#twopence

[chocolatepot]

Did just a little bookbinding project this weekend. A few days ago, I came across this prayerbook from 1895 by Lilian Montagu, an important figure in turn of the century Reform Judaism. It's a fascinating primary source and piece of ephemera - written for the needs of busy, young working-class Jewish women, with prayers for things they would expect to deal with such as going into service, having to work on the Sabbath, and getting engaged. The final prayer is for facing antisemitic persecution.

I really love trying to match historic typesets. I retyped this largely in Century Schoolbook, with the numbers in the publishing date and table of contents in Bembo Std in order to get them oldstyle, not on the baseline. (The back copy is also in Bembo Std. I don't know how I obliterated the Renegade Bindery logo.) The blackletter font in 2001 Rotunda Formata, which was the closest match to the original I could find, although it's still unsatisfyingly different in a few ways. And one little ornament on the cover from Sughayer Separates, a very very useful group of fonts for historical typesets.

Unfortunately I'm just noticing now that I messed up the cover! Forgot about the border and the "Price Twopence." But in general, I think this looks quite a lot like the original - a credible piece of late Victorian ephemera.

Because the original is in a nonstandard page size - very tall and thin - I decided to make this version out of a nonstandard page size. I used some paper I'd had cut down to "executive" size a while back ... although I'd forgotten that my printer gets stupid with smaller page sizes, and messes up the margins. Annoying.

[dathen]

For a chap who’s perpetually hard-up, I must say that young Bingo is the most wasteful telegraphist I ever struck. He’s got no notion of condensing. The silly ass simply pours out his wounded soul at twopence a word, or whatever it is, without a thought.

fucking CRYING drag his ass, Bertie!! this is NOT the fun kind of can’t shut up disease!!

Did some morbid curiosity number crunching and based on the estimates I found, the first telegram in the story cost around $45, and the second around $30. Good lord above.

$8 of those were just for words addressing Bertie. Whoever said I wouldn’t end up using math for important things in real life—

[quill-of-thoth]

Letters from Watson, the Engineer's Thumb

Crimes in Context: Counterfeiting, circa 1889

What coins were the Stark-Becher gang trying to make, anyway? And did they actually need a person squishing hydraulic press to do it?

Most of the cash in circulation in Victorian England would have been coins, so it's time to refresh our memories on what they all are, since I last addressed currency smaller than a pound in The Man with the Twisted Lip. We will be restricting ourselves to denominations that the Stark-Becher gang may have been minting, based on the comment that the hydraulic press was necessary to make coins that were previously minted in silver.

Imperial Currency Definitions

Pound/Quid/Sovereign: Not applicable, the Sovereign coin is gold, but it's the base unit of the currency we're dealing with. It also would have been hard to pass as genuine just because it's a large denomination - the era's equivalent of a hundred dollar bill. Indeed, our Bank of England inflation calculator returns a modern value of £107.

Crown: Five shillings / a quarter pound. Represented by a silver coin. Probably the largest coin you'd make change for without being annoyed by it.

Shilling: 1/20th of a pound. A silver coin. Crowns and Shillings are our most likely candidates, as they're in common use in 1889 and is the kind of cash an average man might have on hand. I personally think shillings are the most likely coin to counterfeit, as a lot of accounting of people's wages, expenses, etc. in this time period is written as pounds / shillings / pennies (L/s/d) and silver pennies (And their horrible spawn of sixpence, twopence, etc) are probably not worth the effort. Also, while there were silver pennies in circulation, the fact that things like silver twopence were minted for maundy money makes the timeline and consistency of their minting beyond my pay grade as a blogger. And probably confusing for a coiner to get exactly right, given the payoff. Hydraulic press:

Modern (paper*) money is printed with several aspects that make it harder to reproduce: the exact fiber content of the paper, the multi layered and detailed design (with parts that can only be seen under UV light, parts that can only be seen with a magnifying glass, etc.), the embossed parts of the print design, and the exact chemical components of the ink can be analyzed to see if a note is authentic. The ink in US dollars also contains a smattering of heavy metals that aren't great for human health, so I don't recommend consuming money in any way - don't lick it, don't snort things off it, don't put it in your blender for a science fair project. It would be chemically somewhat dangerous to counterfeit modern currency at home, assuming you got anywhere close to the right ink.

*Some countries use polymer, but same difference. It will kill your blender, though.

