The Making of Erastus Galer's Cabinet of Wonders

The King’s Kunstkammer

2010-11-23T14:20:00.001Z

Erastus Galer’s Cabinet of Wonders is overflowing with fabulous objects from stories (even from some stories you may have thought were made-up). Erastus acquired many of these wonders during his boyhood adventures – or so he claims. Some are tucked away in drawers, others are displayed on shelves or in specimen jars. Each location and object is carefully numbered and you’ll know by now that in Drawer 207 is the pea from Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Princess and the Pea. Galer tells us how he got his hands on it in his first adventure WONDER 207.

In short: he stole it.

Hans Andersen suspected that one day somebody would. He wrote:

‘And the pea was sent to the Royal Museum, where it is still on display, unless someone has stolen it.’

William Heath Robinson

Many traditional folk legends tell of objects that people can still see, and storytellers can point to these objects and say, “The dragon must have been real because you can still see the rock or hill or tomb today”. Hans Andersen’s stories are not traditional tales, he made them up. But he was very good at making his stories sound like tales that people had been telling for centuries. In Germany in the 19th Century, the Brothers Grimm collected genuine folk tales and legends, and they mistakenly included some of Andersen’s stories in their books because they thought they were old stories that had been passed down from generation to generation. By suggesting that the pea is in a museum, Andersen makes his story appear like a traditional tale based on real events.

But perhaps he was also referring to a real museum and a real theft. Andersen wrote that the pea was placed in the kunstkammer. Over the years the word has been translated in a number of ways: sometimes just as museum or art gallery. When the great ghost-story writer M. R. James translated Andersen’s tales he settled on treasure chamber, but In Maria Tatar’s lavish The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (shown above ) we find the translation Royal Museum. Tatar knows that Andersen was thinking of a very specific museum.

In the 17th Century, Frederick III of Denmark founded a Royal Museum or Wonder Cabinet in Copenhagen Castle. His collection was eventually broken up in the 19th Century, but you can still have a good look at 250 of the objects in nine virtual cabinets, chambers and apartments. Just head over to the English version of a wonderful virtual museum at http://www.kunstkammer.dk/GBindex.shtml .

In the picture of Copenhagen Castle above, you can see the tower where young Galer gets traped in WONDER 207 -- although it's not as 'improbably tall' as in the story.

According to the authors of the virtual King’s Kunstkammer, Hans Andersen was not only thinking of a particular museum, he was also thinking of a famous theft from the Royal Museum. Perhaps by suggesting that the pea might be stolen he was having a dig at the museum authorities for their poor security.

Read the story at http://www.kunstkammer.dk/H_R/H_R_UK/GBhistorie01.shtml

No. 1 Bronze Age Celt

2010-11-23T08:47:00.003Z

Museum Catalogues No.1

CATALOGUE AND ACCOUNT OF THE CELTS

”Entry No. 1. Bronze Axe End Celt
Found in a field at Furneux Pelham Herts called the 10 acre Hinden Field belonging to Mr Morris by a labourer land ditching – He found at the same time several others & sundry lumps of metal but of what nature he did not know. He also found a small axe. There also was skeleton & some black earth.
Presented by Mr Matthew Ward”

(Neville, R.C., Catalogue and Account of the Celts (c.1850) Ms. at Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology GO2/2/10)

This is from the R. C. Neville’s handwritten catalogue of Bronze Age Axe heads in his Museum Room at Audley End House, Essex. Neville, the 4th Lord Braybrooke, died young in 1861, but his family preserved his collections. The Saffron Walden Yearbook for 1866 described a ‘Museum abounding with relics, antiquities, and curiosities.’ Some thirty years after Neville’s death, The Illustrated London News recorded, ‘the little museum that is also a smoking room. Here are great Roman vases, arms, jugs - not unlike our modern claret jugs – heavy chains and implements of iron; with primitive British ornaments, bracelets of mere pebbles (and then, a little later, of bits of coloured clay), and bone knife-handles, and – a ghastly survival – some human skin of a Dane once nailed to a neighbouring church-door.’
In 1948 James Lees-Milne secured Audley End for the nation and the Ministry of Works moved in, stripping the museum room bare, and turning it into an office. Many of the artefacts were acquired by the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

A Green Velvet Gown

2010-11-22T17:38:00.003Z

(Notes on objects thought to have been stolen or otherwise misappropriated by the man known as Erastus Galer)

Hark, hark
The dogs do bark
The beggars are coming to town;
Some in rags
And some in jags*
And one in a Velvet Gown.

