WILLIAM AND HELEN ALLINGHAM This is about a book that we found in Thoreau’s personal library and another book by the same author, out of which Thoreau copied into his 1st commonplace book. Our project, if there is one, will be to figure out what Thoreau was deriving from this particular author — what it was, if anything, that Thoreau had found of value in his work. “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project William Allingham HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ALLINGHAM HELEN ALLINGHAM 1824 March 19, Friday: William Allingham was born near Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Ireland, as a son of a bank manager. Jose Antonio de Oliveira Leite de Barros, conde de Basto replaced Joaquim Pedro Gomes de Oliveira as Secretary of State (prime minister) of Portugal. In New York, David How, a white farmer, was hanged for murder. IT WAS JUST A BABY. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT William Allingham “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX HELEN ALLINGHAM WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 1837 At the age of 13 or 14, William Allingham became an employee of his father’s bank. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. William Allingham “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ALLINGHAM HELEN ALLINGHAM May 9, Tuesday: Thomas Carlyle’s THE FRENCH REVOLUTION began to come off the presses: The work’s message must not be over-simplified: but it does seem a clear statement of Carlyle’s belief in the effects of the destruction of God’s natural order. When the leaders of French society neglected their duties, they found the political order challenged, and feudalism, then monarchy, abandoned. As faithlessness broke out and society broke down, the duty of ruling was passed to those unfitted for it, and finally to a mob. Anarchy, which Carlyle regarded as the manifestation of divine punishment, continued more and more violently until (as personified by Danton and Robespierre) exhausted with its own excesses; in the absence of a natural order came, too, rampant injustice. Humanity and civilization were wrecked, and the effects spread far beyond France. Carlyle explained this with unrestrained passion. He saw history as a continuum, and what had driven him on was the belief that the lessons of half a century earlier with which he lectured his readers were, like all experience, still vital today. This, like so much else of Carlyle’s thought, had German roots. Talking to his friend William Allingham in 1871, Carlyle said: “I often think of Immanuel Kant’s notion —no real Time or Space, these are only appearances— and think it is true.” This is the “natural supernaturalism” of SARTOR RESARTUS. To make the proper didactic point, he communicates facts with, as in Oliver Cromwell eight years later, “elucidations” that reflect his own prejudices. Like most of Carlyle’s works, it is self-centered because it is more about Carlyle than about its notional subject.... A central passage outlines not just the effects of the betrayal of feudal principles, but also sets out Carlyle’s own agenda for the next fifteen years. It is strong meat, too, for those who believe that Carlyle was some sort of proto-fascist who made a rule of siding with the oppressor: Fancy, then, some Five full-grown Millions of such gaunt figures, with their haggard faces (figures hâves); in wollen jupes, with copper-studded leather girths, and high sabots, — starting up to ask, as in forest-roarings, their washed Upper Classes, after long unreviewed centuries, virtually this question: How have ye treated us; how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you? The answer can be read in flames, over the nightly summer- sky. This is the feeding and leading we have had of you; EMPTYNESS, — of pocket, of stomach, of head and of heart. Behold there is nothing in us; nothing but what Nature gives her wild children in the desert: Ferocity and Appetite: Strength grounded on Hunger. Did ye mark among your Rights of Man, that man was not to die of starvation, while there was bread reaped by him? It is among the Mights of Man. ... But the ultimate message points ahead, from England in 1837 when Carlyle finished writing: “Out of a world of Unwise nothing but an Unwisdom can be made. Arrange it, constitution-build it, sift it through ballot-boxes as thou wilt, it is and remains an Unwisdom.” This belief was to dominate his thinking, producing within him a pessimism that alternated between comedy and ferocity. FRENCH REVOLUTION, I FRENCH REVOLUTION, II HDT WHAT? INDEX HELEN ALLINGHAM WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 1848 September 26, Tuesday: Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born in the village of Swadlincote, near Burton on Trent in Derbyshire, England, daughter of a rural physician, Alexander Henry Paterson, with a daughter of a Manchester wine merchant, Mary Chance Herford. The family would soon relocate to Altrincham in Cheshire. