deeply hurt him. At the outbreak of hostilities, he had been living in London for more than thirty years and his wife was British. In spite of that, the members of the orchestra turned against him. They requested his removal from their ranks. By October 1915 he was told that he would not be allowed to play again until the end of the war. In November he felt forced to resign from an orchestra he himself had helped to create and to flourish. Borsdorf never performed professionally again. He died in April 1923. His vital contribution to London’s musical culture in general and to raising the standard of British horn playing in particular was only recognised in retrospect. The risk of whipped up patriotism is that it quickly runs sour. In becoming an expression of resentment rather than pride, the spirit of tolerance is sacrificed.

Language is a ragbag of terms and phrases that are handed down, created or borrowed over a long period of time. A loanword is a term adopted from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. Loanwords are immigrants. They arrive in alien surroundings, adapt to the new vocabulary, integrate and become domesticated (spelling, pronunciation, etc.), at times losing part of their original meaning. In English, loanwords (mostly nouns) appear in a variety of contexts, such as trade, art, fashion, food, technology, war, etc. Such words tend to be taken from a field of activity where the foreign culture has a dominant role, hence the many Italian words in the sphere of music and opera, or French terms in that of ballet.

When the Merchant Adventurers set up headquarters Bruges in 1344, it marked the beginning of a long period of commercial and artistic interaction between the Low Countries and England. Contacts were intense. In order to defend their interests, foreign merchants united in ‘Hansen’, including the powerful ‘Flemish Hanse of London’. From 1463 to 1469 William Caxton stayed in Bruges as governor of the Merchant Adventurers. He learned the art of printing in Flanders and, on his return, installed the first printing press near Westminster Abbey in 1476. Later, when Elizabeth I provided a safe haven to Protestants from the Low Countries who had escaped Spanish persecution, the country received their skilled industry and commercial experience in return. Refugees introduced new trades to local economies, such as Canterbury silks, Norwich stuffs, or Yarmouth herring. Flemish and Dutch professional craftsmen and artists were enticed to cross the Channel. English ambassadors in the Low Countries functioned as industrial and artistic ‘spies’. The brain drain existed long before the term was invented. It is clear from Johan Frederik Bense’s impressive Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary (1926) that many early words borrowed from Flemish/Dutch belong to the economic and commercial domains.

In 1519, Jan Ympyn returned from a twelve years stay in Venice where he had been sent by his merchant father to learn commercial practices and the art of bookkeeping. Ympyn settled in Antwerp where he prospered as an exporter of silks, woollens, and tapestries. Much of his business was directed towards England. Today he is remembered as the author of the first Flemish manual on bookkeeping, entitled Nieuwe instructie ende bewijs der looffelijcker consten des rekenboecks, published posthumously in Antwerp in 1543. Four years later this manual was translated into English as A Notable … Woorke, Expressyng and Declaryng the Forme how to Kepe a Boke of Accomptes or Reconynges. The last word is literally adopted from the Dutch/Flemish word ‘rekening’. Reckoning is one of those loanwords that in the course of time began a ‘life of its own’. This book is the oldest extant text on accounting in English. It has been suggested that merchant and financier Thomas Gresham, resident in Brussels in 1543, had been responsible for the translation, but the claim has not been substantiated.

Under the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585, Elizabeth I decided to intervene directly in the war between the United Provinces and Spain. She sent Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, with some 5,000 troops to assist the Dutch. For years to come, English troops were stationed in Flushing (Vlissingen). During the eighty years of struggle many new weapons, strategies, systems of fortification, and other innovations in the art of warfare were introduced. To British soldiers and mercenaries, the Dutch experience was crucial in their personal career development. The first substantial Dutch-English dictionary (31,000 entries) was compiled by the soldier and scholar Henry Hexham in 1648 and is entitled A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie. He was responsible for introducing many Dutch military terms into the English vocabulary, including booty (buit), beleaguer (belegeren), quarter-master (kwartiermeester), knapsack (knapzak), plunder (plunderen), and tattoo (taptoe).

In 1598, Richard Haydocke, former English ambassador to The Hague, translated Paola Lomazzo’s Trattato del’arte della pittura. Searching for an English equivalent for the Italian paese, he recalled the word landschap from conversations with artists in the Low Countries, the second syllable in the word being derived from scheppen (to create). His Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge introduced a new set of terms in the vocabulary of the English art critic, first landscape, soon to be followed by seascape, cloudscape, riverscape, and townscape, all terms conjuring up the image of the Flemish or Dutch artist contemplating his surroundings and creating scenery, clouds, rivers and urban views in paint.

Certain loanwords have not survived or are rarely used. They appear in the dictionary, but seem lost in a mass of entries, isolated, ignored. Because they are exceptional, such terms tend to hint at a notable event or happening. One particular word tells a story of political intrigue. In its early days Tyburn was a country village in Middlesex, close to the current location of Marble Arch. Until 1783 it served as London’s primary public place of execution. The first recorded hanging took place in 1196 and concerned the charismatic figure of William Fitz Osbert, known as ‘William Longbeard’, the populist leader of London’s poor who was apprehended after a mob uprising against the rich. It was one of the first explosions of urban violence in England. Early executions tended to be of a political nature. Order had to be protected at any cost, hence the public displays of punishment. Tensions within society grew with an increasing influx of refugees into London and elsewhere. It created anxiety among the authorities that certain aliens might have immigrated ‘under the colour of religion’ and could be agents or spies. Such suspicions were not unjustified. Impostors had tried to claim the English throne on a couple of occasions. In both instances a foreign connection was evident. There was the failed attempt by Lambert Simnel, a young pretender to the throne of England and most likely of Flemish descent, whose supporters were beaten in the Battle of Stoke Field in June 1487. Simnel was imprisoned for life, but Henry VII pardoned the young man and gave him a job in the Royal kitchens.

Tournai-born Perkin Warbeck was possibly an illegitimate son of Henry IV. He called himself Richard Shrewsbury, Duke of York. Various European monarchs accepted Warbeck’s claim to the English throne in order to pursue their own diplomatic objectives. In 1497 he landed in Cornwall with a small army of men hoping to capitalize on local resentment in the aftermath of a recent rebellion against the war taxes imposed by Henry VII for his Scottish campaign. As the rebels had been heavily defeated, Perkin found little support for a renewed uprising. He was captured and hanged as a traitor at Tyburn. The story of events was dramatized in 1634 by John Ford in a play entitled The Chronicle Historie of Perkin Warbeck: a Tragedy. In 1830, Mary Shelley wrote a story about him. A linguistic link to the impostor remains. ‘Landloper’ is a Dutch/Flemish word for vagabond or vagrant. The word was first recorded in Britain in the early sixteenth century and used by Francis Bacon in Henry VII (1622) when referring to Warbeck: ‘He had been from his Child-hood such a Wanderer, or (as the King called him) such a Land-loper’. It may well be that Perkin had brought the word with him when he crossed from Flanders to England.

The integration of loanwords can be controversial. In the circle of linguistic sticklers such terms are frowned upon. They suffer hostility and discrimination. Purism is the practice of defining one variety of language as being of intrinsically higher quality than others. By definition, the purist is a prophet of doom. An invasion of foreign words is a sign of decline, fatal to a nation’s cultural wellbeing. He/she strives for a form of prescriptive linguistics, aiming to establish a standard language that is resistant to change, and immune to foreign importation. Purists are the border agents of language, overseeing the strict control of the movement of words. Their record is just as poor as that of the UK Border Agency itself. They have failed in the past and will continue to do so. Nations and languages do not live in a vacuum, but they flourish in a continuous interactive relationship with other countries and peoples. Freedom of movement and exchange are the essential characteristics of a dynamic culture. Mapping the spread of loanwords offers an insight into the balance of power between nations and the migration of peoples at any given period in time.

Usually, the phrase ‘migrants and their families’ is a code for ‘male migrants and their wives and children’. The near-invisibility of women as migrants and their presumed passivity in the migration process in historical reports on the subject, does not reflect reality. For many women relocation meant deliverance from assumed traditional roles and behaviours – as is reflected in the notable careers of two immigrant artists.

Angelica Kauffmanwas born on 30 October 1741 in Chur, capital of the Swiss canton of Graubünden. In 1742 the family moved to Lombardy and ten years later to Como. The young girl showed talent for both art and music, but pursued a career in painting. Whilst in Rome, she became acquainted with German antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose portrait she painted. She also befriended British neo-classical painters Gavin Hamilton and Nathaniel Dance. These contacts inspired her to concentrate on classical and mythological subjects. Since her work proved popular with grand tourists, she readily accepted Lady Wentworth’s invitation to continue her career in England. She arrived in London in June 1766. Within a week she visited Joshua Reynolds in his studio, and her pictures were soon in demand. After lodging in Suffolk Street, Charing Cross, Kauffman occupied a fashionable house in Golden Square, Westminster. In 1767, she suffered a disastrous relationship with bigamist Count Frederick de Horn, who claimed to be a Swedish nobleman. She married him in secret. He signed a separation agreement (February 1768), after being exposed as a fraud and forced to leave the country. She stayed single until July 1781 when, after receiving news of De Horn’s death, she married Venetian painter Antonio Pietro Zucchi, who also resided in London. The couple settled in Rome where her studio became a popular stop for visitors on the grand tour.

Mary Moser was born on 27 October 1744, the daughter of George Michael Moser who had moved from Schaffhausen to London in 1726 where he worked for a cabinet-maker in Soho. During the 1740s he established himself as the finest gold chaser of his generation and a prominent member of the capital’s artistic community. He died in January 1783. At his burial at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, Joshua Reynolds was chief mourner. In his obituary he paid tribute to Moser as the ‘Father of the present race of Artists’, because of his individual skills and inspirational teaching at London academies. Mary had trained with her father and gained the patronage of Queen Charlotte for her flower paintings in oil and watercolour. Her most elaborate work was executed between 1792 and 1795 at Frogmore House, Windsor, where she ornamented rooms with flowers painted directly on the walls as well as large inset canvases that invoked the impression of cascading garlands.

On 28 November 1768 George Michael Moser, together with Francis Cotes, Benjamin West, and William Chambers, petitioned the king to patronise a Royal Academy. Subsequently, the Royal Academy of Arts was founded through a personal act of George III on 10 December 1768 with the aim of establishing a system of professional training and to arrange regular exhibitions of contemporary works of art. The immigrant contribution to the creation of the Royal Academy was considerable. Founding members included Jeremiah Meyer, Francesco Bartolozzi, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Augostino Carlini, Francesco Zucarelli, and Dominic Serres. Art in the capital was a truly European affair. Moser was elected Keeper of the Academy. Initially located in cramped quarters in Pall Mall, the institution was given temporary accommodation in Old Somerset House in 1771. It moved to Burlington House in 1868, where it remains.

Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were the only women mentioned among the thirty-six founding members of the Royal Academy. As females, however, they were prohibited from the proceedings of the Academy and excluded from committee meetings and dinners. In fact, their presence seemed to cause embarrassment to male members. Johan Joseph Zoffany was born on 13 March 1733 near Frankfurt am Main. After a successful career as court painter to the Elector of Trier, he decided to try his luck in London where he settled towards the end of 1760. Actor David Garrick commissioned him to paint informal scenes at his villa at Hampton where the actor had built a ‘Temple to Shakespeare’. At a stroke a new genre was created. Setting up a studio in Covent Garden, Zoffany painted a series of pictures which became known as ‘theatrical conversations’. Success earned him the patronage of George III and Queen Charlotte.

In 1762 Zoffany was nominated a member of the Academy by the king and painted the group portrait ‘The Academicians of the Royal Academy’ (exhibited in 1772). Fellows are gathered around a nude male model at a time when decency demanded that women were barred from such spectacles. In order to include Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, the painter added them not as participants to the scene, but – rather unflattering – as portraits (face only) hanging on the wall. A later painting by Henry Singleton, ‘The Royal Academicians in General Assembly’ (1795), shows the ladies alongside other academicians, but their bodies hidden behind the President’s chair with only their heads detectable. Emancipation among artists has seen strange turns and twists. For long, the art world was boys club. Women artists remained virtually invisible to the public eye, they were wallflowers at best. Mary Moser’s death in 1819 marked the start of an extensive stretch of time in which women were excluded from the Academy. It was not until 1936 that impressionist painter Laura Knight became the next woman to be elected a Royal Academician. This long interlude makes it all the more remarkable that these two women who shared an alien background (temporarily) broke the pattern of male exclusivity in British art societies. They demonstrated that migration unshackles mind and emotion. The need to adapt is a force of release from limiting traditions and attitudes.

From 1881 onwards the mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe to London turned Whitechapel and surrounding boroughs into massive immigrant communities. The arrival of newcomers transformed these areas. Living in poverty, settlers were accused of bringing dirt and disorder with them. Streets strewn with decomposing fish and rotting vegetation were classified by commentators as ‘Jewish’ as though there was a connection between filth and faith. Lack of accommodation led to rent rises and overcrowding which provoked racial agitation. In February 1886 The Pall Mall Gazette warned that ‘foreign Jews … are becoming a pest and a menace to the poor native born East Ender’. With a number of churches turned into synagogues, the clergy feared for the future of Christianity. In 1902, Cosmo Gordon Lang, Bishop of Stepney, accused immigrants of ‘swamping whole areas once populated by English people’. The term ‘swamping’ in the context of immigration would cause renewed controversy during the Thatcher era.

