From The Vaults #1

As some of you may know, my job is to scan books. I scan them to .tif format files, photoshop the scratches out and send them on their merry way to a publishing house of some kind. At the moment I'm building a book from scratch - it's about Irish Feminism in the early to mid 19th Century. But I digress, my point is that occasionally I'll come across something in these old books that really needs saving for one reason or another. Some snippets are hilarious, some offensive, some just plain brilliant. Here are a few of these dusty old gems:

The first is from a book called 'Cosmic Consciousness' by a Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke M.D., "formerly medical superintendent of the asylum for the insane, London, Canada". It was first published in 1901, and it's basically a very long 'study' into the concept of cosmic enlightenment. Burke reckons himself 'enlightened' (forgive me if I use in inordinate number of inverted commas here, it's just that most of this is complete bullshit), and considers examples of other notable enlightened people of history: Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Dante Aligheri, Francis Bacon, William Blake, Honoré de Balzac, Walt Whitman* and more. (His list of almost-but-not-quite-enlightened people is interesting: Moses, Socrates, Blaise Pascal, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Henry David Thoreau). At some point in the book, he starts to analyse the correlation between 'age at enlightenment' and 'age at death', providing us with a helpful table of reference. This is the first bit that made me laugh.

Look at the table. It's chronological, but the mid-to-late 19th Century (Bucke's own era) is vastly over-represented. His own initials are bang in the middle of the list (#33) , surrounded by the initials of other people that he was, coincidentally enough, pretty well acquainted with. Now, call me a cynical old bastard, but it does look an awful lot like Dr. Bucke simply had Delusions of Grandeur on an overwhelming scale, not only ranking himself alongside Socrates and Moses on the spiritual enlightenment scale but roping another bunch of self-regarding Victorian cock-ends into his drawing room to sit around in a circle and profoundly discuss how they're all, like, totally super-enlightened right now.

If that wasn't ridiculous enough, check this out. I think he's arguing here that enlightenment to 'cosmic consciousness' is a kind of evolutionary process, if not necessarily in strictly Darwinian terms, and in some cases can lead to insanity rather than anything positive. Not too controversial in itself, but during this section he drops a truly priceless bit of classic racism, with some very very specious reasoning thrown in for good measure. It's a fucking marvel.

There’s so much wrong with this logic that I can’t even be fucked to start. What I will say though is that, in 1901, widespread psychological evaluation was probably not one of the most pressing concerns of the black community. And while we’re on the subject, I doubt that Victorian-era Canada** could offer much in terms of a representative sample anyway.

Maybe I’m wrong, I dunno. He does have a Wikipedia page after all.

This one’s from a batch of books we got about the 18^th Century Scottish social economist Adam Smith. You may have noticed him on the back of a Scottish twenty quid note. One whole volume was dedicating to the context of his theories – extracts from contemporary journals and such. I found some great stuff in there, including this Georgian-era depiction of a city of vices. It’s called ‘Gin Lane’.

It’s nice to see that gin’s not changed in 300 years, eh?

And now for the piece de resistance. Quoted heavily in this volume are the works of Daniel Defoe, notable of course for writing ‘Robinson Crusoe’, and a fella called Arthur Young. Both men traveled Britain extensively and wrote in great detail about their journeys and the subcultures and specifics that could be found across the land. This is an extract from Arthur Young’s ‘Southern Tour’, published in 1768, in which he ‘reviews’ the inns and taverns he stayed at during the trip.

See that? The Antelope – a nice place to be… 241 years ago.

Just a quickie to finish with, and I promise this is awesome. It’s from a batch of books sent to us by the Naval and Military Press detailing the first-hand accounts of Australian WWI soldiers, mostly Light Horse regiments. These guys saw some very nasty fighting, particularly against the Turks at Gallipoli, and later on the Western Front alongside mostly Canadian and American troops, pushing the German army back across North-Eastern France and Belgium in 1918.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the Real-Life Rambo: Sergeant Stanley Robert MacDougall, 47^th Battalion, A.I.F.:

Fuck yeah.

* It was only when searching for the link to Walt Whitman's Wikipedia entry that I saw how awesome he looks. He looks like Dickens, Father Christmas and Socrates all rolled into one awesomely bearded human-shaped unstoppable ball of awesome (see right):

** The first time I went to write "Canada", it came out as "Conan". Psychological analysis on a postcard please