An Intermission -- Reading The Victorians -- July 26, 2018

Off to Hurricane Harbor:

Relaxing in the pool:

Talking to newfound friend (long, long story):

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The Book Page

From Chapter 13, "Marx - Ruskin - Pre-Raphaelites", The Victorians, A. N. Wilson, c. 2003:

The word "Pre-Raphaelite" in popular modern parlance does not refer to particular painting techniques or attitudes to the Middles Ages.

[Pre-Raphaelite] means young women with pale faces, pouting lips and abundant hair. The hair was important -- this was the 1850's in England; so important that hairdressing, for the first time in English history, came out of the private domain of the home.

Women who could afford to now went to hair-stylists -- the styles varying much from year to year. No respectable woman wore her hair loose -- which is what gives those loose-haired Pre-Raphaelite maidens so much of their erotic charm for the men who painted them and the men who bought the pictures.

And in an age where everything was up for sale, the exporters and importers did not stop at hair itself. Great quantities of hair were imported into Britain fro the European continent. The "hair harvest" in Italy was an annual feature in poorer villages and 200,000 lbs of hair were sold annually in the Paris markets, at a price of 10 shillings or 12 shillings per ounce -- 20 schillings for really long hair.

"We saw several girls," noted one observer at the Collenee market, "sheared, one after the other like sheep, and as many more standing ready for the shears, with their caps in their hands, and their long hair combed out, and hanging down to their waists."

So valuable a commodity had hair become that The Hairdressers Journal reflected on "one most unpleasant feature connected with the business" -- the prevalence of hair thieves who would set upon young women whose head showed a valuable crop, shear them, "and always kept on the safe side of the law, apart from the robbery of the hair."

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The Geography Page

Maluku Island, Moluccas, Malacca 

A. N. Wilson brought me here, to wiki:

Ternate is an island in the Maluku Islands (Moluccas) of eastern Indonesia.

It was the center of the former Sultanate of Ternate. It is off the west coast of the larger island of Halmahera.

Like its neighbouring island, Tidore, Ternate is a visually dramatic cone-shape.

The two are ancient Islamic sultanates (Ternate's Sultanate and Tidore's) with a long history of bitter rivalry. The islands were once the world's single major producer of cloves, a commodity that allowed their sultans to become amongst the wealthiest and most powerful of all sultans in the Indonesian region.

In the precolonial era, Ternate was the dominant political and economic power over most of the "Spice Islands" of Maluku.

Today, Ternate City is the largest town in the province of North Maluku, within which the island constitutes a municipality. It is, however, no longer the provincial capital, a title now held by the town of Sofifi on Halmahera.

The "Ternate Essay" was a pioneering account of evolution by natural selection written on the island by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858 and famously sent to Charles Darwin. Darwin at once responded by publishing Wallace's essay alongside his own accounts of the theory. 

Because of the blog, I "understand" Malacca.