Local inhabitants expressed a sense of isolation which in turn intensified discord. Policing Whitechapel proved problematical because of language barriers. The want of Yiddish among police officers hampered the maintenance of law and order, and impeded investigations into the perceived presence of political agitators. Instead, officers acted as surrogate social workers. They monitored the movement of migrants and were required to brief politicians on socio-economic conditions in the immigrant ghettos. The East London Jewish population was a largely self-surveilling community. The newcomers, though quarrelsome and noisy at times, were hard-working and home-centred – not given to brawling or boozing. This contributed to high rates of social mobility within the community. Territoriality and inter-communal conflict were the main causes of public disorder. Collective resistance to prevent Jewish settlement was rife and the general trend was towards segregation. Rival gangs battled for control of the street. Sections of the borough tended to become either all Jewish or remain Anglo-Irish.

East London immigrants produced individual criminals, but no criminal classes. Urban villainy in the later nineteenth century was an urgent problem, but the reported crime-rate amongst immigrants remained comparatively low. Who was responsible for the ‘new’ wave of wrongdoing? Finger pointing journalism – Daily Mail style – started there and then. Immigrants came to be treated as potential burglars, armed robbers, sex offenders, or murderers. Their crimes were reported in hysterical detail and with a great deal of moral indignation. On 14 November 1864 twenty-four year old Cologne-born Franz Müller was executed before crowd of 50,000 cheerful spectators outside Newgate prison. He had murdered Thomas Briggs, a City banker who was travelling on the 9.50pm North London Railway from Fenchurch Street. The assailant – a tailor by profession – took his gold watch and spectacles and threw the victim’s body from the compartment. It was the very first killing on a British train. His hanging was one of the last public executions in London.

Israel Lobulsk was born in Warsaw in 1865. Having experienced the horrors of the 1881 Christmas pogrom in the city, he left Poland and arranged a passage from Frankfurt to London in exchange for work on a cattle boat, arriving penniless in 1885. Adopting the name Israel Lipski, he worked as an umbrella maker and was one of fifteen persons living in a house at no. 16 Batty Street, running off Commercial Road, East London. In June 1887 one of the other tenants, Polish immigrant Miriam Angel, a pregnant woman who lived one floor below Lipski, was found murdered with nitric acid (_HNO3_ or aqua fortis) poured down her throat. When the police arrived, they found Israel Lipski under the bed, unconscious, with the same corrosive liquid in his mouth. It was concluded that after committing the crime, he had tried to kill himself. Lipski denied any involvement. The case caused furore and touched upon the issue of unrestricted Jewish immigration. A two-day trial took place at the Old Bailey before James Fitzjames Stephen, a well-respected judge. Lipski was poorly defended and, after just eight minutes of deliberation, he was found guilty by members of the jury. Observers raised doubts about the trial’s fairness, but Lipski was hanged on 22 August 1887 at Newgate prison. The execution was carried out by James Berry (during his seven years in office he was responsible for 131 hangings). When the black flag was raised, a crowd of over 5,000 persons gathered outside the prison burst out in jubilation. Thereafter, ‘Lipski’ became a term of ethnic abuse against Jews.

Fear turned into panic in 1888 with a spade of barbaric murders in Whitechapel. The hunt for Jack the Ripper was the talk of the day. Who was this maniac? Surely not an Englishman. Public hysteria, whipped up by unscrupulous politicians and populist press barons, created a Lynch’s Law mentality.

Intense xenophobia made people decide to seek vengeance against a community of aliens in their midst. Hatred of foreigners became mixed up with vitriolic antisemitism. The British Brothers League (BBL) was formed in May 1901 along paramilitary lines with the support of numerous (Conservative) politicians. Using the slogan ‘England for the English’, the movement organised marches and rallies and called for closure of Britain’s borders. London, it was argued, had become the ‘dumping ground for the scum of Europe’. The Gothic metaphor was prevalent in anti-immigration writings, evoking the spectre of racial conflict and painting a hellish picture of cultural ruin. Britain’s identity was at stake. The Eastern Post and City Chronicle headlined BBL activities and demanded that the government end the ‘foreign flood which has submerged our native population of East London’. Within months the league claimed 6,000 members. Parallels with present-day movements are too close for comfort.

The Renaissance held music in high regard. It played a prominent part in religious, court and civic life. The interchange of ideas in Europe through ever closer economic and political contact brought about the creation of new musical genres, the development of instruments, and the advancement of specialist printing. By about 1500, Franco-Flemish composers dominated the domain. Most prestigious among them was Josquin des Prez who, like fellow artists at the time, travelled widely. The intensity of international encounters led to stylistic developments that have been qualified as truly European. By the beginning of the sixteenth century Antwerp had developed into an international hub of musical activity. The important initiatives were undertaken by the church. Antwerp Cathedral employed twelve choristers who lived in a private house where they received instruction from a singing master. At the beginning of the century this office was held by Jacob Obrecht, famous for his polyphonic compositions. His prolific output consists of some twenty-six masses, thirty-two motets, and thirty secular pieces, not all texted. Antwerp also employed a company of fiddlers for both secular and ecclesiastical performances. Musicians from all over Europe chose Antwerp as their home, amongst them a number of English composers.

Peter Philips had moved to the Continent as a refugee. He was one of many Catholic musicians who left England for Flanders. A prolific composer of sacred choral music, he was made organist to the Chapel of Archduke Albrecht in Antwerp. In 1593, he travelled from the Southern Netherlands to Amsterdam to ‘see and heare an excellent man of his faculties’. The man he referred to was Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, a composer and organist known as the ‘Orpheus of Amsterdam’. The latter had converted to Calvinism in 1578, but remained sympathetic to his old faith. Another refugee in Flanders was Hereford-born John Bull. Appointed chief musician to Prince Henry in 1611, he furtively disappeared to Flanders after the death of his patron in November 1612. Bull later explained his flight because of the accusation of Catholic sympathies made against him. He moved to Brussels where he was employed as one of the organists in the Chapel of Archduke Albrecht VII, sovereign of the Habsburg Netherlands. From September 1615, he held the post of organist of Antwerp Cathedral. In December 1617 he acted as city organist at ‘s Hertogenbosch. Bull’s reputation rests mainly on his keyboard music. The composition of God Save the Queen has been attributed to him.

Antwerp was renowned for its printing. Originally, all music was notated by hand. Manuscripts were costly and owned exclusively by religious orders, courts, or wealthy households. That all changed in 1501 when Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci published Harmonice musices odhecation, the first significant anthology of (100) polyphonic secular songs. The availability of notation in print boosted the development of instrumental music for both soloists and ensembles, and engendered the creation of new genres. In Flanders, Tielman Susato was the first printer to gain esteem for producing music books. Nothing is known about the date or place of his birth – he may have been Dutch or German. Details about his activities begin in 1529 when he was working as a calligrapher for Antwerp Cathedral. He also played the trumpet and was listed as a ‘town player’ in the city. In 1541, he created the first music printing company in the Low Countries which he combined with selling musical instruments from his home. During a prolific publishing career he was responsible for twenty-five books of chansons, three books of masses, and nineteen books of motets. The indefatigable Christopher Plantin was also active in printing music and produced some of the finest choir-books of his day. From the 1570s onwards, the Bellerus and Phalesius families were leading printing houses within the domain. The whole contemporary repertoire was made available by Antwerp presses: vernacular song books and psalms as well as polyphonic secular and religious music. Composers from all over Europe had their work printed in this, the most musical of all cities at the time.

Flourishing musical life in Antwerp and Brussels did not go unnoticed at the Palace of Westminster. Henry VIII himself had received a thorough musical education and was a dedicated patron of the arts. He was accomplished at the lute, organ, and virginals and, apparently, sang as well. Henry recruited the best musicians to join his court. A number of Flemish musicians figured amongst the many Europeans that were attracted to take part in music making in and around London. Dyricke Gérarde [Derrick Gerarde] arrived in England in 1544. Little is known of his life, but almost his entire musical output is contained in manuscript at the British Library. These manuscripts constitute one of the largest collections of polyphony by a single composer to have survived from the Elizabethan era. His achievement however was overshadowed by the reputation of a Flemish composer who had arrived in in the capital some two decades previously.

Lutenist Philip van Wilder was first recorded as a resident in London in 1522. By 1529 he was a member of the Privy Chamber, the select group of musicians who played to the king in private. During the second quarter of the sixteenth century Van Wilder oversaw secular music-making at the court, a position that brought him close to Henry VIII. He taught playing the lute to Princess (later Queen) Mary and subsequently to Prince Edward (later Edward VI). At the time of Henry VIII’s death in 1547 Van Wilder was Keeper of the Instruments and effectively head of the instrumental musical establishment at Westminster, a post later known as Master of the King’s Music. The upkeep of the Royal instruments at Westminster was a heavy duty. The scope of that task becomes clear from the inventory of Henry’s possessions at his death, listing thirteen organs, nineteen other keyboard instruments (virginals and clavichords), and several hundred smaller wind and string instruments including viols, lutes, and recorders.

Van Wilder continued to enjoy Royal favour during the reign of Edward VI. He was granted a coat of arms and crest and, in 1551, authorized to recruit boy singers for the Chapel Royal from anywhere in England. Three years after his death in February 1554 an anonymous tribute was paid to the musician and printed by Richard Tottel in his collection of Songes and Sonettes (1557), commonly known as ‘Tottel’s Miscellany’, containing the following line:

Laye downe your lutes and let your gitterns rest.
Phillips is dead whose like you can not finde,
Of musicke much exceeding all the rest.

In an age of wandering artists and scholars, the Renaissance was an internationalist movement united by a common (Latin) language. Its civic life teaches our age the salutary lesson that a nationalist message is one of disengagement. The appeal to nativist emotions conceals the yearning for a flawless world that never was or will be. The cultural strength of a country manifests itself in participation – that is, in the openness of borders, the assimilation of non-native concepts, and the embracing of external influences. It takes a cosmopolitan mind to be a patriot.

On the early battlefield flags served the purpose of identification. They gave the protection to those fighting within a single unit and enhanced their chance of survival. During the Crusades a variety of regimental flags were carried by a multi-national company of knights and soldiers as identification signs for individual groupings. Alfred Altdorfer’s _Alexanderschlacht_ (1529) provides a splendid image of the tactical use of military banners. In battle, the fall of one’s flag meant surrender, defeat, death. Enemy flags were coveted as booties as their symbolic value allowed for hype and bragging. Since early armies were made up mainly of mercenaries, the flag was of no particular emotional significance to the individual fighter. The flag’s function was predominantly utilitarian. The complex process of communication in shipping channels gradually gave rise to a standardized language of flag signals to promote safe navigation.

All this changed on the eve of Romanticism. The transformation was hurried along by the mechanization of (uniformed) warfare in which the flag as rallying point was no longer needed. Having lost its strategic purpose, the flag acquired wider allegorical significance. In 1830 Eugène Delacroix painted his political masterpiece La Liberté guidant le peuple. It is considered the ultimate image of the French Revolution without portraying the events of 1789 itself. Instead the artist commemorated the July Revolution which toppled Charles X. The painting presents a woman personifying the Goddess of Liberty who leads her followers forward over a barricade of dead bodies, holding the tricolore in one hand (now the national flag), and a bayonetted musket in the other. Liberty, also known as Marianne, is a symbol of France and the French Revolution. Another minute flag can be seen in the distance flying from the towers of the Notre Dame. The painting is the iconic image of both the ecstasy and sacrifice that revolution represents. The flag embodies the ideals of liberty and equality.

With the stoking of patriotic passion emerged the desire to display the flag as a symbol of civilian passion and emotion. Little more than piece of fabric (the introduction of silk allowed for the popularization of flags), colours and image of the national flag were nurtured as expressing the (racial) identity, ideas, and feelings of the society it represents. Most European countries adopted their national flag in the course of the nineteenth century (Netherlands in 1813, Greece 1822, Switzerland 1889). The frenzy for the flag is a relatively recent phenomenon. Artistic representation ran more or less parallel to political developments. In 1867 Claude Monet painted Jardin à Sainte-Adresse (a seaside resort near Le Havre). It was his first masterpiece. A holiday scene of family members painted in ‘plein air’, the painting was exhibited at the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879. From an elevated viewpoint Monet painted the terrace, sea, and sky as three distinct bands, vertically organized by two fluttering flags in the breeze. The image celebrates leisure and relaxation. The technical challenge Monet had to overcome was to suggest atmospheric conditions on canvas. He succeeded in making wind visible. Having raised the weather flag, he initiated his generation’s passion for pennant-painting. The emotive commemoration, , added a new aspect to the flutter of flags. Having been declared a national holiday by the French government, the festivities marked the restoration of national pride after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War and the schismatic events of the Commune. France gathered around the tricolore. The flag represented unity and patriotism. French flag-waving inspired an American visitor.

Over the course of his creative life, Boston-born Frederick Childe Hassam (he would later drop his first name) produced over 3,000 paintings, watercolours, and lithographs. Having begun his career as a draftsman for wood engraver George Johnson, he established his first studio in 1882. Working mainly in his preferred medium was watercolour, he depicted scenes on misty days or at dark nights and concentrated on movement (pedestrians, carriages, etc.). Hampered by la lack of formal training, Hassam undertook a study trip to Europe during the summer of 1883. He travelled extensively in order to take note of the Old Masters, creating many sketches and watercolours on the way. In 1885, back in Boston, he created _Columbus Avenue: Rainy Day_. The image of a buzzing city in damp weather conditions indicated Hassam’s ambition to introduce urban themes in the Impressionist manner to an American audience. He returned to Paris and settled near Place Pigalle. One of his Parisian streetscapes was exhibited at the Salon of 1887. Two years later Hassam moved into a studio apartment at New York’s Fifth Avenue and established the reputation of being ‘America’s Monet’. He was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to collectors and dealers.