The Victorians did... none of that, really. The idea of designing money to be harder to fake was already around, but metal coins can only be produced to a certain degree of precision with the tools that were available in the 1800's: you essentially heat a disk of the correct metal (a blank) and press it with a stamp. The hydraulic press would, of course, squash blanks between two plates of stamps precisely, and with great force.

Both silver and gold have relatively low melting points (under 2,000 degrees F / close to 1,000 C) and are malleable at lower temperatures than the iron or steel of a hydraulic press. Silver amalgam (a silver/mercury alloy) has an even lower melting point, so it would be even easier to fit to a mold.

Essentially, anybody who knew much about molding metal and could get a precise-ish model of the coin in question would make pretty convincing money. A hydraulic press large enough to fit three grown men between the plates of may have been overkill.

[tybaltsjuliet]

Noah was a charity-boy, but not a workhouse orphan. No chance-child was he, for he could trace his genealogy all the way back to his parents, who lived hard by; his mother being a washerwoman, and his father a drunken soldier, discharged with a wooden leg, and a diurnal pension of twopence-halfpenny and an unstateable fraction. The shop-boys in the neighbourhood had long been in the habit of branding Noah in the public streets, with the ignominious epithets of “leathers,” “charity,” and the like; and Noah had borne them without reply. But, now that fortune had cast in his way a nameless orphan, at whom even the meanest could point the finger of scorn, he retorted on him with interest. This affords charming food for contemplation. It shows us what a beautiful thing human nature may be made to be; and how impartially the same amiable qualities are developed in the finest lord and the dirtiest charity-boy.

[world-of-wales]

This is a very touchy subject I know, but I feel like adding my twopence worth in the conversation about the cost of Catherine’s clothes. Firstly, I understand that in today’s economy, these things are put into great focus, especially when so many people across the country are struggling to provide basic things like food, heating and rent for themselves and their families. Personally, I feel this struggle too. I have just never been upset at people with more money than I have using it in whatever way they feel like - that is life! The next argument is that she is a public figure. Yes she is, but the taxpayer doesn’t fund her clothing. Do they even look at the cost of the men’s clothing on their annual lists? Suits and dress shoes can be very expensive, yet for all Charles’ stylish outfits, I don’t see his tallies on that list. And even beyond that - what about the government officials! Do we have a breakdown of Rishi Sunak’s clothing cost per year? Or better yet, his wife? The response will likely be that they have their own money. They do, which is surely what funds their wardrobe - but so do the royal family. I feel it’s really unfair how royal women in particular are always reduced to and criticised for their outfits, from how it looks to how much it costs, when even royal men and government officials don’t face any of that backlash on the same scale, especially when it comes from private funds! The irony is that if royal watchers didn’t pay as much attention to it (like UFO No More for example), we wouldn’t even really know how much they spend on clothing each year. I’m certainly not sitting with my notebook recording whenever I see my boss wearing a new blazer, regardless of how bad my financial situation is that month. Sorry, but this is one area of criticism that really gets on my nerves for these reasons.

ANON OMFG THANK YOU!!!! THIS SUMS UP EVERYTHING IN THE BEST POSSIBLE TERMS. I'll admit I too am guilty of being a critic when it comes to clothes but all the blame around this issue I feel like is very unfairly put on catherines shoulders and the people who've been following me for some time will be surprised by this but I just find this constant criticism when it comes to this so unnecessary now. I just want to be done with it. You've explained it in such a good way and this is how I have started to feel now too. So thank you for sending this in

[hayleysstark]

so fucking embarrassing to send my writing out for publication. i feel like an impoverished little boy in victorian london, standing on a street corner whilst i recite poems and fables, hoping desperately that some kind stranger might come along and put twopence in the ragged cap clutched in my hand

[not-psychotic]

i wanted to reblog, but then i figured i didn't want to take up space in your notes in case this is an astronomically bad take, but. regarding the hannibal liking/disliking bella discourse.

i think one of my favourite aspects of the episodes involving bella is the nuance with which her relationship with hannibal is treated.

on her part, she trusts him and considers him if not a friend then an ally. she likes him enough to be willing to die in front of him, enough to bring him a token of her gratitude.

hannibal feels about her the same way he feels about a lot of people on the show: indifferent, but faintly amused. there's like a distinction between the humans he considers no better than pigs, humans he only deems worthy of his time because he can play with them/enjoy what intellectual stimulation he can get from them (think jack, bedelia, abigail, alana, and yeah, even bella), and finally people like will.

