The Trouble with Tom (31 page)

Comfort for the Ruptured

For anyone curious about E. B. Foote, there is no better place to start than with the books themselves. Not only was Foote a prolific author, he also frequently excerpted and recycled his material under different titles: anyone trying to amass a comprehensive collection of Footesiana would have a lifetime pursuit on their hands. But the three ur-texts are undoubtedly
Medical
Common Sense
(1857),
Plain Home Talk
(1870), and the
Sammy Tubbs
series (1874). Thanks to Foote's popularity, it is relatively easy to track old copies of the first two titles.
Tubbs
was not as popular, but it is now much loved among collectors in the know; consequently, you can easily pay $100 for a single volume from that series. If you know anything of human nature, it will not surprise you to hear that volume 5,
Elimination and Reproduction
, is the most eagerly sought one of all. It is only in the first printing (quite rare indeed) that illustrator Stephens managed to sneak in the infamous tooting vagina.

Curiously, in addition to a great many British and American editions, Foote's works were widely published in German in both Germany and the United States.
Plain Home Talk
, for example, was published as
Offene Volks-Sprache
. Foote himself made a point of advertising that he was available to give private consultations in his Manhattan office in German. This, I think, is a clue for an intrepid scholar. German-Americans appear to have had access to a body of American contraceptive literature
written in German
. I have never heard of anyone publishing in German getting prosecuted by Comstock and his minions. Fortunately for horny immigrants, meddling religious prudes tend toward anti-intellectualism: they can barely read in their own language, never mind someone else's. So there may well have been a substantial hidden contraceptive sub- culture in America, one that operated under the noses of authorities
simply by being in a different language.

The first modern account of Foote was Edward Cirillo's articles in volume 25 (1970) of the
Journal of the History of Medicine and
Allied Science.
A great many further details of Foote's life and of the contraceptive business can be found in two excellent books, which I cannot recommend highly enough for students of social history: Janet Farrell Brodie's
Contraception and Abortion in 19th Century
America
(Cornell UP, 1994), and Michael Sappol's
A
Traffic of Dead
Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century
America
(Princeton UP, 2002). Both Janet and Michael were very kind in responding to my inquiries about some of the more arcane bits of this history.

As a tireless self-promoter, Foote also had much written about him in his own lifetime, primarily and rather conveniently by his own hand.
Medical Common Sense
and
Plain Home Talk
both give brief autobiographical accounts, one fleshed out by pamphlets like his
Evidences of Dr. Foote's Success
(1888). Thaddeus Burr Wake-man's elegy and testimonial collection
In Memory of Edward Bliss
Foote
(1907) is also quite useful.

Unmentioned in this chapter is one of the great pioneers of earth toilets, the English inventor the Reverend Henry Moule, who in 1861 had published a treatise with the doggedly literal title
National
Health and Wealth, Instead of Disease, Nuisance, Expense, and Waste,
Caused by Cesspools and Water Drainage.
His Moule Earth Closet never did get much recognition. As our water runs out, his work may prove prophetic yet. And prophesy would not be too strong a word. Moule, being a man of the cloth, viewed the matter in theological terms. He noted the Deuteronomy 23:13 instruction that "With your equipment you will have a trowel, and when you squat outside, you shall scrape a hole with it and then turn and cover your excrement." The Bible has nothing to say, on the other hand, about plungers, S-bends, or chain pulls. To Moule's mind, if water sewage fouled God's creation and wasted perfectly good manure for crops, then surely earth closets treated feces with the respect it deserved.

For those eager to learn more about Victorian toilets—I know you're out there—I recommend Adam Hart Davis's
The Great Stink
of
London: Sir Joseph Bazakette and the Cleansing of the Victorian
Metropolis
(2001)' and his general history
Thunder, Flush, and
Thomas Crapper
(1997). Also see Lawrence Wright's
Clean and
Decent
(1997) and Wallace Reyburn's
Flushed With Pride: The Story of
Thomas Crapper
(1969). Schematics of the Wakefield Earth Toilet are on page 286 of
The Manufacturer and Builder
magazine for December 1871. Details of the 1867 inspection of Britain's rivers, and the sewage and other pollution problems discovered, can be found in
The Life of Frank Buckland,
by George
C.
Bompas (1886).