Between 1916 and 1919 flags flew from almost every pole in Paris, London, and New York. Hassam composed a set of about thirty paintings showing images of a flag-decorated Fifth Avenue. The first in the series of Stars & Stripes paintings had been inspired by a so-called ‘Preparedness Parade’. War in Europe sparked an American debate on involvement. Theodore Roosevelt advocated expanding the military in anticipation of the spreading conflict, but President Woodrow Wilson preferred a position of armed neutrality. Parades for and against engagement were held around the nation. Hassam supported the idea of intervention. Being an avid Francophile and passionately anti-German, his flag paintings were both deeply patriotic and aimed at encouraging the Allied war effort.

In the years leading up to the First World War flags and banners had become the symbols of an intensely felt nationalism. Flag desecration was its inevitable correlative. In 1914 futurist artists began a hate campaign against the Austro-Hungarian Empire which controlled a number of former Italian territories. In September, Umberto Boccioni, seated in the balcony of the Teatro dal Verme in Milan, tore up an Austrian flag and threw it into the audience, while Marinetti waved an Italian flag (although there are contradictory reports on the incident). The outbreak of war further encouraged flag worship. Patriotism became idolatry. In 1915 [Giacomo Balla]() painted _Bandiere all’altare della patria_ (Flags at the altar of the motherland). Flags symbolized various extreme political cults. Music and banners emerged as powerful tools in the nazification process. Consecration fanfares and flag songs were composed in honour of the Führer and performed during tightly organized rallies. Anthem of the Nazi Party was the Horst-Wessel-Lied, also known as ‘Die Fahne hoch’ (Flags on high – from its opening line). Flags achieved the status of a graven image. The Blutfahne was originally the banner of the fifth Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers). After the crushing of the Munich Putsch in November 1923, it was soaked in blood. Restored upon Hitler’s release from prison in 1925, the blood flag was idolized asd a ‘sacred’ Nazi relic.

Erich Fromm, born in Frankfurt am Main into a Jewish family, moved to Geneva after the Nazi takeover and from there, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. He had observed the mass psychology of flag-waving from nearby. In _The Sane Society (1955) he insisted that nationalism is ‘our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity’ – patriotism is its cult. Just as love for one individual which excludes the passion for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s attachment to humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship. Waving the banner of nationalism is politically and morally pervert. It causes xenophobia, emboldens bigotry, undermines democracy, and creates demagogues. Nationalism limits the individual as being the sharer of a distinct group based on such indicators as language, religion, or ethnicity. It builds – either for real or in a metaphorical sense – a protective wall around its members to keep out ‘others’, because newcomers threaten their way of life, take their jobs, rob their properties, rape their daughters, or block their GP appointments. The other in our midst means bother, a person not to be embraced but to be treated as suspect. The foreigner is a threat – he is to be registered, controlled, marked, and made visible. His status has to be settled.

At the beginning of the 1880s, Barcelona was a rapidly expanding city of about 350,000 people. Its medieval walls had been knocked down only twenty years earlier. Catalonia developed into Spain’s economic dynamo. Prosperity mushroomed. A self-confident region strove to re-establish its identity by invigorating local culture and language. Barcelona was the engine of change and modernity. The embellishment of the city was ambitious. Having been selected to host the 1888 World Exhibition, the authorities were willing to consider unconventional views of young architects and designers. The period from 1880 witnessed the flowering of ‘La Renaixença’ (the Catalan Renaissance). Identified by a flair for innovation, it was driven by a passion to make Barcelona distinct from Madrid in every conceivable manner.

Catalan modernism was a coalition across the artistic spectrum, although primarily associated with architecture. Nowhere else in Europedid Art Nouveau leave and equally strong building legacy. The movement was pushed forward by Lluis Domenech i Montaner, director of the Barcelona School of Architecture (where he taught Gaudi). His essay ‘In Search of a National Architecture’ (1878) is a seminal text in the history of the modernism. The challenge was to create a peculiar style that would set Barcelona apart from other world cities. Catalan architecture came to be characterized by a preference for the curve over the straight line, a disregard of symmetry, a passion for botanical shapes and motifs, as well as a return to Arabic patterns and decorations. The style is both colourful and ostentatious. It stands in contrast to the minimalism of modernist construction in northern Europe.

The new Catalan style proved perfectly suitable for an Iberian graveyard. Lloret de Mar is an unattractive coastal resort on the Costa Brava. It once was a ship building hub and a centre of trade with the New World. Many youngsters left the town for Cuba or elsewhere in the Americas to make their fortune. On their return, they became known as ‘Indianos’. On 25 April 1898 America declared war on Spain following the sinking of the battleship ‘Maine’ in Havana harbour. Hostilities ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in December 1898. As a result Spain lost the last remnants of its colonial Empire – Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and other islands. The remaining Indianos returned home. Wealthy, cosmopolitan, and often closely related to the Barcelona social elite, they strove to mark their status. They put up the money to create a grand cemetery. In 1892, the project was commissioned to Joaquim Artau i Fàbregas, a disciple of Gaudi. The architect transferred the latest urban planning trends to the interior of the ‘city of the dead’. Avenues, promenades, and squares were lined with modernist tombs and sculptures. The new cemetery opened in November 1901: Catalan funerary art had come alive.

Three decades later death arrived with fury in Catalonia. General Francisco Franco was a devout Catholic, but as commander of Spain’s Foreign Legion in Morocco he permitted his troupes to commit atrocities. In 1936 he led the insurrection against the government. During the Civil War intellectuals, photographers, and artists travelled to Spain offering support to the Republicans. Robert Capa, Langston Hughes, André Malraux, Willy Brandt, Emma Goldman, John Dos Passos, and many others joined the international brigades. Never before had an armed conflict been reported in such detail. Ernest Hemingway arrived in 1937 to cover the war. Three years later he completed For Whom the Bell Tolls, the greatest novel to emerge from the battle. Global participation proved fruitless. Following the fall of Tarragona on 15 January 1939, a mass exodus started on the routes leading from Catalonia to France. Some 465,000 people crossed the border. By the end of March, Franco declared victory and received a congratulatory telegram from the Vatican. Once established Head of State, Franco’s propaganda machine praised him as a crusader. Ecclesiastical support convinced him of a divine mission to eradicate liberals and left-wingers from the country. Committed to a policy of institutionalized revenge, Franco rejected any idea of amnesty. As late as 1940 Spanish prisons held countless political inmates waiting for execution.

Numerous Republicans sought refuge in Britain. In the late 1930s, after the German blitzkrieg of Guernica, refugees from the civil war began settling in North Kensington, close to the Spanish Republican government in exile which remained active until 1945. Anti-Franco meetings were held at El Hogar Español (the Spanish House) in Bayswater. Portobello Road and Ladbroke Grove were centres of Hispanic settlement: London’s ‘barrio Español’. There is some irony here. Known prior to 1740 as Green’s Lane, the name Portobello is derived from Puerto Bello, a harbour town situated near the northern end of the present-day Panama Canal. The port was captured by the English Navy from the Spaniards in 1739 and victory over a maritime rival was met with jubilation throughout the country. George Orwell lived in a grotty flat atno. 22 Portobello Road before he set out to join the Spanish Republicans. In 1938 he would pay Homage to Catalonia.

One of the permanent settlers in Britain was Barcelona-born bookseller, publisher, and scholar Joan Gili. His father Lluís Gili Roig was the founder of a publishing house which became known for its elegant books on art and architecture which included Pablo Picasso’s Tauromaquia (1959). Young Gili had a passion for English literature which led to his correspondence with author and broadcaster Clarence Henry Warren who invited him to England in 1933. He settled permanently in London in October 1934 and went into partnership with Warren to open a bookshop at no. 5 Cecil Court. Known since the 1930s as Booksellers’ Row, the court had a proud cultural history. It was Mozart’s initial London address where he, arguably, composed his first symphony. Long-term residents included T.S. Eliot and John Gielgud amongst others.

When the partnership with Warren was dissolved Gili, now sole owner, filled the shelves with Spanish textbooks imported from Barcelona. Gili was a mediator between London and Barcelona. From Cecil Court flowed articles and commentaries on English literature, there were also regular ‘Letters from England’, and occasional translations into Catalan of pages from D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and other contemporary writers. He then began to publish on his own account. After meeting Miguel de Unamuno during his visit to England in 1936, he obtained the philosopher’s permission to issue his works in Britain. The first public edition of his Dolphin Bookshop Editions was a collection of Unamuno’s writings selected by Gili himself (1938). This was followed by Federico García Lorca’s Poems, jointly translated by Stephen Spender and Gili, with an introduction by Lorca’s close friend Rafael Martínez Nadal. During the Spanish Civil War the Dolphin Bookshop became a hub where supporters of the Republic met and mingled.

Late 1938 Gili secured the contract to transport from Paris to London the fine library of manuscripts and books collected by the French Catalanist Raymond Foulché-Delbosc. This bibliographical coup made him the outstanding Hispanic antiquarian bookseller of his generation. When the Second World War began in September 1939, Gili was registered as an alien in London. Cecil Court seemed a dangerous place to keep priceless books and manuscripts, and the collection was moved to Cambridge first, and from there to a Victorian mansion in Fyfield Road, Oxford. Having settled there, Gili again took pleasure in hosting numerous Spanish Republican exiles.

On 29 July 1940 a National Council of Catalonia was created in London demanding self-determination for the region within a federal Spain. Gili actively promoted the cause by publishing the first edition of his Catalan Grammar in 1943, when the language was banned by Franco’s fascists. In 1954, Josep Maria Batista i Roca conceived the idea of an Anglo-Catalan Society, of which Joan Gili was a founding member and later President. He became known as the ‘unofficial consul of the Catalans in Britain’. Of the seventy-three titles published under the Dolphin imprint between 1936 and 1996 no fewer than twenty-five were Catalan works, forty were Spanish or Latin-American, five were on art, and three were English works. Joan Gili died in Oxford in May 1998, a passionate Anglo-Catalan to his very last day. Critics of immigration fail to understand that it is perfectly possible for an exile to integrate into a host society without sacrificing one’s identity. In fact, those who succeed in doing so tend to be the most creative and productive of newcomers. At best, resettlement is an extension, not a reduction of individuality.

The age of political muscle during the 1930s led to artistic suppression. The tragedy of modernism became evident with the expulsion of writers and artists from their native countries; and with the migration of books and works of art to be safeguarded from the burning eyes of zealots. During Franco’s regime, modernist ideas were perceived as a threat to the country’s moral fabric. The authorities censored all writing that was at odds with its political and religious stance. Literature went into exile. In Britain, Joan Gili had promoted Spanish/Catalan modernism both as a publisher and a translator of Lorca. His son Jonathan Gili, a documentary film-maker and small-press publisher, was a collector of Iberian printed ephemera. He rescued many first editions and rare examples of Art Deco style in print form. In 2014, a decade after his death, Cambridge University Library acquired seventy titles from his collection. It is a tribute to the Gili family that some of their exiled books – migrants of the mind – have found a niche in one of the world’s prominent libraries.

With its introduction into Europe from the Middle East in the seventeenth century, the coffeehouse transformed many areas of social, intellectual, and commercial life. In London, the coffee habit became associated with the dissemination of news and information (Richard Steele, editor of the Tatler, gave its postal address as the Grecian coffeehouse, which he used as his office), the sharing of science and knowledge (‘penny universities’), with trading and auctioneering, and a range of other activities. From the outset artists, writers, and intellectuals frequented cafés. It was here that movements were formed and aesthetics formulated. Discussion demands freedom of speech and expression, one of the more contested aspects of human rights. On 23 December 1675 Charles II issued a ‘Proclamation for the suppression of coffee houses’. His edict banning the sale of coffee, chocolate, sherbet, and tea was motivated by the suspicion that coffeehouses provided a meeting place for the disaffected to spread rumours about court and government. Charles II sensed the dangers of what would later be called ‘public opinion’. The outcry against the draconian ban was such that the king decided to back off and no further mention was made of his edict. Open debate was born in a coffeehouse.

The first successful coffeehouse in Paris was Café Procope, established in 1676 by Sicilian immigrant Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli. In 1689 the nearby Comédie Française opened its doors and the café became associated with actors and acting. The first literary café was established. Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire frequented the café and heightened its reputation as a cultural hub. The Enlightenment is associated with the genius of these individuals, but alongside them there was a host of coffee-drinking pamphleteers, journalists, and popular novelists at work. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 forced large numbers of Huguenot scholars, publishers, and printers out of France. Many of them settled in London. They brought the coffee culture with them. The Rainbow Coffee House in Lancaster Court, off St Martin’s Lane, was in existence from 1702 to 1755. Until about 1730 it was known as a meeting place of French intellectuals. They swapped books and ideas and engaged in discussion on political and theological topics. With close links to Paris and to the Low Countries, its members formed part of a pan-European network for the free exchange of ideas in science and philosophy. Situated close to Huguenot communities in the Strand and Covent Garden, with their chapels at the Savoy and in Leicester Fields, the Rainbow was located near to the French bookshops established by Paul Vaillant and Pierre du Noyer.