he throws a coin to decide whether he wants to save her or not precisely because he feels so ambivalent. if he had disliked her the same way he did... i don't know, franklin? he probably would have poured himself some wine and just let her pass. i think he betrayed his indifference in throwing the coin, and when it landed on the "right" side, he was acting in a way that would protect him from any judgement, as is his usual.

after all, a doctor is morally obligated to give first aid to anyone in need of it – it's literally in their oath. if questioned about it, he could have defended himself by saying that while he respected bella's freedom, by choosing to die in front of him she had put him in the position to save her.

i think the best part about his manipulative skills is that he always, always covers himself by making it sound as if he were in a corner, forced by circumstances apparently out of his control to act in a certain way. he had to kill tobias, or he would have died. he had to save bella, or he would have betrayed what all doctors stand for. no one can question him, so he acts undetected.

at the same time, i wonder how much bella actually trusted him. she didn't seem too friendly with him, almost as if unnerved by his presence. she knew he was a doctor, knew that he would be obligated to help her, so why choose to die in front of him? she says she didn't want jack to find her, but i'm sure there must have been plenty other ways to go about that without involving hannibal. honestly i'm curious to know if maybe she also wanted to know what hannibal would do.

sorry now, this has become a GIGANTIC ask and i don't even know how i got here. but yeah, that's just my twopence on their dynamic, because it's really interesting and criminally overlooked. anyways. hope you have a good day!

yeah he flips the coin because he doesn’t care to make the choice himself. as to their relationship, we only ever see bella in scenes with jack or with hannibal or both. she wanted to die, she didn’t want jack to find her so her only other option was hannibal. which is extremely sad. saying that hannibal saving her was one of his “nice” “selfless” moments is insane to me. bella wanted to escape and hannibal plunged her right back into the miserable life she tried to escape from, now more trapped than before. and we shouldn’t act like the hippocratic oath is important to hannibal in any way

[this-bitch-is-indeed-empty]

im thinking about maurice and how in the british museum when maurice is trying to persuade alec to stop blackmailing him and become lovers instead, in the movie he says

"i dont find you are, my god if youd have split on my to ducie id have broken you. might have cost me hundreds, but ive got them. and the police always back my sort against yours. as good as i? ... come outside"

whereas in the book he says

"i dont find you are!" there was a pause before the storm then he burst out: "by god, if youd have split on me to mr ducie id have broken you. it might have cost me hundred, but ive got them, and the police always back my sort against yours. you dont know. wed have got you into quod for blackmail, after which - id have blown out my brains." "killed yourself? death?" "i should have known by that time that i loved you. too late ... everythings too late"

i think its interesting that in the book this is him getting over his worries about class, that he ought to "keep to his class" rather than following his heart. it shows him thinking outloud, and realising that if he did "keep to his class" he would always be miserable but by loving alec he has a chance of being happy. on the other hand in the film it shows maurice directly using his class as leverage over alec to persuade him that blackmail isnt worth i,t and it would be easier for both of them to be lovers instead.

the movie, i think, in general makes maurice a lot less emotional than he is in the book, which i guess is understandable because his emotionality is skated over in the book with a sort of very english stoicism.

for instance

"id jump out the window for twopence." having spoken, he began to contemplate suicide.

and

their corespondence has ceased several months ago, maurice’s last had been written after birmingham, and announced he should not kill himself. clive had never supposed he would, and was glad the melodrama was over.

are how his thoughts of suicide are first brought up and closed in an ealier part of the book. theres clearly more emotion being felt that we are allowed to see as the reader.

the maurice of the film is almost who the maurice of the book pretends to be. the periods of deep mental ill health, that it seems maurice himself wills the reader to see only summary of, are omited entirely from the film.

