Post by RossI realize it is not entirely on-topic, but I love this passage
from George Steiner, and I think the present audience may enjoy it
..................
Did Victorian pundits need less sleep than we do? Consider the
facts. They tramped miles over brake and through briar before
breakfast or high tea. At either or both of which collations they
would consume flitches of bacon, grilled kidneys, silver-sides of
Scotch beef, a garland of mutton chops, kippers and bloaters in
silvery shoals, and half a dozen cavernous cups of Indian tea.
They sired more offspring than Jacob the Patriarch. They breathed
Homer and Catullus, Plato and Vergil, Holy Scripture and
Bradshaw's Railway Guide through their stentorian nostrils. When
they voyaged, it was either through Turkestan with a walking stick
and one change of flea powder or to the spas of Europe with a
pride of steamer trunks, portable escritoires, tooled-leather
vanity cases, and mountainous hampers. The Sunday sermons that
they orated or listened to ran anywhere up to two mortal hours. A
second service, with an average of eleven hymns, four homilies,
and assorted benedictions, followed in the afternoon. After which
there would be Medelssohn's "Songs Without Words" at the piano, a
reading out loud of two or three of the shorter epics by Clough or
Tennyson, a charade featuring General Gordon's celebrated descent
of a staircase at Khartoum in the grinning face of death.
Between which accomplishments out sages, scholars, boffins, and
reformers would learn languages, sciences, literatures, and crafts
at a rate and with a mastery to make lesser generations cringe.
Victorian memories ingested epics, Biblical family trees, the
flora of Lapland, Macedonian irregular verbs, Parliamentary
reports, local topography, and the names of third cousins with
tireless voracity. Victorian wrists and fingers wrote, without
typewriters, without Dictaphones, to the tune of thousands of
printable words per diem. Histories of religious opinion in six
volumes, lives of Disraeli ditto, twelve tomes of The Golden
Bough, eighteen of Darwin, thirty-five of Ruskin. Trollope had
composed his daily stint of several thousand deftly placed words
before the professional working day had even begun. Dickens could
produce a quire at a time with the printer's devil puffing at the
door. But this was only the half of it; for after the public
leviathans came the private immensities -- diaries that run to
thousands of minutely crowded pages, personal reflections, maxims,
and exercises in pious meditation straining the hinges of marbled
notebooks folio size, and, above all, letters. Letters of a length
and deliberation of which we have no present imagining. Letters in
the literal thousands and ten thousands: to Cousin Hallam on the
Zambezi, to the Very Reverand Noel Tolpuddle concerning the thorny
points raised in his nine addresses on infant perdition, letters
of credit and discredit, epistles to every member of the family,
to the beloved across the street. Written by hand. Very often with
a first draft and a manuscript copy (no carbon, no Xerox). With
scratchy pens. In the yellowish, straining aura of gaslight. In
rooms getting chillier by the hour.
...............
It's the opening of his review of K.M.Elizabeth Murray's _Caught
in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English
Dictionary_ (2001). It leads straight on to Murray's letter of
application for a job at the British Museum Library, but I'll
leave you to enjoy that if you haven't already.
activities..