Religious questioning was at the centre of philosophical discourse at that period, with long-held beliefs being undermined by recent scientific developments. Knowledge was on display in the public forum which removed the religious shackles of old. Pierre Coste’s translations of John Locke and Isaac Newton facilitated the circulation of their work throughout Europe. Pierre Baylewas educated at Geneva and Toulouse, but spent most of his life in Holland as the leading member of an active intellectual community in Rotterdam. He published the first edition of his astonishing Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) with Reinier Leers, Rotterdam’s most prominent publisher.English translations were issued in 1709 and 1734/41. This work has been called the ‘Arsenal of the Enlightenment’. Michel de la Roche was a journalist and translator who worked on the first English translation of Bayle’s Dictionnaire. He played a major role in the dissemination of English science and philosophy abroad, and conducted a campaign in favour of religious toleration. Exile was an exercise in Enlightenment.

The literary career of Maty underlines the close Anglo-French-Dutch circle. In 1740, Utrecht-born Matthieu Maty, a multi-lingual descendant of Huguenot refugees, obtained degrees in medicine and philosophy at Leiden University after which he settled in London. Mixing with journalists and intellectuals in London coffeehouses, he gained a contract with the publisher Henri Scheurleer at The Hague to act as the sole editor of the ‘Journal Britannique’ (1750-1757: 24 parts) and introduce aspects of English social and cultural life to Dutch and French readers. Maty would eventually rise to the position of Principal Librarian of the British Museum. Refugee publishing lies at the heart of Europe’s intellectual history. The driving force behind the Rainbow group was the journalist and editor Pierre Des Maizeaux. He promoted the circulation of English scientific and philosophical ideas on the Continent through his contributions to French-language periodicals published in Holland, and maintained an impressive network of contacts with regular correspondents in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and The Hague. Rarely before (and certainly not after) had Britain been so open to the ‘universality’ of research. Without a café culture, cosmopolitan Enlightenment would have been unthinkable.

There are parallels with the rise of the modernist movement in Europe. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the École des Beaux Arts was in control of all aspects of artistic life in France. Art academies regulated cultural production, but protests were raised against its dictatorial position. Basic questions were asked. Can art be taught? Should art be regulated or supervised? Is there a tenable theory of absolute beauty? To those queries modernists replied in negative terms. Frustrated by the establishment, they rejected academic art as bourgeois, conservative, and lacking in style. The overbearing rule of the Academy was dismantled in Parisian cafés. Formal discipline was replaced by a free flowing coffee and absinthe culture. The café symbolized modern urban lifestyle. The Café Guerbois and La Nouvelle Athènes played a major role in an emerging modernist movement. Impressionism was the first artistic grouping entirely organized in cafés. Movements such as Symbolism, Decadence, Impressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Existentialism, Surrealism, and Vorticism were all rooted in a café culture. It was in these settings that the issue of modernity was first articulated. Modernism arrived in sips.

In 1928, Jewish-born author Herman Kesten settled in Berlin to take up the post as editor with the left-wing publisher Gustav Kiepenheuer. That same year he published his first novel Josef sucht die Freiheit. Two more novels followed in quick succession. In 1933, when Hitler came to power Kesten left Berlin for the Netherlands. There he was employed by Allert de Lange’s publishing house to run its German department. Amsterdam was a centre of expatriate German book-publishing in the 1930s, being the home of two outstanding publishers of exile literature: Querido and De Lange. Kesten was actively involved in the preservation of the grand tradition of German writing, editing the work of authors from Heinrich Heine to Max Brod, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, and Bertholt Brecht. De Lange published ninety-one books written by exiled authors. With the occupation of the Netherlands Kesten fled to New York and later acquired American citizenship. In 1970, Kesten looked back in gratitude by publishing a Hymne für Holland. In 1959 he published Dichter im Café in which he looked back at the experience of banishment and its effect upon the creative process. In exile, the coffeehouse is home, church, parliament, desert, place of pilgrimage, cradle of illusions and their cemetery. Exile provokes isolation, but also regenerates. Wherever he arrived on his travels as a refugee, Kesten sought a coffeehouse to withdraw from his woes and write – ‘Ich sass im Kaffeehaus des Exils und schrieb’.

A metropolis without immigrants would be unthinkable. The history of the modern movement coincided with multiple waves of migration in which large numbers of people fled poverty, injustice, censorship, or the ravages of war and revolution. Modernism is associated with flux, exile, and alienation. The café was a haven of permanence in the lives of displaced artists and writers. For James Joyce or Ezra Pound expatriatism and freedom were synonymous. They stressed the intellectual necessity of being abroad, presenting exile as a vehicle for individuality and liberation. To George Steiner, modernism meant extra-territoriality. In practical terms, the café offered drink, food, newspapers, heat, light, and companionship. Emotionally, a seat at the table was of deeper significance. For itinerant artists the café was at the centre of lived experience. It was their cultural homeland. Exclusion turned them into cosmopolitan figures, citizens of several cities, fully at home in none but capable in all. The experience of exile functioned as a release mechanism. Migration meant a loosening of conventional values and customs and as such became a vital source of creative endeavour.

The London Jewish community of the mid-eighteenth century was expanding rapidly, mainly through immigration. These immigrants fell into two broad categories: Ashkenazim, who had arrived from Eastern and Central European countries, and Sephardim, largely of Iberian descent. The Ashkenazim were poorer and tended to integrate less well. They accounted for most of the Jewish pedlars and small-dealers.

The Sephardim, by contrast, were wealthier and tended to be laxer about religious observance. As merchants and financiers they fought to have restrictions lifted on international trade. British law at the time dictated that foreign-born persons applying for naturalization had to receive the Sacrament at Anglican Holy Communion. Jewish immigrants could be exempted from this requirement, but were granted ‘endenization’ which carried fewer rights than full citizenship (such as the right to own land or trade with the colonies).

In 1753 Henry Pelham’s Whig government proposed a bill allowing Jews who had been resident in Britain for three years might be naturalized without taking the Sacrament. The Jewish Naturalization Act (or ‘Jew Bill’) passed through both Houses of Parliament, but created press-inflamed agitation amongst the public. Tory papers denounced the Act as an attack upon Christianity. As it happened, 1754 would be an election year. Beginning in May 1753, the opposition sponsored articles in the London Evening Post attacking the Jew Bill. Much of the opposition was cynical politicking, but it revealed deep-rooted social anxieties too. The London Evening Post was particularly aggressive in building up a picture of Jews as cruel and sinister ‘monsters’.

Early in his career Henry Fielding had created The Grub Street Opera (1731). The ballad-opera failed, but one song survived and was integrated in Don Quixote in England (1734). Its title was ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. Thanks to the intervention of singer-composer Richard Leveridge who added a few new stanzas and gave the song a catchier tune, it gained the status of a national anthem.

In 1748, William Hogarth painted The Gate of Calais, better known as The Roast Beef of Old England. He established in visual form the stereotype of poverty-stricken French citizens that was used time and again by satirists after him. His picture shows a huge rib of red-blooded beef being delivered to Madam Grandsire’s English hotel in Calais. Surrounding the porter are a trio of poor fishwives, a pair of miserable soldiers, a salivating friar, a couple of emaciated cooks, and a pauper in the tattered uniform of the failed Jacobite rebellion. All are in contrast to the anticipated plenty represented by the hunk of English meat central to the scene.

The symbolism is plain: native means wholesome, foreign indicates weakness and effeminacy. Loathing of foreigners was multi-adaptable: what applied to one, applies to another. In the mind of the British public the Jew was a foreigner. The Evening Post’s adaptation of ‘The Roast Beef’ simply swaps hatred of the French for that of Jews (28 July 1753; first verse):

When mighty Roast Pork was the Englishman’s Food,
It ennobl’d our Veins and enriched our Blood,
And a Jew’s Dish of Foreskins was not understood,
Sing Oh! the Roast Pork of Old England,
Oh! the Old English Roast Pork.

The ‘pamphlet war’ was an ugly one. In broadsides and ballads Jews were accused of ritual murder, of planning to turn St Paul’s Cathedral into a synagogue, of wanting to force British males to be circumcised. Antisemitism had returned with a vengeance. The gloves were off. The outburst of hatred postponed any further attempt to modify the legal status of Jews within society. In the clamour of anti-Jewish propaganda the dictionary of medieval slurs was reopened and, more worrying, elements of modern ‘racial’ stereotyping were introduced. It undermined any tendency towards religious tolerance for generations to come. The rhetoric of the row suggested that Jewishness and Englishness were incompatible. Integration was impossible. Five months after its introduction, the government withdrew the Act.

During the later decades of the eighteenth century the East End of London began to be occupied by poorer classes of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, their numbers overrunning those of long-established immigrants in the area which caused strains of overcrowding. In this tense atmosphere, Samuel Elias – better known as Dutch Sam – was born on 4 April 1775 in Petticoat Lane, Whitechapel. In this tough area, boxing was a narrative of the immigrant poor. For young Jewish boys fighting helped to confirm a sense of identity and ethnicity. The ring was a place to knock out stereotypes, a punching stage of liberation. Sam learned to box at former heavyweight champion Daniel Mendoza’s academy.

Known as Mendoza the Jew, this bare-knuckle-fighter of Paradise Row, Bethnal Green, had captivated Regency London with his skills and set an example for Jewish kids to follow. Sam’s first recorded boxing match took place in 1801. He became the sensation of the pugilist circuit. The young lightweight faced opponents who were taller and heavier than he, but his blending of power and guile proved lethal. On 7 August 1894 he faced Caleb Baldwin, the ‘Pride of Westminster’. Sam ‘invented’ the uppercut and humiliated his celebrated opponent in the only defeat of his career. It cemented Dutch Sam’s reputation as the biggest hitter in the game, earning him the nickname of the ‘Man with the Iron Hand’. The ‘Terrible Jew’ (another nickname) was unbeatable. He succeeded Mendoza as the sporting hero of the London Jewish community.

His training regime was unusual. Sam could not go through his exhausting physical routines without an ample supply of gin. In one of his fights (April 1805) he was, according to reports, ‘positively inebriated’ when entering the ring, but in spite of that he professionally trounced his opponent. Considering the ‘rules’ of the game at the time that was quite a remarkable feat. Until Queensberry, there were no written regulations, no weight divisions, no round limits, no rest periods, and no referees. A boxer was declared the winner when his opponent was physically no longer able to continue. A single bout went a long way. Dutch Sam fought Tom Belcher, the brother of former heavyweight champion Jem Belger, on three occasions. The first fight, held in 1806, ended in a 57th round knockout win for Sam. The second match, which took place the following year, ended in a draw; the third was a 36th round stoppage win for Sam. Such was his standing that Daniel Mendoza agreed to act as second in his corner for all three bouts. After defeating Ben Medley in 1810 in round 49, Dutch Sam retired undefeated in over a hundred contests.

Sam was admired for his skill and agility. Between 1812 and 1828 Pierce Egan published his Boxiana; or, Sketches of Modern Pugilism with illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank (the book went through several editions in five expensive volumes). The author charted the ‘Sweet Science of Bruising’, the progress of bare-knuckle boxing from its emergence in the early eighteenth century to its decline in the 1830s (and he also included an anthology of pugilistic verse). His verdict on Dutch Sam was full of praise: ‘Terrific is the only word that adequately describes his manner of fighting’. In 1814, Sam made the fatal error of a comeback. Not for money or pride, but because of a drunken dispute with William Nosworthy, a young baker from Devonshire who had recently beaten a Jewish boxer.

His anti-Semitic remarks upset the Dutchman who challenged him to a fight. Against medical advice he once again entered the ring. Although Sam had remained in training, his gin habit had deteriorated. A shell of his former self, he was knocked out by his opponent in the 15th round. After a life of fighting and boozing, he threw in the towel on 3 July 1816 and was buried in Whitechapel. His son, known as Young Dutch Sam, also became a professional fighter. Arthur Conan Doyle (who showed a keen interest in boxing and wrestling) included Sam as a character in his 1896 boxing novel Rodney Stone. The Iron Fist had made a mark, bruising his way out of a life of misery and discrimination towards levels of recognition that young London refugees could aspire to. East London’s uncompromising environment produced more champion fighters than any other part of Britain – most of them were of Jewish immigrant descent.

In 1727, Alexander Pope coined the literary term bathos in his short polemic essay ‘Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry’. To him, the word meant a failed attempt at sublimity, or a sudden transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one. The effect is one of anti-climax. For Pope, it violated ‘decorum’ and the fittingness of subject. In a modernist context bathos suggests an irreverent attitude towards our cultural heritage; it is mixing learning with bawdiness and confronting the serious with the frivolous, the lofty with the vulgar, or the revered with the ridiculous. James Joyce was a master of the bathetic.

Leopold Bloom in Ulysses is a middle-aged Jewish advertising salesman who seeks commissions from small businesses, designs imagery and copy, and negotiates its placing in Dublin newspapers. At the same time, he has literary ambitions. Explaining the term ‘metempsychosis’ to his wife Molly who had come across the word in a popular novel, he points to a picture named ‘The Bath of the Nymph’ which is framed above the marital bed in order to illuminate the finer detail of his argument. The print itself, in spite of its Classical allusion, was a handout given to those who had bought the Easter number of the softcore weekly magazine Photo Bits – Joyce uses pornography in aid of exploring Greek philosophy. The intellectual high and low are entangled in a single passage. Time and again, Joyce counter-balanced erudition with aspects of popular urban culture such as sexy peephole machines, music-hall tunes, or naughty images – Ulysses may follow the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, but it is the (erotic) vibrancy of the modern city not a legendary past that captured the author’s creative attention.

