User Experience Page 9

 

 

I’ve been so rushed I feel I’ve been shortchanging you folks on your NOTES, which I know full well is 64% of the reason anyone reads the comic in the first place so.. A quick recap of some of our friends:

 

CHARLES BABBAGE

was, we must not forget, a notable writer as well as a mathematician. By far his greatest hit was “On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures” which is indeed an unmixed gratification. I link you to the 3rd edition because you may enjoy not only his initial exposure of the cabal of booksellers, but also his rebuttal of their defence, prefacing the 2nd edition, AND the further dramatic developments for those watching at home from the preface to the 3rd edition (with charts!).

 

THOMAS CARLYLE

— the preeminent, and least currently read, Victorian Public Intellectual. If living now would have regular column in The Times and do big BBC history series, that sort of thing. — shared an intense mutual dislike with Charles Babbage, I’m not sure why. Possibly because Carlyle disliked economists and mathematicians (he coined the phrase ‘the dismal science’); possibly because they were rivals in dinner-party conversation-dominating — or possibly because they were on opposite sides of the slavery issue- abolitionist Babbage inserts a heartfelt plea against it in the 9th Bridgewater Treatise; Carlyle would I’m sure be surprised to find himself the author of what must be the only Victorian essay with a genuinely unprintable title (NSFW) –such was their antagonism that they were unable to bond over their mutual persecution by street urchins and street musicians and hobby of running outside WITHOUT HATS to confront them.

WILIKE COLLINS

– his books are really great. You haven’t read OMG go read it! Why isn’t it a lavish BBC spectacular? Honestly. — He hung out with Dickens and they wrote an awful play together, The Frozen Deep — His father was a notable landscape painter and described 19-yr-old Ada Lovelaceas “delightful and simple-minded, without an atom of pride”. She never met Wilkie as far as I know which is a shame as I think they would have gotten on LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE. — on account of they both liked unconventional women, unconventional marriages, and opium — Marion Halcombe in The Woman In White is thought to be based on George Eliot. Dang it I need to work that better into the comic.

The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted—never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead.

GEORGE ELIOT

Here she is again! I love George. The Lady Novelist’s jibe about her ‘friend’ George in the last page is an allusion to Marion Evans extremely unconventional marriage, or ‘marriage’ to George Henry Lewes. I don’t often recommend secondary sources but if you want a cozy gossip about weird Victorian personal relations Parallel Lives tells you ALL ABOUT not just George Eliot and Robert Carlyle, but also Ruskin, JS Mill, and Charles Dickens.

CHARLES DICKENS we will get to know more next week!

(I have not, before you ask, actually conducted a statistical survey of misprints in Victorian publications BUT I will leave you with the most poetical example of all: the final page of Lovelace’s magisterial, yet extremely full of typos, paper on computer science and the elimination of errors by machinery, which not only misprints her initials as “A.L.L” instead of “A.A.L” (Augusta Ada Lovelace that is), but is headed “The Analytitical Engine”!