*shreds of cloth, from the jagged edges cut into medieval clothes for ornament – as on the dress of the woman cradling the child in the picture below

(2)
No man vnder the degree of a barons sonne..shall weare any maner of veluet in their gownes
Act 24 Hen. VIII, c. 13 (1532-3 )

(3)
“One of the remarkable features of the Elizabethan underworld was the high proportion of gentlemen crooks which the profession attracted, especially in London. In a society whose consciousness of differences of dress was so acute that it extended to legislation as to which persons could or could not wear which types of clothing, a good deal of deception depended on being taken for a man of quality when you were not one.”
Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: The Folio Society, 2006) p.16

(Possibly associated with Sighting No. 1 Grene Cloke)

(4)

This wonderful picture is used with the kind permission of the artist Rima Staines. Visit her blog Into The Hermitage at http://intothehermitage.blogspot.com/2008/10/hark-hark.html or click on the picture to order a print of the original oil painting.

(5) G. M. Trevelyan tells us that in the early 1600s thanks to the Poor Laws passed at the end of Elizabeth’s reign “The panic terror that in Plantagenet and Tudor days rushed through every room in the lonely farmstead and every house in the hamlet when the growling of the watch-dogs proclaimed that ‘the beggars were coming to town’, had become a memory and a nursery tale.”

G. M. Trevelyan, England Under the Stuarts (London: Folio Society, 1996)

The Old Ticket Booth

2010-11-22T11:26:00.003Z

On the river bank at the bottom of my little garden, I have a hut where I am supposed to write. I modelled it on the hut where the playwright George Bernard Shaw used to work in Ayot St Lawrence, but whereas Shaw’s hut sits on a turntable so it can be rotated to catch the sun mine is on giant articulated legs. As I write, I travel all over the village taking in different views depending on my mood. All right, that’s a lie. Whereas Shaw’s hut can perform pirouettes to chase the light, mine can’t move anywhere –- although one day it might collapse into the river. What I did try to copy was the sparseness of Shaw’s hut: like him, I screwed a plank of wood to the wall for a desk. Against the opposite wall I installed a rocking chair (Shaw had a cot or camp bed, but I’d have spent most of my day asleep). My shed was to be Spartan, uncluttered and free from all distractions.

But where was I supposed to put the 34 water-damaged volumes of the 9th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (The Scholar’s Edition) which I’d recently acquired? I built a bookcase into the back wall, and soon filled it. The slide down the slippery slope had begun. The ancient filing cabinet I’d saved from a skip and convinced a London cab driver to bring home for me was dragged from the house. In came a lectern, a set of drawers, a desk on wheels with an adjustable writing slope. And room had to be found for essential items such as a large worm-eaten lump of medieval timber rescued from a friend’s fireplace.
In no time at all, there were too many distractions. Someone gave me an oil-filled radiator which took up the leg room under the desk and by the time I realised how much it was costing me in electricity to heat my hut, it was so full of maps, empty shoes boxes, old magazines, gadgets, card indexes and box files that there was barely room for me to get through the door anyway. Then along came Erastus Galer with his sticks, tin soldiers, and famous old smells; fairy loaves, nightmares, black spots and blowpipes; finger bones, thumb rings, and fumet.

I tried writing in bed and at the kitchen table, but that wouldn’t do. And then I had an idea. Not far from my cottage is a village hall built during the First World War. By the 1930s the villagers had erected a projection room over the porch and turned the hall into a cinema -- complete with a little ticket booth on the right hand side as you go in. On the eve of the Second World War, the Government ordered all cinemas to close and the projector was removed and that was the end of the cinema.
(Incidentally, many cinemas reopened a few weeks after they were closed when the government realized that films were quite good for morale.)
The projection room was dismantled in the 1980s and all that remains of the cinema is a mark in the plaster, where the lens used to poke through the wall, and the tiny ticket booth. I was attracted to the room by the appealing little hatch in the door and one day I acquired the key to the hall (I know where it's hidden) and cleared all the junk out of the little room. It was the perfect place to write Wonder 207. It's about two metres by one metre so all I have in there are two chairs -- one for me and one for Erastus Galer -- and when no-one else is using the hall I acquire the key, slip in with my laptop and no-one can find me (though as you can see from the picture, sometimes they come looking for me).