Bathos in Ulysses works at a more subtle level. A particular reference in the ‘Calypso’ episode is a literary one, its location less elevated. Seated on the loo, Leopold Bloom opens an old issue of the penny weekly Titbits, taking his time to read the columns of its main story, and allowing his bowels to release the constipation he had suffered from the previous day: ‘Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize titbit: Matcham’s Masterstroke. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers’ Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds three. Three pounds, thirteen and six’. Bloom admires Beaufoy. He dreams of writing a story himself and of emulating the author of a series of prize-winning contributions. The magazine was known for sponsoring competitions. P.G. Wodehouse, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence all submitted stories seduced by the financial reward (young Joyce himself once planned to contribute a story). The wish to write a story returns in the ‘Circe’ episode. Bloom imagines a literary trial against him in which he is attacked by Beaufoy for being a plagiarist and a fake author.

The real Philip Beaufoy was a hack, a writer of shoddy and melodramatic prose, of books for children, the author of practical handbooks such as How to Succeed as a Writer, and he was indeed a member of the Playgoers’ Club on the Strand (founded in 1884 with the aim of raising the status of traditionally rowdy playgoers). Beaufoy contributed articles, stories, and letters to various other periodicals at the turn of the century. He was a prolific writer of immediately forgettable fiction – the kind of author Joyce would have despised. And yet he was given a portrait in the Dublin gallery of characters to which Joyce introduced his readers. Who then was this Philip Beaufoy (also known as Philip Beaufoy Barry)? The family history is an extraordinary one.

Composer and piano teacher Michael Bergson was born Michał Bereksohn in Warsaw on 20 May 1820 into a prominent Jewish family. His great-grandfather Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795. He studied in Dessau and Berlin (under Chopin?) and started his career in Italy. In 1865 he was appointed Professor of Music at the Conservatory of Geneva. On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and living in Paris at the time, he took his family to London where he would stay for the rest of his life. He initially settled at no. 1 Ordnance Road, Marylebone (now: Ordnance Hill, St John’s Wood). In 1881 the family lived at no. 92 Percy Road, Hammersmith; by 1891 they had moved to no. 50 Alexander Road, Willesden. He worked as a piano teacher, composed, and promoted Chopin in Britain. His composition A Dream Wish was played at a Promenade concert in 1875. He wrote two operas and a large number of songs. One of his best-known pieces is the ‘Scena ed Aria’ for clarinet, was played by military bands throughout the world. His Islington-born wife Catherine [Kate] Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire surgeon and dentist, was from an Anglo-Irish Jewish background. The couple had seven children, three of which are worth mentioning in this context.

Mina [Minna] Bergson was born on 28 February 1865 in Geneva. She was still young when the family moved from Paris to Ordnance Road, Marylebone. At the age of fifteen Mina was admitted to the Slade School of Art, she shared a studio with Beatrice Offor, and became close friends with Annie Horniman who would later sponsor her research in the occult. In 1887 she met Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers [S.L. Mathers] who she married three years later in the library of the Horniman Museum, changing her name to Moina Mathers. Her partner was the founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn of which she was the first initiate in March 1888. In their occult partnership, her husband was described as the ‘evoker of spirits’ and Moina as the clairvoyant ‘seeress’. In 1918, when her husband died, Moina took over the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega, a successor organisation to the Golden Dawn, as its Imperatrix. 

Mina’s younger brother Zaleq Philip Bergson was born in 1878 in London and educated at the City of London School. One of the great benefactors of the school had been Henry Benjamin Hanbury Beaufoy, a wealthy London distiller, Member of Parliament for Hackney Wick, and collector of books (copies from his library of the First Four Folio Editions of Shakespeare were auctioned separately by Christies in July 1912). The ambitious young author most likely considered this figure a role model and took his nom de plume from him. Both in the 1891 and 1901 census Philip was living at home at no. 92 Percy Street, Hammersmith. By then, his career as an author and journalist had taken off (he is mentioned in the 1933 edition of Who’s Who in Literature under the name of BARRY, Philip Beaufoy). There is evidence that there was some musical collaboration with his father. Beaufoy, the ‘old hag’ as he is referred to in Ulysses, made a prosperous career out of creating literary garbage. A notice of his death on 19 January 1947 in the London Gazette mentions his residence as the Heathfield Hotel in Guilford Street, Bloomsbury. He had previously resided at no. 31 Regent Square, Bloomsbury, one of London’s most desirable areas. James Joyce, the novelist who revolutionised fiction, had died six years earlier, half-blind and in poverty.

The Bergson clan that moved to Ordnance Road in 1870 included an eleven year old son. Henri Bergson had been born in Paris on 18 January 1859 (the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species) at Rue Lamartine, close to the Palais Garnier, the old opera house in the capital. Having entered the Lycée Fontanes (renamed Lycée Condorcet in 1883) in 1868, he returned to Paris to complete his studies and maintained his French citizenship. By 1900 he was a Professor at the Collège de France and one of Europe’s outstanding intellectuals. His mother being English, he was familiar with the language from an early age and he remained in close contact with Britain. 

In 1889 Bergson published his doctoral thesis Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. The study was translated by Frank L. Pogson into English in 1910 as Time and Free Will. It established Bergson’s international reputation as a highly original thinker – 1911 was a crucial year in the process. That year L’évolution créatrice was translated into English (Creative Evolution) and Joseph Solomon published his groundbreaking study on Bergson. One of his dedicated supporters was Herbert Hildon Carr, Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London, who published Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change (1911) and was involved in the organisation of Bergson’s first series of lectures in Britain. These included two lectures at Oxford University on The Perception of Change, and the Huxley Lecture delivered at the University of Birmingham on Life and Consciousness, published in the Hibbert Journal in October 1911. He also delivered four lectures at the University of London on The Nature of the Soul. Just before the outbreak of the Great War, Bergson was invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford lectures at several universities in Scotland. He presented the first series of eleven lectures on The Problem of Personality at the University of Edinburgh, but the outbreak of the war prevented his second lecture series. In 1913 he had been appointed President of The Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Founded in London in 1882, early members of this Society for investigating paranormal phenomena had included psychologist Edmund Gurney; poet and philologist Frederic W.H. Myers (who coined the term telepathy); philosopher Henry Sidgwick; physicist William Fletcher Barret; and journalist Edmund Dawson Rogers. During the early twentieth century other prominent members were Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle. The escapologist Harry Houdini also had links to the Society. Mina’s Bergson interest in the occult was shared by her elder brother.

Joyce was a devotee of Bergson’s philosophy. He had a copy of L’évolution créatrice in his bookcase (and also of The Meaning of War, published in 1915) as well as Solomon’s study on the philosopher. The crucial influence of Bergson’s theories on the development of British literary modernism has frequently been discussed. In the early twentieth century his work was widely read and debated. His notion of ‘pure duration’, that is: the subjective and qualitative experience of time as set against the ‘spurious’ concept of time that is quantified into countable units, made a profound impact and left an imprint on modernist fiction and film. The psychological concept was developed by William James who described consciousness as ‘a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations’. Nothing is jointed; everything ‘flows’. James and Bergson contributed to developing the narrative device of a ‘stream of consciousness’. This stylistic process, masterly applied by Joyce, eliminates narratorial mediation in order to transfer a direct ‘quotation’ of the character’s mind, either in loose interior monologue or in relation to sensory reactions to external occurrences. Joyce’s literary technique owes a great deal to Henri Bergson’s erudite philosophy, but it is his brother Philip, the author of shoddy and melodramatic tales, who is represented in the narrative of Ulysses. Would it be too much to suggest that Joyce knew exactly what he was doing here? The author does not refer to the sophistication of thought to which the novel owes much of its structure, but instead he focuses on vulgar titbits penned down by an old hag for which he is richly rewarded by the word, the column, and the page. Two Bergson brothers representing extremes of the sublime and the vulgar. This is Joycean bathos in all its bravura.

During the late eighteenth century whilst teaching at the University of Bologna, Luigi Galvani investigated the effect of electricity on dissected animals (frogs). He found that when an external charge was applied to the muscles, opposite electrical charges on the inside and outside surfaces would cause an attraction which in turn produced a muscle contraction. He summarized his observations in 1791 in an essay entitled ‘De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius’. Electricity sparked interest in European medical circles. Once again Italy seemed to be pointing the way in research.

On 18 January 1803 George Forster was hanged at Newgate for the murder of his wife and child by drowning them in London’s Paddington Canal. The fairness of the trial (in retrospect) has been questioned and it remains far from certain that Forster committed the crime. Shortly after his execution the body was taken to a nearby house and handed to Giovanni Aldini to be used for a scientific experiment. The Italian scientist and nephew of Luigi Galvani performed a public demonstration of the electro-stimulation technique on the corpse’s deceased limbs. He aimed at convincing sceptic colleagues of the scientific value of galvanism. The famous Newgate Calendar (a detailed account of public executions outside the prison) reported that life re-appeared in the dead body, one eye opened, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs were set in motion. Those present were shocked. As Forster was sentenced to hang until he was dead, it was assumed that a re-execution needed to be performed. Galvanism made a huge impact. The medical use of direct current became the rage of the day. Vocal members of the sect of ‘galvanists’ promised that the shocks and sparks of electricity would turn the long held dream of a miracle cure into reality. The technique was subsequently applied to needles, hence the first form of electro-acupuncture pioneered by Louis-Joseph Berlioz at the Paris medical school in 1810. It was inevitable that theories about the ‘spark of life’ would touch upon literature. The notion of bringing an organism to life by the use of electricity was explicitly stated in the 1831 revised edition of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. The novel reflects the interest in and uncertainty about the boundary between life and death by suggesting that this dividing line might be breached. By the time Gustave Flaubert published Madame Bovary in 1856, such fundamental questions had receded because electro-therapy had become an almost routine medical treatment. 

When the story was serialized in La Revue de Paris between October and December 1856, public prosecutors attacked it for being obscene. The author was taken to court. After Flaubert’s acquittal in February 1857 the novel became a bestseller when it was published in two volumes three months later. An intriguing character in the story is Monsieur Homais, the town pharmacist, and rival of Charles Bovary. He is vehemently anti-clerical and practices medicine without a license. A rather pompous character, he is a man with a strong erotic appetite (shared by his bourgeois wife). In order to improve his performance Homais wears Pulvermacher chains (chapter 11):

‘Il s’éprit d’enthousiasme pour les chaînes hydro-électriques Pulvermacher ; il en portait une lui-même ; et, le soir, quand il retirait son gilet de flanelle, madame Homais restait tout éblouie devant la spirale d’or sous laquelle il disparaissait, et sentait redoubler ses ardeurs pour cet homme plus garrotté qu’un Scythe et splendide comme un mage.’

[He was enthusiastic about the hydro-electric Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for this man more bandaged than a Scythian, and splendid as one of the Magi].

Flaubert seems to assume in this passage that his readers would be familiar with this allusion to Pulvermacher. To the contemporary reader the name may be somewhat of a mystery. The reference nevertheless hides a fascinating aspect of European migration and assimilation in the later nineteenth century.

Electrical engineer Isaak Louis [Lewis] Pulvermacher was born Isak Löbl Pulvermacher on 15 March 1815 in Breslau into a Jewish family. He may have spent his younger years in Vienna and signed later documents with ‘from Vienna’; he certainly studied at the Technischen Universität Wien (1846/7). He too became an enthusiastic follower of the Galvanist school. By 1850 he had moved to London. He invented and marketed a string of new instruments and was famous for the Pulvermacher [hydro-electric] chain. The instrument was reported as a useful source of electricity for medical and scientific purposes (and particularly popular amongst quack practitioners). He established the firm J.L. Pulvermacher at no. 194 Regent Street from where he produced and sold electric belts for every part of the human anatomy: limbs, abdomen, chest, and neck – sometimes all worn at the same time. Among Charles Dickens’s late correspondence is a letter dated 3 June 1870 to Pulvermacher’s firm with the request for a ‘voltaic band across his right foot’ as a remedy against neuralgia. Pulvermacher even had a model designed to attach to the male genitals which was claimed to cure impotence and erectile dysfunction. He promoted a theory that loss of ‘male vigour’ was a consequence of masturbation in early life. Pulvermacher’s device was meant to address this shortcoming. Flaubert seemed to hint at this aspect of male potency when he describes Homais’s pride in his sexual prowess.

Pulvermacher made a fortune out of his belt and band business. The family home was Windmill House, located in one of the most exclusive spots in Hampstead. There he died in September 1884. The process of assimilation of this family of German-speaking Jewish immigrants was quick and profound.  was born in 1882. In the course of a career as an able journalist, he was appointed editor-in-chief and member of the Board of Directors of the Daily Mail. In 1933 he objected to the sympathetic leanings towards Hitler by the Mail’s owner Lord Rothermere and resigned. A month later he was engaged by the Daily Telegraph. It took a generation for the Pulvermachers to become part of the powerful matrix of official and social relations known as the British establishment.

Merchant banker Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Schröder [known as: Baron John Henry Schröder] was born on 13 February 1825 in Hamburg into a prominent dynasty of bankers and merchants. His father was one of the foremost merchants of his generation in Hamburg. During the Napoleonic wars he lived in London, where he built up a mercantile business with his brother. In 1818 he established his own merchant banking firm, J. Henry Schroder & Co (now at no. 31 Gresham Street).