[freakoutgirl]

Prefacing this first to say I don't like AI art. However I've been thinking recently about those arguments about how it takes its information from other existing artists, and honestly in a way that's true of humans making art, too. I remember seeing this quote once (apparently from Austin Klein, author of Steal Like an Artist) that goes “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.” This whole thing is covered in academia by the concept of intertextuality, coined in the 1960s by Julia Kristeva. She herself said: "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." (Of course as with any post-structualist thoughts, she gets a little more complex than this, so sorry grad school film theorists if I'm misrepresenting her here). So there can be an argument to be made that humans "copy" existing art similar to how AI does -- the way one artist's sky is painted may be modeled after another artist whose style they admired, the way a character's pose emits a sort of motion may have come from the artist studying comics they borrowed from a library. One difference between this and AI though is that humans are capable of not just copying information but synthesizing it, whereas computers, at least at this moment in time, are not. We take the information that has come before us and piece it together, compare the works that came before us, expand upon it, critique it, parody it. There's another quote by C.S. Lewis that goes, "if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often is has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." Despite the fact that nothing is "original" in a pure sense, despite the fact that all art takes its parts from the art before it, it remains true. AI art is not true.

[xoceansx]

"'You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other thing is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that — if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is — I wouldn't give twopence for him' — here Caleb's mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers — 'whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do.'"

— George Eliot, Middlemarch [1871]

[toughpaperround]

Queen's Hall, London

Built in 1893 and destroyed in the WWII blitz, this Hall was the original venue for 'The Proms' concerts as we now know them in the Royal Albert Hall.

It had fantastic acoustics, but the decor was rather drab and the seating famously cramped. In 1913, The Musical Times said,

In the placing of the seats - apparently no account whatever is taken even of the average length of lower limbs, and it appeared to be the understanding that legs were to be left in the cloak room. At twopence apiece this would be expensive, and there might be difficulties afterwards if the cloak room sorting arrangements were not perfect.

Source via wiki page: JSTOR (subscription required)

[quill-of-thoth]

Letters from Watson: The Man with the Twisted Lip

Crimes in Context. Sit down bloggers, it's time for a few rounds with my current least-favorite monetary system, and an actual scale of the wealth difference between the poorest and wealthiest Victorians. I already did some math here, where @thethirdromana did some research regarding other contemporary math failures about begging. I swear this will be interesting after we get through the math.

Imperial Currency Definitions

Pound, or "quid" or "pound sterling": Literally one pound of silver coins. (Sterling is a silver alloy.) The gold coin representing it was called a Sovereign. It's worth 240 pennies or 20 shillings. There was also a gold half-sovereign. (120 pennies, 10 shillings...)

Shilling: 1/20th of a pound. A silver coin. Penny also pence, but only as a plural: 1/240th of a pound, or 1/12th of a shilling. Confusingly, there were silver pennies, copper pennies, and bronze pennies, with the exact same value, during the 1800's - silver pennies were minted specifically for royal charity, to be given out on Maundy Thursday. (The day before Good Friday.)

A lot of victorian accounts are written in Pounds, shillings, pennies, represented as L/s/d, but there were also other coins. I do not like them any better than this setup, but they provide context, so here we go.

Guinea: One pound and one shilling. Not it's own coin by the 1890's, since the last ones were minted in 1814, probably because they're stupid. I've seen it cited that if a professional gentleman was paid a guinea he got the pound and his clerks or assistants got the shilling.

Crown: Five shillings / a quarter pound. Represented by a silver coin.

Sixpence / Fourpence (Groat) / threepence / twopence (half-groat): conveniently, the numbers within the name tell you all you need to know. These were silver but twopence was also only minted for Maundy money during this era. Halfpenny / Ha'penny: Half a penny, a bronze coin. Farthing: A quarter of a penny, also a bronze coin, presumably for transactions like buying a single egg or leaving an extremely insulting tip.

Typical Wages:

Poverty: Laborers and factory workers may get anything from 4 shillings (0.2 pounds) to 1 pound per week. Women and children were routinely paid much less for the same work as men. Francis Moulton's 8s room from The Noble Bachelor cost up to two weeks wages per night. If an average adult male working in a factory was paid about 1 pound per week, he would make about 50-52 pounds per year. If a maid was paid 4 shillings a week, she would make about 10 pounds a year. If a child was paid 1 shilling a week, they would make about two and a half pounds a year. My sources cited a variety of years from 1860 on, so take all of these as ballpark estimates. The difference between 10 pounds and 50 pounds per year doesn't sound that stark, but today it's the equivalent of 1,000 pounds (1,200 USD) and 5,000 pounds (6,000 USD). Neither is enough to live on now, and it wasn't enough to live independently then, but it's the difference between living on L 2.7 / USD 3.2 a day and L 13.7 / USD 16.4 per day: You starve a lot faster at that first rate.

