Posted by Cori on March 31st, 2007 — Posted in Misc. text stuff
Confessedly, as a class, the quadroon women of New Orleans are the most beautiful in America. Their personal attractions are not only irresistible, but they have, in general, the best blood of America in their veins. They are mostly white in complexion, and are, many of them, highly educated and accomplished; and yet, by the law of Louisiana, no man may marry a quadroon woman, unless he can prove that he, too, has African blood in his veins. A law involving a greater outrage on propriety, a more blasphemous trifling with the heart’s affections, and evincing a more contemptible tyranny, those who will look at the matter from the beginning to the end, will agree with me, could not possibly have been enacted.[…]
A planter, it seems, had fallen deeply in love with a charming quadroon girl. He desired to marry her; but the law forbade. What was he to do? To tarnish her honour was out of the question; he had too much himself to seek to tarnish hers. Here was a dilemma. But he was not to be foiled. What true heart will be, if there be any virtue in expedients?
”– –In love,
His thoughts came down like a rushing stream.”
At last he got it. A capital thought, which could have crept out of no one’s brain, save that of a most desperate lover. He hit upon the expedient of extracting a little African blood from the veins of one of his slaves, and injecting it into his own. The deed done, the letter of the law was answered. He made proposals, was accepted, and they were married,–he being willing to risk his caste in obedience to a love higher and holier than any conventionalism which men have ever contrived to establish.
The American Prejudice Against Color by William G. Allen (1853).
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Posted by Cori on March 24th, 2007 — Posted in Misc. text stuff
Firmly in the “nothing new here” category comes this commentary on a crusade to ban “Penny Dreadfuls” [aka. trashy fiction at the end of the 19th century.]
Our friends have been occupied with the case of a half-witted boy who consumed Penny Dreadfuls and afterwards went and killed his mother. They infer that he killed his mother because he had read Penny Dreadfuls (post hoc ergo propter hoc) and they conclude very naturally that Penny Dreadfuls should be suppressed. But before roundly pronouncing the doom of this–to me unattractive–branch of fiction, would it not be well to inquire a trifle more deeply into cause and effect? In the first place matricide is so utterly unnatural a crime that there must be something abominably peculiar in a form of literature that persuades to it. But a year or two back, on the occasion of a former crusade, I took the pains to study a considerable number of Penny Dreadfuls. My reading embraced all those–I believe I am right in saying all–which were reviewed, a few days back, in the Daily Chronicle; and some others. I give you my word I could find nothing peculiar about them. They were even rather ostentatiously on the side of virtue. As for the bloodshed in them, it would not compare with that in many of the five-shilling adventure stories at that time read so eagerly by boys of the middle and upper classes. The style was ridiculous, of course: but a bad style excites nobody but a reviewer, and does not even excite him to deeds of the kind we are now trying to account for. The reviewer in the Daily Chronicle thinks worse of these books than I do. But he certainly failed to quote anything from them that by the wildest fancy could be interpreted as sanctioning such a crime as matricide.
[…]
For indeed it is not possible to name any book out of which a perverted mind will not draw food for its disease. The whole fallacy lies in supposing literature the cause of the disease. Evil men are not evil because they read bad books: they read bad books because they are evil: and being evil, or diseased, they are quickly able to extract evil or disease even from very good books.
Adventures in Criticism by Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch (1896)
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Posted by Cori on March 17th, 2007 — Posted in Misc. text stuff
Captain Thomas Pound.
On August 8th, 1689, this pirate, with five men and a boy, sailed out of Boston Harbour as passengers in a small vessel. When off Lovell’s Island, five other armed men joined them. Pound now seized the craft and took command, and declared his intention of going on a piratical cruise. The first vessel they met with they decided to take. It was a fishing boat. Pound ran his craft alongside, but at the last moment his heart failed him, and he merely bought eight penn’o’th of mackerel from the surprised fishermen.
Philip Gosse, in The Pirates’ Who’s Who.
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Posted by Cori on March 10th, 2007 — Posted in Misc. text stuff
Reconstituting my lost blog — hoorah for the Internet Wayback Machine. I’ve lost some, but not much, given I’m such a lackadaisical soul. This is obviously the best of quotes to begin again with.
Let them pile up costly and lofty monuments–reaching heavenward; let the artist cut their names and virtues deep into the enduring granite; let the mechanic, with all his skill, set the foundations, yet the lettering will perish and the stone will crumble. Parasitic plants will fasten upon them; beneath their destroying grasp names and dates will disappear, and generations yet to come will be unable to tell whether they look upon the grave of a prince or upon that of a peddler–the narrow house of him who retired to the straw pallet of poverty, will not then be known from that of him who reclined upon the silken couch of affluence–
“Death levels all ranks,
And lays the shepherd’s crook beside the sceptre.”
From Nick Baba’s last drink, and other sketches by George Paul Goff. Pome by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (The Lady of Lyons).
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