The Duke of Puppies

As we all know the Duke of Devonshire was the definition of socially awkward.  We also know he  preferred the company of dogs to men ( no blame there!) which is why he was known as Canis to his close friends.  This was an affection that did not wane with age, according to his daughter, Harryo (probably the most opinionated of the Devonshire brood).  After Georgiana's death, the duke was more aware of his mortality and put in a last-ditch effort to get to know his adult children.  The olive branch he extended to Harryo came in the form of a puppy, which must have had the middle-child rolling her eyes at her senile old dad.  She wrote,

he really thinks of little else [besides puppies] and the whole time of dinner and supper he feeds and watches them, laughs excessively every time they squeak or run and listens to no conversation with half the pleasure as he does when these puppies are the subject.

Despite his many, many flaws, there are just some aspects of the duke that I can't help but relate to.  Puppies > Dinner conversation.

Wimpole Hall

This weekend I had the pleasure of visiting Wimpole Estate which was all decked out for Christmas.  Construction begun on the house in 1640 and saw a multitude of architects in the eighteenth century include John Soane.  The end result is a really big Georgian mansion just outside of Cambridge.

The last picture I took from the garden and as I found out later the tower is called Wimpole's Folly.  Thanks to craze for the gothic, Lord Hardwicke (the owner at the time) had ruins of what looked to be an old medieval castle built on the estate, because as we all know, there aren't enough old (actual) ruins just hanging about England! 

The Toils of Celebrity

Mobs of fans swarming around celebrities in the streets is no new concept.  Just ask the gorgeous Gunning sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who could barely go anywhere in public without being stared at.  This extreme facet from the new culture of celebrity took many by shock, prompting some amusing poetry.  After being mobbed in the park for the umpteenth time a satirist imagined Maria petitioning the king for protection from her fans:

'Shut, shut up the Park I beseech you;
Lay a Tax upon staring so hard;
Or, if you're afraid to do that, Sir,
I'm sure you will grant me a Guard!'

The Boon thus requested was granted:
The Warriors were drawn up with care;
'With my slaves and my Guards I'm surrounded,
Come, stare at me now if you dare!'

The poem puts me in mind of the ever-obnoxious TMZ, I like to think of it as a predecessor.  In the end Maria did end up having to hire body guards in the form of the (very official) Brigade of Guards.  However, her personal escorts only served to attract more attention.  No surprise there!

Put this in the Medical Books

As we all well know, women fight a constant battle with themselves...not to faint.  Hysterics as they were called, were an expectant problem of women - not because of tightly-laced stays, this malady was the cause of those emotions women are forced to deal with or, rather to contain.  An expert at the time explained:

The entire female body is riddled by obscure but strangely direct oaths of sympathy...from one extremity of its organic space to the other, it encloses a perpetual possibility of hysteria.  The sympathetic sensibilities of her organism...condemns woman to...diseases of the nerves.

Why thank you for that elucidation, "doctor."

Yes indeed, it was believed that all those pent-up emotions of amorous affection that women contained had no way of escaping and therefore built up in a lady's womb as some sort of massive heat-bomb ready to explode.  And when it did explode?  Hysterics.