Finally, details of August Woehler's attempt upon E. B. Foote's life can be found in the
New York Times
for 1879, on the dates November 2, 7, and 17. As one might have gathered by Woehler's choice of it as a good place to hang himself, Putnam House was not the most happy of boardinghouses. In February 1892, another boarder—this one signing himself in as "J. Davis," and suicidally despondent over racetrack debts—shut himself into his room and tried to blow both himself and the house up with the gas stove. Instead of landing in the Hereafter, though, the gentleman later awoke in the decidedly less tranquil confines of Bellevue Hospital.

The Mornington Crescent Game

Severalyears ago, when I was still living in Portland, I was sitting in the Periodicals Room of the Multnomah Public Library reading the January 25, 1868, issue of
Notes and Queries
when I came across a letter in it, sent in anonymously by the old customer of John Chennell, and titled 'Tom Paine's Bones." I read it in stunned disbelief. I'd vaguely heard once about Paine's body going missing, but—this? What was he doing in the basement of some corn merchant's shop in Guildford? What on earth . . . ?

It was at that moment that this book began.

The Guildford Museum was very helpful in directing me to Mark Sturley's
The Breweries and Public Houses of Guildford
(1990) for more information about the Chennell clan. The hair-raising murder and executions in 1818 are described in the anonymous booklet
Murder and Paricide!!!
(1818) and in the 1841 edition of
The
New gate Calendar.
I also found useful the Guildford Ordnance Survey Map (1895), E. M. Butts's
Guildford Shops
&
Shopping:
1740-1850 (1989), and
Shops
&
Shopping:
A
History of Buying and
Selling in Guildford
(2002)-and, of course, John Janaway's splendid
Surrey Privies: A Nostalgic Trip Down the Garden Path
(1999), which reminds us that "The surviving privies of Surrey need all the help they can get."

In addition to the three accounts of Paine's bones cited for "The Bone Grubbers" chapter (Watson, Conway, and Hunns), and Moncure Conway's
Autobiography,
further information can be gleaned from Moncure Conway's exhibition catalogue
Thomas
Paine Exhibition at South Place Institute, Finsbuy
(1895), which can be found at the British Library. The catalogue contains the first mention of Louis Breeze's ownership of Paine's brain. Breeze's appeals to Parliament over vaccination can be found in the
Times
of London for 21 February 1876 and 20 June 1877; his run-ins with the law are noted in the
Times
for 20 September 1884 and 21 January 1885, and his household members are noted in the United Kingdom Census for 1881.

The British Library has numerous books and pamphlets by Robert Ainslie, including
Is There a God?
(1840). The Darwin Correspondence Online Database (University of Cambridge) also has letters by son Oliver Ainslie to Charles Darwin inquiring about the possibility of buying Trowmer Lodge, most notably his letter of 23 November 1880. But for those tracing Ainslie's steps who find themselves at Mornington Crescent, remember: it's
A
Lifetime
to
Learn, a Minute to Master.
Or so proclaim the devotees of the Mornington Crescent Game, and never was a truer word spoken. Details may be found at the Web site for the radio program
I'm Sorry
I
Haven't a Clue
(isihac.co.uk). The closing and reopening of Mornington Crescent station, along with a summary of the game's "rules," can be found in the BBC News story "Mornington Crescent: The Legend Is Reborn" (27 April 1998).

Speaking of splendid hoaxes, Tom Paine's appearance among banjo-strumming con men is recounted in
The Scotsman
for 16 November 1876. George Reynolds and his battles with the staged photos and claims of Dr. Barnardo can be found in Gillian Wagner's history
Barnardo
(1979), as well as in two booklets at the British Library, Reynolds's
Dr. Barnardo's Homes: Containing Startling
Revelations, Etc.
(1877) and
The Charity Organization and the
Reynolds-Barnardo Arbitration
(1878).