John Henry Schröder joined his father’s London firm in 1841, aged sixteen, learning the business under the supervision of a resident partner. The London partnership was restructured in 1849, the new resident partners being John Henry and Alexander Schlüsser. The latter was a specialist in trade with Russia. Much of the firm’s business was conducted in Hamburg and other commercial centres with John Henry’s brothers and cousins, who formed an extensive network of family firms. Schröder married Alexander’s niece Dorothea Eveline Schlüsser. They took up residence in fashionable Bayswater.

On Alexander Schlüsser’s retirement in 1871, Henry Tiarks, the son of a pastor to London’s Anglo-German community who had worked at the firm as a clerk since 1847, was made a partner. The 1870s and 1880s were John Henry’s heyday as a businessman. He was a director and later chairman of the North British and Marine Insurance Company; in 1888 he became a director of the West India Dock Company, and two years later a member of Lloyd’s of London.

In 1895, being childless, he brought in his nephew Bruno Schröder from Hamburg to represent the family in the partnership. The latter soon assumed control of the firm’s affairs. John Henry spent the remainder of his time looking after his extensive collection of objets d’art and the cultivation of orchids. Throughout his life, Schröder was a generous benefactor to German institutions and charities. From the outset he was treasurer of the German Hospital, Hackney, and in 1862 he became a trustee of the Hamburg Lutheran Church, London’s oldest German institution. He died in April 1910. He was one of only thirty persons to leave a fortune in excess of £2 million in the years between 1895 and 1914.

Brass instrument maker Gustave Auguste Besson was born in Paris in 1820. At the age of eighteen he produced a revolutionary design of cornet which surpassed all contemporary models. He formed the Besson Company in 1837 and his products quickly gained a great reputation throughout Europe.

In 1857, he moved to London where he built a large factory at no. 158 Euston Road. Following Besson’s death in 1874, the company changed its name, becoming Fontaine-Besson in 1880 in France, and Besson in England. At the end of the nineteenth century (1894), the Besson factory of London employed 131 workers, producing some hundred brass instruments a week. In 1968, the group Boosey & Hawkes acquired the Besson London brand. As a consequence, Besson cornets, horns, trombones, tubas and other instruments are still made today. The Boosey family was of Franco-Flemish origin. The company traces its roots back to John Boosey, a bookseller in London in the 1760s and 1770s. His son Thomas continued the business at no. 4 Old Bond Street.

Boost, Baste and Lambast (How to Poach a Periodical)
On 27 January 1990 a ninety-three year old man named Alfred John Barret died in the cathedral city of Wells in Somerset. He was cremated and his ashes scattered. Having moved from London in 1952/3, he had lived in Wells for some four decades with his Scottish wife, leading an unassuming life in a modest red brick housing estate. His death went unnoticed.

Alfred Perlès was born in 1897 in Vienna. His father was an affluent Czech Jew; his mother French and Catholic; his education Austro-German in the tradition of Goethe, Hölderin, and Mozart. As a young man he had the ambition of becoming a writer and, according to his own memoirs, he had sold a German-language film synopsis shortly before the outbreak of war – his only pre-war publication. Apparently there were several novels (or fragments thereof) written in German, but these were never published. During World War I he served as a junior officer in the Austrian army. Having been sent into action in Romania, he was court-martialled for a serious dereliction of duty and spent the remaining years of the war in an asylum. After the war he left Vienna never to return. The first phase of his life had ended in disgrace.

Carrying a Czech passport and very little money, he roamed through the streets of Berlin, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, before arriving in Paris around 1920. When his affluent parents realised that their son had falsely told them that he was studying medicine at the Sorbonne, they stopped sending him money. Battling extreme poverty, he held a variety of odd jobs and survived in the margin of society, acquiring a ‘wolf nature’ (his own term) with a street instinct for securing shelter and food. He lived the life of the wandering artist: exiled, rootless, and assuming numerous identities (his aliases were Alf and Joey and Joe and Fredl; he was the infamous Carl of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy). Perlès was one of the ‘Internationale’ of drifters in Paris – possessing an amazing ability to adapt to new socio-cultural surroundings. He quickly began writing in French and thought of himself as standing in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, or William Saroyan. They all had adopted a foreign tongue and made creative use of it. To Perlès it was a condition of modernism: writing in another language intensifies one’s consciousness, opens new horizons, and deepens the range of feelings and sensations.

Perlès met Henry Miller when the latter first visited Paris in April 1928, but it was not until early 1930 that their close friendship began. At the time, Perlès was scraping together a living as a journalist, writing feature stories for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. Miller once described Perlès’s existence in the metropolis as the ‘life of a cockroach’. Miller himself was in an even worse state, broke, starving, and homeless. Perlès offered him all the help he could afford. They became roommates in Clichy, a poor district just outside Paris. Six years older than his companion, Perlès was Miller’s mentor in how to survive hardship and be an artist. Miller memorised the experience in Quiet Days in Clichy (written in 1940; published in 1956). Together they penned a pseudo-manifesto called ‘The New Instinctivism: A Duet in Creative Violence’ (1930). In 1936 Perlès wrote his first French novel Sentiments limitrophes. Creatively, these intimate friends and artistic rivals spurred each other on.

In 1934 Perlès was made unemployed once again with the closure of the Chicago Tribune office. Soon after, an unexpected opportunity came his way. Situated about twenty miles east of Paris, the American Country Club of France had been founded by elderly businessman Elmer Prather for the pleasure of affluent Anglo-American expats and a handful of local lovers of the game. The Club also provided its members with tennis facilities and a swimming pool. Prather launched a monthly magazine with club notices, sporting news, and advertisements for golf clubs, waterproof clothing, etc. Lacking editorial expertise, he decided to delegate the job to a professional. In 1937, he handed over ownership to Perlès on condition that the magazine’s old name be kept and its connection to the Country Club maintained by printing in each number two pages of golf news. For Prahter it seemed a shrewd move. The editorial responsibility was given to a proper writer whom he did not have to pay. At the same time he would have his notices published for free and the Club’s name would benefit from its association with a quality magazine.

It was a golden opportunity for Perlès & Friends. Together with Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Anaïs Nin, he poached the journal and turned it into an avant-garde enterprise (in English & French). Modernism was the motivator. In a letter soliciting subscriptions, Henry Miller announced that the editors were planning to ‘boost, baste and lambast when and wherever possible. Mostly we shall boost. We like to boost, and of course to begin with we are going to boost ourselves’. In the wider Parisian artistic scene, the modernist idea had been pushed forward in countless manifestos that were diffused in a flow of little magazines. Manifestos were battle cries, not sets of rules and regulations. One of the ambitions of the movement was to abolish all directives that had been imposed upon writers and artists. Modernist art was spontaneous rather than ‘programmed’. The Booster took a unique place in that tradition. Its starting team was impressive: managing editor: Alfred Perlès; society editor: Anaïs Nin; sports editor: Charles Nordon (Lawrence Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (Henry Miller); literary editors: Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan.

Since the magazine was dependent on advertising patronage of the golfing elite, a measured approach would have been a pragmatic position to take. The opposite was the case. The editorial stance was uncompromising and subversive. Financial backing soon dried up and was halted with the publication of Nukarpiartekak, a Greenland saga which had been brought to European attention in 1884 by the Danish explorer Gustav Holm.* It tells the tale of an old bachelor, a lustful Eskimo, who disappears entirely in the vagina of a young woman. What is left of him is a small skeleton she passes into the snow the next morning. The publication was publicly denounced as obscene by the Club’s president. The magazine changed its name to Delta. It ran for another three issues before being discontinued. Boosting was no longer acceptable.

In 1938 Alfred published his second French novel Le quatour en ré majeur. Soon after, the band of friends broke up. Miller moved to Greece and Perlès fled to London. The Bohemian stage of his life came to an end. After coming to England in December 1938, he was briefly interned (he recorded his experiences in 1944 in Alien Corn). On his release he joined the British Pioneer Corps helping to clean up rubble after the Blitz. He turned into a British patriot, concerned about the future of humanity and with an intense hatred of Nazi Germany. He expressed a moralistic seriousness which his friends of old greeted with dismay. He suggested in writing that he ‘had conquered the futility’ of his existence and emerged on ‘a higher plane of life’. He may have regretted his wild years in Paris, but there remains at least a linguistic link between his involvement in the avant-garde and his activities in the Pioneer Corps. By the mid-fourteenth century the word ‘pioneer’ (of French origin) referred to foot soldiers who marched ahead of their regiment to prepare the way, dig trenches, clear roads and terrain, with their picks and shovels. Pioneers were send in advance of the army. Napoleon’s use of the term avant-garde was identical before it became a cultural metaphor.
In 1943 Perlès published his first novel in English, entitled The Renegade. Around this time, he met Anne Barret who became his partner and later, in 1950, his wife. At the time of his naturalisation on 11 November 1947, he was living at Lissenden Mansions, Highgate Road in Kentish Town. By then he had changed his name to Alfred John Barret. In 1952 the couple moved to Wells. Perlès and Miller maintained a lifelong friendship. Miller visited Perlès in Britain and Perlès went out to see Miller in 1954/5 in Big Sur, California, where he wrote My Friend Henry Miller. In 1979, Miller composed a tribute to Perlès in the memoir Joey (the name given to him by Miller and Nin). The latter’s autobiography Scenes of a Floating Life is out of print (and should be re-issued). His relative quietness as an author in Britain and his disappearance from public life is intriguing and goes deeper than a more ‘mature’ outlook at life.

Ironically, it was the friendship with Miller that lies at the bottom of Alfred’s reduced creative powers. Perlès was a floater, an individual who was able to assume a variety of identities and act out different parts without ever belonging to any specific cultural group. He drifted from Vienna, to Paris, to London, writing in German, French, and English, but was unable to find a sense of totality or personal completeness. His psychological make up was as bewildering to himself as it was to others. He never showed the force of character to channel his creative talent. Young Miller was of a different disposition. Working in Paris on his first novel Tropic of Cancer, he submitted himself to a set of rules which were formulated in the process. It was a program of obsessive work based on a regime of relentless self-discipline. Sustained creation is not possible, but work always necessary (Miller was the fastest typist Perlès had ever met in his life). In the end, Miller’s sheer creative power inhibited his friend. It proved impossible to wrench himself free from the presence of genius. Perlès was acutely aware that his younger roommate would overshadow him in creative achievement – in the domain of ultimate human pride. He withdrew into the quiet splendour of England’s smallest city.

* Nukarpiartekak – Modernist Magazines Project – Magazine Viewer
http://www.modernistmagazines.com/magazine_viewer.php?gallery…article_id=681

Yolande Duvernay was born in December 1812 in Versailles. Little is known about her youth, apart from the fact that she was brought up in poverty. Her domineering mother, only known as Madame Duvernay, had been a dancer in her youth and steered her six-year old daughter into the same direction. An underfed and poorly clad girl, she was enrolled in the School of Dance where pupils were known as petits rats de l’Opéra. 

Under control of their mothers, the rats spent their days in school and their evenings on the stage of the opera house, appearing in a variety of juvenile roles. Dance may have been a career for some in the end, for most girls it was an instruction into coquetterie and a pathway into the shady world of sex and abuse. Men of society kept an eye on ballet pupils and, through mothers who ‘managed’ their daughters, made sexual assignations with the young rat of their choice. The school was a stage where mothers ‘auctioned’ off their daughters. Some girls did make careers and Yolande fared particularly well. She was described as an elegant young woman and a graceful dancer. Aware of the situation, Madame Duvernay was intent to exploit her daughter’s eye-catching presence. In 1831, Yolande became the mistress of Louis-Désiré Véron, the newly appointed director of the Paris Opéra after the toppling of the Bourbon monarchy. He took her out of ballet school and promoted her straight into leading roles. She made her début in Jean-Baptiste Blache’s neo-classical ballet Mars et Vénus ou Les fillets de Vulcain (1809). Having adopted the stage name Pauline Duvernay, she became the star of the theatre.

Her fame crossed the Channel where Princess Victoria loved her performances. Young Wiliam Makepeace Thackeray was in awe of her and, according to fellow dancer and friend Antoine Coulon, she was the ‘idol of all the dandies’ in London. In October 1836, Pauline performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where she danced the role of Florinda in the first London production of Le diable boiteux. Published as a novel set in Madrid by Alain-René Lesage in 1707 (translated as ‘The Devil upon Two Sticks’ in 1708), the story was turned into a ballet by Jean Coralli in 1836. Her performance of an unusual Spanish-Cuban solo dance, the ‘cachucha’, catapulted her to unequalled fame. Alone on stage, castanets in her hands, wearing a pink satin dress trimmed with black lace, she added a provocative twist to the curious steps of the dance (captured in a hand-coloured lithograph by John Frederick Lewis in February 1837). Society went wild. Men of all ages were eager to pay for the privilege of being near to her. The price (set by Madame Duvernay) was high. All rivals in the ‘sale’ of sexual favours were outbid by a self-effacing, but immensely rich man. His name was Stephens Lyne-Stephens. His wealth was inherited.

