Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
“Humans are a marvel of ingenuity, yet we seem to exist in this great pond of primitive terror and paranoia”: Simon Schama on pandemics and vaccines
For centuries, scientists have striven to combat a whole host of infectious diseases. Yet, as Simon Schama explains in his new book, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, they have often met with considerable opposition
Q: You write in your new book that you are acutely conscious of being a newcomer to medical and scientific history. What drew you to this subject? It won’t surprise anybody to learn that the pandemic played a large role. I thought: if there’s a moment when nationalism needs to be set aside for the common good, it’s now, when people need to share vaccines. I was quickly disabused, of course, by nations leapfrogging over each other to secure supplies of vaccines in advance. But that disappointing moment led me, via the World Health Organization’s website, to the International Sanitary Conferences held from the mid-19th century, which were the first example of international organisation outside religious institutions, military alliances or peace conferences. On the podcast | Simon Schama discusses how scientific ingenuity and the fear of contagion combined to produce life-saving vaccines This, suddenly, felt very much like the right subject for a book. My wife is a biologist, so I asked her: “Is this ridiculous? Will I perish with a terminal case of imposter syndrome?” But she encouraged me. I think something happens when you’re a really old geezer, too: you either want to escape completely into a hobby – Byzantine coinage in the 11th century, perhaps – or, if you’re like me, you only want to do history with an immediate link to what’s happening right now. The first section of your book focuses on the fight against smallpox. How disruptive was that disease at its peak in Europe? It was extraordinarily contagious and apocalyptically terrifying. It ran amok in crowded urban environments, killing as many as one in three people who contracted it. Plague had been even more frightening in the late Middle Ages and 17th century, but had somewhat retreated by the early 18th century, so people had been lulled into a false sense of security. Within 100 years, fortunately, there was a great breakthrough against smallpox with the first mass inoculation campaign. It seemed such a counterintuitive thing to do: put inside your body the very thing responsible for so many deaths. This benevolent self-poisoning was an astonishing psychological barrier, and it’s still amazing to me that people have eventually come to accept it in such large numbers. What were the key factors in persuading people that inoculation was a good thing? It helped – in Britain, in particular – that the royal family was converted. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople, had survived a terrifying attack of smallpox herself, and had also heard stories of women escaping death from the disease. Her curiosity led her to believe that the process of inoculation – taking pus from a smallpox victim and pre-emptively injecting it into yourself – would save you. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/KFGFYRwebready-399d437.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, seen in a portrait by Godfrey Kneller, advocated inoculation against smallpox, including to the queen Caroline of Ansbach (Photo by GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, seen in a portrait by Godfrey Kneller, advocated inoculation against smallpox, including to the queen Caroline of Ansbach (Photo by GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> She was a born publicist with lots of important social and literary connections and, when she came back to Britain in 1718, she converted Caroline of Ansbach, the Princess of Wales, to her cause. Smallpox was a real worry among the royal dynasties of the time, because it was mowing down princes and empresses around Europe. Then, because the royal family was doing it, the press started reporting what was happening. Read more | Mary Wortley Montagu: the scourge of smallpox There was, of course, committed opposition – particularly from clerics, some of whom preached that inoculation was interfering with God’s judgment. But by the 1720s, the cause had been taken up by various doctors and had become more than a mere fashion. One of the figures in my book is Thomas Nettleton, a doctor in Halifax who inoculated as many people as he could in the area. Crucially, such individuals sent their results to the Royal Society, which collected the data – that struck me as very modern. Your book profiles a series of remarkable individuals such as Mary Wortley Montagu. But are there wider cultural forces at play, too? The 18th century was a very interesting moment in the relationship between science and religion. I think the extent to which the period was non-religious is sometimes overstated, because the rise of evangelical faith was a very important aspect of the century. However, it’s true to say that facing pandemic after pandemic had weakened people’s willingness to be passive in the face of ‘divine judgment’. There was a growing belief that science and human ingenuity might be able to do what God seemed indifferent to or incapable of doing. So this was a real sea-change moment. Read more | "An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in 18th-century Britain You also explore the 19th-century spread of cholera. What was its impact? Cholera was pretty unknown in Europe until the early 19th century so, again, people were unprepared for this horrifying disease. If you caught it, you quickly died a very unpleasant death, losing all of your bodily fluids. One of the paradoxes that runs through my book is the fact that the key aspects of progress that brought power and wealth and happiness to people in Europe and the west – new forms of transport and extensive travel networks – also created the ideal conditions for pathogens to spread and flourish. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/GettyImages-815688322webready-2c68649.