Grene Cloke

2010-11-16T17:38:00.003Z

(Sightings No. 1)

Old John Naps of Greece was seen talking to a man known as Grene Cloke at a secret Hertfordshire victualling house one day in June 1597, but the men were gone before the constable arrived. One witness said they were followed by a youth in an outlandishly broad-brimmed cap which he fixed under his chin with a strap. The same hat was seen hanging on the back of a chair at the Signe of the Beares Hed the previous week. The innkeeper John Carter was later questioned by the Justice of the Peace and swore that the hat’s owner was not a Spanish agent but merely a boy who had been asking about reports of a mysterious figure clad in a green velvet gown.

Petition of the inhabitants of Buntingford, for the suppression of abuses arising from secret victualling houses, not licensed, as well as from licensed houses, especially that of John Stanfield, otherwise “Grene Cloke” of the parish of Laistone, who keeps “a howse of great disorders as well in intertayninge of the worst sort of people as also by sufferinge swearinge, gamynge, drunkenness, quarrellinge…to the great disturbance of his neighbours by night and day.

Hertfordshire Quarter Sessions, 1597-8

Erastus Galer’s Hat – Part 1

2010-11-15T22:27:00.001Z

One of my favourite names is Cloudsley Shovell (which only works if you pronounce the surname as if it were a type of spade). It once belonged to a British naval hero whose death off the Isles of Scilly in 1707 became one of the great murder mysteries of English folklore.

We know lots about Admiral Shovell and thousands of words have been written about his life and adventures. His is a great-sounding name with a great story attached. Most names in the historical record have far less of a narrative. They have become detached from their owners. The historian, however, can sometimes reunite them. Take Nathaniell Cakebreade -- a name that caught my ear. It appears in a list of men from the county of Hertfordshire who were fit to serve in the army about 400 years ago, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne. Next to the name is written “collermaker” (probably a horse collar maker), and a letter “b” in the margin tells us that he fought with a Black Bill – a short pike with a sharp edge. Historians think that bill men were usually short and muscular and sported pot helmets in battle. With these few facts we can start to piece together a picture of Nathaniell and a little of his story. It’s good material for a writer of fiction: Billman Cakebreade would make a great minor character in an Elizabethan novel. Perhaps we’d first meet him harnessing a horse needed to drag firewood up to Ivinghoe Beacon when the threat of a Spanish invasion is at its height…

But what happens when you encounter a name so mellifluous or suggestive to the ear that it hides a great tale even though there is nothing to go on but the name and the sound it makes?

It was about 10 years ago that I first came across a name like that in the Gutch Memorandum Book, a 200-year-old notebook that belonged to the eccentric English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (So-called because it was once looked after by his school friend John Matthew Gutch.) Coleridge used the notebook to jot down his ideas for poems and one of those jottings reads: 'Wild Poem' with 'a maniac', but the key words are scribbled cryptically using the Greek alphabet.

The great Coleridge expert, John Livingstone Lowes thought it was one of Coleridge's secret ciphers written in ancient Greek, and he puzzled over the meaning for a long time, until one day he realized he’d been trying too hard. The characters simply spelt out the phrase 'Erastus Galer's Hat'. (I do love the sound of those six syllables, especially if you pronounce Galer to rhyme with ‘valour’.)

It was a clue to a 'vanished, tantalizing tale' wrote Lowes in 1927, in his insane and brilliant, but sadly unfashionable, book The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. He tried to find out Erastus Galer's story. But even though he was fairly adept at solving literary and historical mysteries, all he could find were a few instances of the surname in Hertfordshire and Somerset. There was no trace of Erastus Galer anywhere. His story was lost.

‘Erastus himself may survive in some dusty civic record of Bristol or Nether Stowey,” Lowes concluded. “The riddle of the hat, I fear, is a question above antiquarianism, not to be resolved by man, and he himself as shadowy as Henry Pimpernel, and Peter Turph, and old John Naps of Greece.’

Professor Lowes was wrong of course. The clue to how the mystery can be resolved by man is in the the subtitle of The Road to Xanadu. Erastus Galer’s story has to be found in the imagination. Not any old story would do. The point is that a name like that contains a very particular story. It took me a long time to find it out.