Protestant glassmaker William Stephens was the illegitimate son of Cornish schoolmaster Oliver Stephens and servant girl Jane Smith. In 1746 he travelled to Portugal where one of his relations worked as a merchant. In 1755 he survived the Lisbon earthquake and during the next decade he made a living out of burning lime to provide mortar for rebuilding the city. In 1769, he was asked by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mel, 1st Marquis of Pombal, Secretary of the State of Internal Affairs in the government of Joseph I and its de facto head, to re-open a derelict glass factory which was located some ninety miles north of Lisbon. Such was the urgency to stimulate commercial activity that he was granted a number of lucrative privileges: exemption from all taxes; a monopoly of glass supply in Portugal and its colonies; and free use of fuel from the Royal pine forest. Joseph I died in 1777 and was succeeded by his eldest daughter Maria I who hated Pombal and his policies. The latter lost his position, but Stephens held on to his status and build a good working relationship with the new queen. That in itself was remarkable. She was a Catholic monarch who believed that her authority was derived from God; he was an illegitimate and foreign Protestant ‘heretic’ – and they enjoyed each other’s company. William retained his privileges for almost forty years and build up an enormous fortune. After he died, unmarried and childless, his wealth was bequeathed to a cousin in London, Charles Lyne, who applied for Royal license to take the name Lyne-Stephens. Charles’s inheritance made him the richest commoner in England. It became a cause célèbre and his only son and heir, Stephens Lyne-Stephens, found himself in great demand by families with unmarried daughters. But Stephens was an unassuming young man who showed little interest in the company of women – until the day he encountered Pauline Duvernay on stage at Drury Lane. 

At that time she was the mistress of the diplomat Charles, Marquis de la Valette, but in an arrangement negotiated between Count d’Orsay (a friend of Stephens and himself a colorful French figure in British high society) and Yolande’s greedy mother who took two-thirds of the cash deal, Stephens paid a considerable amount of money for the pleasure of ‘owning’ the ballerina. Stephens provided Yolande with a comfortable lifestyle and a property in Kensington, whilst he remained at his father’s estate in Portman Square, Marylebone, to keep up appearances. In 1837, he persuaded her to retire from the stage and live with him at his father’s house. The latter felt uncomfortable with the arrangement (she demanded that he addressed her in French) and, in June 1843, he acquired Grove House in Wandsworth. Pauline remained Stephens’s mistress for eight years. In 1845, out of the blue, the couple married at St Mary’s Church in Putney for an Anglican service, followed by a Catholic one at Cadogan Terrace chapel in Chelsea. To keep a mistress in Victorian society was quietly accepted, but to marry in a mixture of religion was considered a social disgrace. Ostracised by relations and friends, London became a prison to them. When his father died in 1851, Stephens became the richest man in Britain. He bought Hôtel Molé, a grand mansion in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, acquired Lynford Hall near Thetford (Norfolk), and built up a celebrated art collection. The couple settled at Grove House.

The Grove estate was re-designed and built in the later eighteenth century by James Wyatt for the Dutch immigrant merchant and financier Joshua van Neck (the name was later anglicised as Vanneck). At his death in 1777, he was one of the richest men in Europe. Yolande settled in an environment of traditional wealth and she acquired her share of it. When Stephens died in 1860, he left his entire fortune to her. She became the nation’s wealthiest woman, richer – it was rumoured – than Queen Victoria. She owned three grand estates in England and Paris, thousands of acres of land, and employed hundreds of staff. Yolande continued to live at Grove House, building a Romanesque mausoleum in its grounds. In addition, she acquired the 1863 sculptural group Fighting Bulls by Jean-Baptiste Clésinger which was sited in the gardens of Lynford Hall also as a memorial to her late husband. 

Not equipped to handle her financial obligations, she befriended Edward Stopford Claremont, a former British military attaché in Paris and friend of Napoleon III, to help her out. Yolande persuaded him to join her at Lynford Hall and live in a ménage-à-trois with his tragically unhappy wife. The arrangement lasted for two decades. Then the past started to trouble her. There were dark secrets and two abandoned children in Paris. Religion took hold of her. She gave huge sums of money to the church and financed the building of Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge, one of the biggest Catholic churches in England. With the tallest spire in the city, the building remains a landmark sight.

Yolande Duvernay died on 2 September 1894. She rests in the Grove House mausoleum, next to her husband. Since the marriage had been childless, the trustees put the contents of Lynford Hall and most of the furniture and paintings in Grove House up for sale. The auction took place at Christie’s in May 1895 and lasted nine days. A whole day was devoted to pictures, including portraits of Philip IV and the Infanta Maria Teresa by Velazquez; paintings by Albert Cuyp, Bellini, Veronese, Watteau, Murillo, Claude Lorrain, and others. The furniture was French, mostly Louis XIV and Louis XVI; there was a large quantity of (Sèvres) porcelain; and a wide variety of exclusive objets d’art. Day nine was exclusively dedicated to silverware and jewelry for which a separate catalog was issued for this day (17 pages, 158 items). The sale attracted buyers from Paris, Vienna, Berlin, New York, and elsewhere. The proceeds of the sale were mind-boggling. It was a classic rags-to-riches story with an immigration twist: a young rat who had been ‘auctioned’ by her mother in Paris setting a record art sale at Christie’s after her demise as Britain’s richest widow.

Painter Carl Haag was born in April 1820 at Erlangen, Bavaria. Having spent five months in Brussels, he travelled to London in April 1847. When Queen Victoria was made aware of his work, she invited him to spend six weeks at Balmoral where he produced a number of watercolours. Knowing the art market and responding to British taste, Haag travelled extensively in Egypt (together with Frederick Goodall), Jerusalem, Oman, Palmyra, and became a popular painter of Eastern themes. He settled in London. Having married in 1866, he added an oriental studio on top of a newly built four storey mansion which he named Ida Villa (after his wife) at no. 7 Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead. In 1883 a reporter of the Art Journal visited the artist. He left the studio overwhelmed by a multiplicity of exotic paraphernalia that ranged from Persian rugs and tapestries from Palmyra to Turkish swords and Nubian camel saddles.

Orientalism was a Franco-British obsession which manifested itself in literature, painting, architecture, and in music. The Orient had attracted European writers and artists from the Renaissance onwards, but nineteenth century fascination with the domain was unprecedented. On 1 July 1798, Napoleon landed in Egypt and proceeded to invade the country. The occupation lasted until 1801. Some 150 scholars and scientists were instructed to execute a comprehensive study of the country. Topographical surveys were carried out, animals and plants studied, minerals classified, and local skills scrutinized. The total set of spectacular publications contained 837 engravings which captured Egyptian civilization from every vantage point. Never before had a single country inspired such a monumental scientific and editorial effort. The research made a real impact on French art and architecture (dominating the Empire Style), inciting a vogue for all things Egyptian. Napoleon also employed court painters such as Antoine-Jean Gros to create striking images of him in action.

The Egyptian campaign, steamboat travel in the 1830s, the opening of the Suez Canal, the growth of international railway travel, together with Anglo-French political and commercial involvement in the Ottoman Empire, advanced the passion for the Orient over a period of time. It made the East a focus of artistic and literary interest and the harem was a defining symbol of Oriental imagery. Background information however was scarce. One of the first Western accounts of harem life was recorded by Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman sultan’s court. She spent time in Constantinople and strived to get to know Ottoman women and deliver dispatches from their private world. Her collected letters were published in 1763 and sparked interest for their eyewitness insights into Turkish society. Her descriptions influenced the work of subsequent Orientalist painters and writers.

To Europeans, the Middle East was a region of luxuriance and forbidden pleasures. Orientalism was a fantasy, an escape into the exotic and mysterious, an escapade into a domain of colour set against an ever darkening Western world. In 1877, five years after the author’s death, Georges Charpentier published Théophile Gautier’s L’Orient, voyages et voyageurs. In these accounts, the East is an outlandish ideal with emotional significance because it served the author as an alternative to European culture. His writing was a protest against contemporary goose-cackle about progress, a rejection of the ‘Americanization’ of society, and – by implication – a nostalgic memory of what old Paris used to be before Baron Haussmann took up the sledgehammer. Significantly, the author created his Oriental stories long before he had ever set foot in the region.

Orientalism coincided with a quest for sexual liberation. This erotic element was typified by the literary efforts of Richard Francis Burton. As a soldier stationed in India, he learned Arabic and immersed himself in Islam. In 1853, disguised as a pilgrim, he made the dangerous trek to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. He published a description of his journey in a three-volume book that became an immediate sensation in England. Burton was excited by Eastern erotica. He translated and printed the Kama Sutra (1883) and The Perfumed Garden (1886), and published a splendid edition of the Arabian Nights (1885) which still stands unchallenged. Burton’s success had been prepared by Edward FitzGerald’s translations of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (1859) which achieved astonishing popularity during the Victorian era.

France was the birthplace of Orientalist painting. The revolt against the stifling dominance of academic art shifted the attention from Rome towards the East. Disenchanted with artistic developments at home, Delacroix travelled to Morocco and Algeria in 1832. He returned to Paris to present Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement at the 1834 Salon, although he had been forced to use French models because western men were forbidden to enter the harem. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres never travelled to the East. In 1862 – an old man by then – he completed Le bain Turc, an oil painting depicting a group of women in the bath of a harem.

The sexualised style is typical. Denied entrance to seraglios and lacking authentic accounts, artists took a leap of the imagination to create opulent interiors in which sex slaves and concubines posed in the nude. Flights of erotic fancy brushed aside inhibitions. In 1872 Pierre-Auguste Renoir completed Intérieur de harem à Montmartre (Parisiennes habillées algériennes). It was painted in homage to Delacroix, the ‘sultan of Orientalism’, but rejected for entry to the 1872 Salon. The title of the picture acknowledged the artificial nature of much Orientalist painting by making it clear that these were Parisian women in costume (Renoir did not visit Algeria until 1881).

One aspect of the lure of the East was the cult of Cairo. Painters and poets were obsessed with the unhurried serenity of an old city that seemed far removed from the urban disquiets of Western civilization. They communicated the charm of the place rather than give a precise indication of topography. It was the atmosphere and ambience that attracted artists to Cairo where – in excitable male imagination – at every step one may stumble upon a harem enveloped in the scent of roses and set amongst sycamore figs.

John Frederick Lewis spent a year in Constantinople and most of the 1840s in Cairo. Famously, Thackeray visited the artist at his studio there. In his Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846) he described the painter as a languid lotus-eater who was living a ‘dreamy, lazy, hazy, tobaccofied life’. Once back in Britain, Lewis created a series of harem and bazaar scenes that were a huge success. In 1850 he exhibited his watercolour The Harem at the Old Water-Colour Society’s rooms in Pall Mall which set the tone for his later images. From his studio at Walton-on-Thames he produced one Oriental scene after another. Having never seen the traditional women’s quarters, his settings were those of the grand mansion he had once occupied in Cairo’s Europeanised Esbekieh district. His unveiled women were models who made a living out of posing for northern artists. Lewis and fellow painters such as William Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton, or David Wilkie, relied on precise decors to convince the public of the authenticity of their work. If the facts were correct, then fantasy could take flight. The harem was perceived as an epitome of Oriental omnipotence, a male’s erotic dream of multiple wives and numerous sex slaves. To the contemporary eye most of these scenes are (at best) alluring still-lifes, but in the heated Victorian mind these images were loaded with erotic suspense and sexual promise.

In 1857 Lewis completed yet another Hhareem Life. The painting depicts a scene in which two women watch a cat picking apart a bouquet of feathers. The domestic setting is vaguely suggestive and quietly erotic – the location is supposed to be Constantinople, but it could just as well be Hampstead or Highgate. After all, the artist used his wife as a model without attempting to hide her British features.

French painters were less inhibited than their Victorian colleagues. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s smoke-filled images are voluptuous and seductive. Nude women are smoking a hookah or lounging lustfully bored at a pool side as can be seen in La grande piscine de Brousse (1885) which depicts a bath in the Turkish town of Bursa. His images may be less restrained, but Gérôme was just as ignorant about harem life as were the British painters. Western men were strictly forbidden to enter the female quarters. Stereotyping became inevitable.

The name of Félicien-César David is associated with the introduction of Oriental exoticism into music. Like many early Romantics in France he joined the socialist brotherhood of the Saint-Simonians and put music to the utopian vision of a New Christianity. From 1833 to 1835 he was in the Middle East having embarked with Barthélemy Prosper [Père] Enfantin and his followers on a voyage to Egypt to realise their utopia in the Mediterranean basin. During their short stay, Saint-Simonians were involved in a number of engineering projects, including the construction of Nile barrages, railways, and canals. In his later music, David incorporated recollections of the music he had heard Cairo and elsewhere. In 1844 he produced his symphonic ode Le Désert, an evocative work that became a sensation and foreshadowed the Orientalism of Bizet’s Djamileh (1882) or Delibes’s Lakmé (1883), and other Romantic operas. Verdi’s Aida was commissioned by the Khedive of Egypt and first performed in Cairo in 1871. The house where the opera was staged was built under the same ruler and faced the modernised city. The opera’s storyline represents an imagined Egyptian past. Ironically, performance of the opera marked the opening of the Suez Canal which connected imperial Europe with its colonies. Since the 1860s, developers had been engaged to regularise Cairo’s network of streets, create avenues, and establish public squares. Only remnants of the pre-industrial city survived. To celebrate technological achievements, a non-existent romanticised background was chosen as setting for the opera. In every aspect, Orientalism was a false statement – fake and fancy.