The possible fate of Paine's skull can be glimpsed in Richard W. Holloway's eyewitness account of the use of human bones by British chemical manure manufacturers, which he recounted in an April 1917 letter in the
Cairns Post
(compiled online at
www.holloways-beach.com
by Ian Johnson of Holloways Beach, Australia), as well as in the weirdly compelling October 1871 article 'The Art of Utilizing" in
Manufacturer and Builder
magazine, which includes among its many revelations that "fishes' eyes are used for buds in artificial flowers."

Gordon Alexander's account of meeting the Muggletonians can be found in
Ancient and Modern Muggktonians
(1870) at the British Library; more recently, see Ted Underwood's
The
Acts
of
the
Witnesses: The Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and Other Early
Muggletonian Writings
(1999). They survived well into the twentieth century and the last surviving Muggletonian—Philip Noakes, of Matfield, Kent—passed away in 1979. He left behind a trove of early and previously unknown Muggletonian documents to the British Library; he had, in effect, been the last guardian of the sect's legacy.

Laurence Hutton's complaint about not being able to find old landmarks is even truer today than when he first wrote it in
Literary
Landmarks of London
(1885). Still, we at least have better maps to work with now. A recent poll of
Time Out London
readers for the "best London book" found their choice to be the
London A-Z
street atlas (1936), which beat out any novelist or historian. This was taken as a rather overly literal answer to the poll's question, but perhaps there's something to that judgment. I trudged around London equipped with a
Dickens's Dictionary of London
(1884), and Karl Baedeker's
Baedeker's London and Its Environs
(1885). If you want to know exactly what a person would see when they walked down a stree—what businesses they would patronize, what things cost, what cons and arcane laws they had to watch out for—then old Baedekers and the like are just extraordinary. These were also the last generation of guides to show the dynamic of city life before automobiles overran it.

Forgetting

An account of the Tivoli discovery can be found in the
New
York
Times
for July 19 ("Paine Tombstone Uncovered Upstate Revives Mystery About Pamphleteer"), and July 20, 1976 ('Thomas Paine Mystery at Tivoli, N.Y., Solved"), both written by James Feron. Feron had previously been a Middle East correspondent for the
Times;
one can only wonder what he made of being dispatched to, as he informed readers, "an object of curiosity and mystery for Jack and Josephine McNeil and their children, as well as for neighbors who live in trailers, frame houses and modest contemporary homes."

The
Times
of London accounet—peter Strafford's 'Tombstone Is Said to Be Paine's," which ran July 20—was, though filed the same day as the latter Feron story, seemingly unaware of the explanation of the obelisk's origin. Given how often stories from both
Times
are picked up in the foreign media, I imagine the Paine story made its way into other countries and continents; in a conversation with Josephine McNeil, she mentioned to me that back in 1976 she was receiving calls and letters from as far away as Australia.

There was a brief attempt at gathering up Paine's bones in 2001—a "Citizen Paine Restoration Initiative," was profiled in the March 30, 2001,
New York Times.
It seems to have fallen quite silent since then. Among those cited was Hazel Burgess, the Australian owner of the alleged Paine skull bought from a dealer in Sydney. She was trying to raise money for DNA tests on the skull, but has not been heard from publicly since; when I contacted her, she politely declined to give further details on any findings.

Perhaps her story will become rather like that of the McNeils. Cultural forgetfulness is not the same as the individual loss of memory, but the former seems to me largely an accumulation of the latter. When we no longer find something useful, we—individually and collectively—tend to forget it. After all, the too-strong persistence of memory winds up interfering with one's ability to perceive the present moment. The hippocampus and amygdala are constantly throwing away memories-whether by destroying or sealing them off is not clear-though this function notably goes awry in the traumatic memories associated with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The best academic introduction to this field of memory studies is Daniel Schecter and Larry Squire's
Neuropsychology
of Memory
(3rd ed.,
2002)
and in Schacter and Elaine Scarry's
Memory Brain, and Belief(2002).
One promising new area is the use of memory-related drugs, notably in the work of Bryan Strange, Larry Cahill, and Roger Pitman. These are not the old panaceas that promise to improve your memory: quite the opposite.
They help you
forget.