(Obligatory note that live in servants often had it better than factory workers making the same wage on account of having room and board provided as part of their compensation. Hence why a governess - a gentlewoman in distress - considers L50 a year a fairly comfortable wage: she's not paying rent, or for the bulk of her food. Like today's population of new graduates teaching English abroad.)

Comparative Wealth: Neville St. Clair states he's making about L 700 a year by begging. This is the equivalent of 71,000 pounds / 85,200 USD today. It's about the same salary as a modern university chairperson. At the time of this story it's enough to live in an upper middle class suburb very securely, with several servants. It is, however, an absolute bullshit number. To acquire five hundred and sixty six (ish) pennies per day, in 691 coins, St Clair probably had upwards of five hundred people toss him a coin. Presuming that the reason nobody gave him twopence was low circulation of that specific coin, we can estimate that few, if any, people gave him three pence or more, judging by a lack of any of three pence, four pence, or sixpence coins. (There also aren't any farthings but I'm not sure what 0.25 pennies could actually buy you in those days. Possibly people who had any money to spare didn't carry them.) If Neville works his corner for just long enough to get home by the 5:15 train, and it takes him maybe ten minutes to change out of his disguise, it's a reasonable assumption that he leaves his corner by 4:30 ish. He isn't noted as leaving particularly early in the mornings either, so I'm going to roughly estimate that he works about eight hours a day. If so he is earning more than a penny per MINUTE begging. He's getting someone throwing him a penny every 55ish seconds. There's a line of his benefactors dropping coins into his hat. Threadneedle street was home to the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange: presumably St. Clair picked this location because people going to and from either actually had some money to spare. But it also leads to an inevitable alternate idea: since it's impossible for St. Clair to be regularly making two pounds a day begging, perhaps his beggar disguise is for more criminal reasons... perhaps a long running plot to rob the bank? Either he is casing the place or he's a lookout. Or perhaps he's the accomplice of a clerk skimming his own pound or two a day out of the change from deposits, handing it over to St. Clair whenever he walks out for lunch or at the end of his day so that he's never discovered with a truly stupid amount of pennies.

And as far as Holmes is concerned... he's brilliantly deduced the bizarre portion of this case. Who cares that the scale of the begging is impossible? The Victorian middle class could be just as blinded by propaganda regarding the poor as we can be today. Even though there were no official public services and the myth of the welfare queen is a modern invention there were definitely people who resented the entire idea of charity: human nature has not completely changed in the last 130 years.

[chaoticallymuse]

Will and the Six-Fingered Nigel

“The Devil Tavern, if you must know.” Will sighed and leaned against one of the posts of the bed. “I had such plans for this evening. The pursuit of blind drunkenness and wayward women was my goal. But alas, it was not to be. No sooner had I consumed my third drink in the Devil than I was accosted by a delightful small flower-selling child who asked me for twopence for a daisy. The price seemed steep, so I refused. When I told the girl as much, she proceeded to rob me.” “A little girl robbed you?” Tessa said. “Actually, she wasn’t a little girl at all, as it turns out, but a midget in a dress with a penchant for violence, who goes by the name of Six-Fingered Nigel.” “Easy mistake to make,” Jem said.

“I want to be back before dark,” Will said. “I have an assignation in Soho this evening with a certain attractive someone.” “Goodness,” Tessa said to the back of his head. “If you keep seeing Six-Fingered Nigel like this, he’ll expect you to declare your intentions.” Jem choked on his tea.

[vespulagermanica]

Injecting this paper into the dark academia girlies veins so that they see the world the way i do

[talesofpassingtime]

"You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that — if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is — I wouldn’t give twopence for him” — here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers — “whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do."

— Mary Ann Evans, Middlemarch  

[spacerangersam]

putting my own twopence out there about the idea of havers somehow having something to do with the captain’s death: uh, no, i don’t he did? i think the actor has come back for season 5, but i assume that’s to film a scene with him and cap before he left for africa? idk, it would cut of ruin the emotional impact of the scene where cap’s remembering him leaving, thinking it’s the last time he’ll ever see havers, if he just- came back afterwards?

it’s difficult because i know ghosts does kind of like to pull things out of nowhere eg fanny’s maths skills and carol’s cheating, but even so, i don’t think they’d go so far to completely undercut such an emotional scene by having havers pop up after like it was no big deal.