Imaginary harems were created metropolitan writing rooms and studios. Composers constructed narratives in sound in which the figure of Scheherazade came to dominate. Some artists travelled to Constantinople or Cairo, others never did. No one, not a single artist was permitted to enter into the private quarters of an Oriental harem – with one exception. Violinist August Wilhelmj was born on 21 September 1845 in Usingen, Hesse. A prodigy (Franz Liszt called him the ‘future Paganini’), he gave his first concert at the age of eight in Wiesbaden. He began his concert career in 1865, and eventually made a number of world tours. A personal friend of Richard Wagner, he led the violins at the première of Der Ring des Niebelungen in Bayreuth in 1876. He became famous for his arrangement of the air from J.S. Bach’s orchestral Suite in D major, known as the ‘Air on the G String’. His re-orchestration of Paganini’s violin concerto in 1882 was a major contribution to the pantheon of works for the violin. From 1894 he was a Professor of violin at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He also took an active interest in the technique of violin-making. His home at Avenue Road, St John’s Wood, was a museum of instruments. Wilhelmj owned a 1725 Stradivarius which later came to be known by his name. During his lifetime he was a legendary performer.

In 1885, he received what must have been an astonishing invitation from Abdul Hamid II. He was requested to travel to Constantinople and play for the ladies of the Sultan’s harem. It has not been reported what this female audience made of the performance by this tall, broad-shouldered figure with a massive forehead surrounded by long and wavy hair (like a Greek statue according to contemporary sources), but the Sultan was impressed. He decorated the maestro with the knightly Order of the Medjidie and presented him with diamonds. After decades of European devotion to the Orient and a multitude of suggestive scenes in art and literature, the virtuoso who entered the Sultan’s harem must have been the most envied man in the Western world.

In 1807 Andrew Pears started a small factory just of Oxford Street producing transparent soap. It proved a huge success in an age that became aware of the social value of hygiene. Pears Soap became a household name not in the last because of the firm’s brand marketing strategy introduced by the inspirational figure of Thomas J. Barratt, the ‘father of modern advertising’ (and son-in-law of the company’s founder). 

It all started with the commissioning of sculptor Giovanni Focardi. Born in Florence around 1843 and having studied under Enrico Pazzi, he moved to London in 1875 where he spent most of his working years at no. 10 Auriol Road, Baron’s Court. For the Pears Company he produced his most famous creation, a group of mother and child titled You Dirty Boy.

This statue of a ragged young boy having his ears washed was exhibited at the Paris Exhibition Universelle in 1878 where it was greatly appreciated. It was also part of Pears’s soap stand at London’s International Health Exhibition in 1884 under the patronage of Queen Victoria.

Pears had purchased the copyright to produce copies of the statue as advertisements for their products. They were made for shop counter displays in terracotta, plaster, or metal, and sold worldwide. Pears became famous for other advertising drives involving artists. Its campaign using John Everett Millais’s painting Bubbles (1886) continued over many decades. Art entered the domain of commerce.

Through the late 1800s Spitalfields, Whitechapel, and Bethnal Green were home to the tobacco industry. Production was driven by immigrants. The decline of the Dutch economy had prompted many skilled Amsterdam Jews to settle in London. Jewish immigrants from Germany were also involved in the industry. Samuel Gluckstein was born on 4 January 1821 in Rheinberg. He moved to London in 1841, starting his own business in Crown Street, Soho, in 1855. His two sons Isidore and Montague joined the firm. His daughter Helena married Barnett Salmon, also a tobacco salesman. The Salmon & Gluckstein firm was established in 1873.

By the turn of the century it was the world’s largest retail tobacconist (taken over by Imperial Tobacco in 1902). In 1887 Montague Gluckstein put forward the idea of providing catering services for large exhibitions that had become fashionable. Family members gave their consent on condition that their name would not be used in such a ‘vulgar’ enterprise. 

Montague employed Joseph Lyons, a water-colour artist, who had experience in dealing with exhibition authorities. In 1894 the company started a teashop in Piccadilly. Within a couple of decades a chain of so-called Lyons’ Corner Houses was established, including a number of huge restaurants on four or five levels. Each floor had its own eatery and all had orchestras playing to its diners. Corner Houses were treasures of Art Deco. This style of building in Britain was introduced by Oliver Percy Bernard. Having acted as technical director of the British Pavilion at the influential 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (from which Art Deco took its name), he operated as consultant for Lyons and designed the interior for their iconic Oxford Street and Coventry Street establishments. In 1929, he conceived an Art Deco entrance to the illustrious Strand Palace Hotel. Dresden-born refugee Hans Arnold Rothholz who had been trained in the Bauhaus tradition, also worked on behalf of the company and created a mural for the Lyons Corner House restaurant at Marble Arch.

There is an even more immediate link between tobacco and Art Deco. Bernhard Baron was born on 5 December 1850 in the Russian town of Brest Litovsk into a Jewish family of French descent. In 1867 Baron moved to New York where he manufactured handmade cigarettes. He later moved his business to Baltimore. In 1872 Baron took out his first patent for a cigarette making machine. In 1895 he visited London to sell the patent rights of his invention. Attracted by business opportunities, he decided to settle at St James’ Place, Aldgate, where he established the Baron Cigarette Machine Company. In 1903 he joined the board of Carreras Limited, becoming its managing director and chairman. He held both positions until his death in August 1929. Carreras’s cigarettes, notably their Black Cat brand, proved popular. 

Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun made a huge impact on art and architecture. The 1925 Paris Exhibition extended the vogue. Egypt-o-mania was in full swing. The country was also a major cigarette manufacturer. After British (BTE) troops were stationed in Egypt in 1882, soldiers developed a liking for local tobacco. Soon this ‘sophisticated’ smoke was in demand throughout the country. Tobacco companies adopted Egyptian motifs in their advertising to cash in on this all-gender fashion. Kate Chopin presented an image of the new ‘progressive’ woman in her story ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’, published in Vogue Magazine in April 1902. During the First World War smoking increased sharply and the Carreras Company came to the fore in supplying cigarettes to the armed forces. In 1920 the business moved to new premises, the Arcadia Works at City Road, Moorgate. Six years later, architects Collins & Porri were commissioned to design a new factory to be built on Mornington Crescent’s communal garden. The white building’s ornamentation included a solar disc to the Sun-god Ra, two effigies of black cats flanking the entrance, and colourful painted details. The plant was opened in style in 1928. The pavements were covered with ‘desert’ sand; there was a procession of cast members from a production of Verdi’s Aida; a performance was given by actors in Egyptian costume; and a chariot race was held on Hampstead Road. The Carreras factory is one of London’s finest surviving Art Deco designs.

The success of the Lyons and Carrera companies points at growing ties between business and design. Romantic thinkers feared the corrupting impact of commerce on the creative impulse. During the last decades of the nineteenth century this perspective changed, at least within the visual arts (Symbolist poets stubbornly defended their art against all intrusions from the ‘market’). Department stores and restaurants redefined the bond between commerce and aesthetics. Eye-catching design boosted sales. Increased profitability provided commissions to aspiring artists. The age of graphic art and advertising was born. With it, the artist modified the interpretation of his position in society. Much of the Romantic humbug of his ‘leading’ role was dumped. Simplification became the new catchword. An idealistic aspect (especially amongst the pupils of Bauhaus) remained a feature of socially engaged design, but even Utopia acquired a more human dimension. During man’s brief spell on earth, architecture and design could make his journey physically more pleasant and aesthetically more pleasing. Style became equated with wellbeing.

The Gay Gondolier

Seymour Street (Marylebone)

On 7 December 1889 the Savoy Theatre on the Strand premiered the opera The Gondoliers. It was Gilbert and Sullivan’s last great success and ran for 554 performances, closing on 30 June 1891. Its title highlighted the long-lasting British passion for Venice and its gondolas. From then to the Italian Exhibition at Earls Court in 1904 (with a special section on ‘Venice at Night’) gondola-mania was at its height.

Venice installed its first Doge as leader of the young autonomous state in 697. It amassed its wealth from agriculture, local industry (textiles), maritime trade, and international banking. Shipbuilders provided commercial vessels and a naval fleet to protect and control the seaways. Commercial growth was matched by an astonishing cultural development. From Titian to Tintoretto, the city was home to renowned Renaissance painters and laid claim to the celebrated architects Jacobo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio. Aldus Manutius founded the Aldine Press producing the first printed editions of many of the Greek and Latin classics. Venice ruled the world, commercially, intellectually, and artistically. Known as Seranissima (‘most serene’), the Republic divided its power amongst members of the Doge’s Inner Circle which included six councillors and three inquisitors who were responsible for law and order. Policing the expanding domain was a necessity. After all, Venice produced Giacomo Casanova, Europe’s most notorious ruffian.

During the Renaissance it was also a city of courtesans of which there were two classes, namely ‘cortigna onesta’ (educated prostitutes) and ‘cortigna lume’ (common prostitutes). The first group was of a patrician or merchant background. In a society that dictated exorbitant dowries, many daughters were denied the opportunity of marriage. They would become nuns or spinsters. Alternatively, they followed a path into prostitution which enabled them to support themselves and other members of the family. As it was a duty for a Venetian male to make his fortune before marriage, many youngsters sought pleasure with women of taste and refinement (and most likely without disease). Elderly men were happy to supply young courtesans with a luxurious lifestyle.

The prostitute appeared in influential circles and mixed with artists, poets, politicians, and philosophers. She was introduced into art and poetry (the trend was set by Pietro Aretino) – and with her presence the gondola became a regular feature. Boat ride and sex became intertwined. Sometimes in a shocking manner. In Il trentuno della Zaffetta (1532) Lorenzo Venier – a friend of Aretino – recounts the alleged ‘trentuno’ (gang rape) of Angela del Moro on 6 April 1531. The attack was organised by her noble lover as a punishment for her betrayal. He lures Angela into a gondola for a sumptuous day trip, but instead she ends up in the fishing town of Chioggia where she is raped by eighty of his cronies. She is then sent back to Venice in a boat full of melons, a fruit loaded with erotic connotations at the time. The impact of Vernier’s poem was significant and soon the word ‘trentuno’ became common place as a euphemism for the group violation of a single female victim. It appeared in English for the first time in John Florio’s Anglo-Italian dictionary A Worlde of Words in 1598.

The British passion for manifestations of Italian culture has a long history. The sonnet was introduced into English literature during the 1550s in imitation of models pioneered by Francesco Petrarca (known as Petrarch in English). For generations to come, Italy was considered the home of poetry. To Shakespeare, it was the domain of imagination. His plays may be set in France, Austria, or Denmark, but his references to Italy are frequent and mostly accurate (John Florio, the London-born son of a Reformed refugee from Tuscany, was tutor of the Earl of Southampton, patron of the bard). Such is the contemporary association of Shakespeare with Venice that Stratford-upon-Avon offers the affluent tourist a romantic passage on the river in his/her private gondola. 

During the eighteenth century Venetian painting came to the fore. Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto, produced urban panoramas in which the painter tended to include architectural distortions for pictorial effect. From the late 1720s to the early 1750s Canaletto’s fortunes were bound up with the figure of Joseph Smith, British Consul in Venice. The latter was one of the foremost collectors in the city who, over three decades, acquired fifty paintings by the artist which he housed in his palazzo on the Grand Canal. They were eventually sold en bloc to George III in 1762. Canaletto was and remains one of Britain’s favourite artists, widely appreciated as the genius of gondolas.

Lord Byron lived between 1816 and 1823 in Italy and adored the country’s cultural history and vibrant present. He was the most Italian of British poets and certainly the most Venetian one. During his stay, Venice had an exuberant gay community although the punishment for sodomy remained severe. However, the topography of the city provided unparalleled opportunities for clandestine meetings. According to Casanova, gondolas were primarily used for ‘sex acts on water’. Venetian gondoliers sold a range of erotic services to both male and female clients (John Addington Symonds for years had an affair – love at first sight – with a blue-eyed gondolier named Giacomo ‘Angelo’ Fusato). Byron greatly enjoyed the Venetian Carnival in which gay men happily took part. The traditional costumes disguised the features of the masked wearer making it impossible to guess his or her gender. In Beppo: A Venetian Story (1817) Byron praised the carnival in terms of its ‘Gaiety’. During his lifetime, the word gay was already understood in its current use.

Giovanni Battista [Tita] Falcieri was born in Venice in 1798 into a family of hereditary gondoliers. He was described as a huge but gentle person, black-bearded, and ferocious in appearance. He was first employed as manservant by Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis, the Gothic and homosexual novelist. Tita accompanied the author on his tour of the Continent and joined him on the long voyage to inspect his plantations in Jamaica. When in the early summer of 1818 Byron rented the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal, Falcieri entered into the poet’s service as his personal gondolier, probably through Lewis’s intervention. Like the former, Byron liked the proximity of young and muscular men. There have been suggestions of a homo-erotic exchange between the two authors of an attractive male member of staff in their entourage.

Falcieri was close to Byron at Missolonghi when the poet died on 19 April 1824. He accompanied the body to England and was a mourner at his funeral. Tita subsequently fought for the Greek cause in an Albanian regiment. Having returned to England, he was employed as butler by Isaac D’Israeli at Bradenham House, Buckinghamshire. On Isaac’s death in 1848, Byron’s friend John Hobhouse arranged for him to be employed as a Government messenger at the (Indian) Board of Control’s headquarters at Canon Row, Westminster. He got married a year later. Falcieri was later appointed chief messenger at the new India Office, but without the liability of having to carry any messages. Venice had become a distant memory. The gay gondolier had become a grey civil servant, living at no. 60 Seymour Street in respectable Marylebone where he died in December 1874.