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project William Allingham HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ALLINGHAM HELEN ALLINGHAM 1850 1 William Allingham dedicated his POEMS (London: Chapman & Hall) to James Henry Leigh Hunt. ALLINGHAM’S POEMS 1. Unfortunately Google Books has not as yet made this 1850 London edition that Thoreau copied from into his 1st commonplace book available — I have needed to substitute the 1st American edition, published in Boston in 1861. HDT WHAT? INDEX HELEN ALLINGHAM WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 1852 An anonymous essay, by William Allingham, on “Irish Ballad Singers and Street Singers,” appeared in Household Words. HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ALLINGHAM HELEN ALLINGHAM 1854 William Allingham’s PEACE AND WAR (London: G. Routledge). Also, in this year, from the same publisher, his DAY AND NIGHT SONGS, illustrated by his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He moved from Ireland to London with the intention of finding work in literary journalism. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project William Allingham HDT WHAT? INDEX HELEN ALLINGHAM WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 1855 William Allingham’s THE MUSIC MASTER: A LOVE STORY. AND TWO SERIES OF DAY AND NIGHT SONGS.... (London: G. Routledge & Company). (This edition would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.) THE MUSIC MASTER HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ALLINGHAM HELEN ALLINGHAM 1861 June: By invitation, William Allingham visited Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The popular weekly literary magazine of London, Once A Week. An Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Art, Science, and Popular Information: JUN 1861 ONCE A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX HELEN ALLINGHAM WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 1862 May: The rural physician Alexander Henry Paterson, father of 13-year-old Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson, died while treating his patients during an epidemic of diphtheria. Helen’s 3-year-old sister Isabel also succumbed. After this the widowed Mary Chance Herford Paterson would relocate with her surviving children to Birmingham in order to obtain the assistance of Paterson aunts. CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT William Allingham “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ALLINGHAM HELEN ALLINGHAM 1863 Completion of serial publication of William Allingham’s verse novel LAURENCE BLOOMFIELD IN IRELAND, which dealt with land-relations in a manner sympathetic to the tenants, during the previous year and this year in Fraser’s Magazine. His landlord hero, upon taking charge of his estate, dismissed his bailiff for cruelty and burned the bailiff’s list of Ribbonmen, halting evictions and instituting fair dealing. Despite this fair treatment of the peasants, this kindly landlord was unable to prevent them from taking their revenge on the former bailiff. This novel, when it would be published in book form, would win him the appreciation of George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Ford Madox Brown. The founding of the “Irish People” newspaper. Upon his return to Ireland at the completion of his military service with the 11th Lancashire Rifle Volunteers, John Boyle O’Reilly enlisted with the 10th Hussars in Dublin. HDT WHAT? INDEX HELEN ALLINGHAM WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 1864 William Allingham edited THE BALLAD BOOK: A SELECTION OF THE CHOICEST BRITISH BALLADS (London: Macmillan, Golden Treasury Series) and provided a preface giving an account of the genre. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project William Allingham HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM ALLINGHAM HELEN ALLINGHAM 1865 January 15, Sunday: In Concord, Moses Prichard died. Thomas Carlyle took the last ms leaves of his THE HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA, CALLED FREDERICK THE GREAT to the post-office. He would comment that his labors on this history had nearly killed him:2 Evening still vivid to me. I was not joyful of mood; sad rather, mournfully thankful, but indeed half-killed, and utterly wearing out and sinking into stupefied collapse after my “comatose” efforts to continue the long fight of thirteen years to finis. On her [Jane’s] face, too, when I went out, there was a silent, faint, and pathetic smile, which I well felt at the moment, and better now! 2. William Allingham would characterize this work as “the reductio ad absurdum of Carlyleism.” Simon Heffer would say: The book is shot through with Carlyle’s fundamental prejudices. It is a pursuit of a hero, one made all the more special by his self-reclamation from a degenerate, effete youth. It is a celebration of Germanism, more particularly Prussianism, and the resolute process of Germanisation. Above all, it is the text adduced, quite fairly, by Carlyle’s critics to prove his belief in the “might is right” thesis.