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A Court for King Cholera, a cartoon published in Punch in 1852, depicting the kind of conditions where this disease thrived (Photo by Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="A Court for King Cholera, a cartoon published in Punch in 1852, depicting the kind of conditions where this disease thrived (Photo by Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> After London doctor John Snow determined that a water pump dispensing faecally contaminated water in Broad Street (now Broadwick Street, Soho) was the epicentre of a major cholera outbreak in London – and therefore that cholera was a water-borne disease – it seemed that cleaning up water sources would solve the problem. In fact, people in trains or horse-drawn carriages might invisibly soil the upholstery, putting the next person to use the carriage at risk of catching cholera. So the conditions that brought economic prosperity and interconnectedness and commercial progress were also increasing the likelihood of spreading terrifying infectious diseases. It was only when the cholera bacillus was discovered in the 19th century that scientists realised how disastrously and speedily the bacillus itself could travel. One particularly intriguing character in your book is Adrien Proust. How important was his work? Adrien Proust – father of renowned author Marcel – was a doctor who became a key figure at the International Sanitary Conferences. He promoted the idea that it wouldn’t be possible to get to grips with cholera without imposing a lockdown or serious quarantine on particularly vulnerable areas. He believed that some kind of international public health organisation was needed – an idea that sowed the seeds of what later became the World Health Organization. Read more | Victorian medicine: why the 19th century was a time of seismic medical change So he had a far-sighted and benevolent side, but was also classically imperialist and defensive: his primary concern was to prevent cholera coming to western Europe, so he called for a cordon sanitaire against its spread from Asia. One of his specific concerns was about the Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca. That’s not because it was a Muslim or Asian thing – it wasn’t simple prejudice – but because the Hajj involved hundreds of thousands of people lodging together in tight quarters on small boats with no sanitary provisions, which was a paradise for microbial reproduction. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/GettyImages-1426055410webready-f69806d.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 19th-century portrait of Adrien Proust. The French epidemiologist’s ideas seeded the creation of the World Health Organization (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)" title="A 19th-century portrait of Adrien Proust. The French epidemiologist’s ideas seeded the creation of the World Health Organization (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)" /> There were two huge problems with taking this tack. One was that the British empire was, in the middle of the 19th century, beginning to make a huge amount of money from its Indian enterprise. So the British didn’t want to stop traffic coming through the Suez Canal, and were the last to accept the science about cholera transmission and germ theory. They maintained that it wasn’t a contagious disease, so could be resolved by local disinfection with no need to interrupt the empire’s international trade routes. On the podcast | Humans throughout history have faced a scourge of infectious illnesses. Kyle Harper discusses how diseases have shaped our past The other problem was that the Indian uprising of the late 1850s had a very strong religious element, so the British were, quite rightly, nervous about interrupting the pilgrimage to Mecca, which might light a tinderbox of insurrection that could bring down British imperial presence not just in India but across the region. So the science had to pass a test of political acceptability – as it still does. How much is that relationship between science and politics a recurring theme? One would love to think that science could be accepted as non-ideological, as disinterested in politics, even when it leads to inconveniences such as lockdowns, the shutting down of trade routes and so on. But that’s not the case, even today. You can see the attitude forming in those 19th-century dialogues, in which science was somehow held to be – hence the title of my book, Foreign Bodies – an alien thing: that it belonged to international organisations of elite scientists who might have suspicious motives. At the sad core of my book is this extraordinary paradox: we celebrate and marvel at the extraordinariness of human ingenuity and the speed at which science can achieve practical results, while the most irrational and feverishly prejudiced biases and suspicions about that ingenuity endure. So what enlightened minds of the 18th century thought would happen – that, one day, knowledge itself would be responsible for eliminating sickness and ignorance and poverty – never came about. There seems to be something hardwired into our shared cultures, from one end of the world to the other, that wants to resist that development – to see science as some sort of plot. Another pivotal figure in your book is Waldemar Haffkine. Can you briefly introduce him and his work? Waldemar Haffkine was an extraordinary figure: a Jew from Odessa who, in the second half of the 19th century, was running guns in an attempt to protect the Jewish community from pogroms. Odessa was one of those rare places in the Russian empire in which Jewish people were not trapped in a kind of Fiddler on the Roof world, and could enjoy a secular education. So Haffkine became a student at the new university in Odessa, where he was tutored by another extraordinary figure: the avant-garde microbiology professor Ilya Mechnikov. In 1889, Haffkine joined Mechnikov at the recently founded Pasteur Institute in Paris. There he was given the task of developing a vaccine against cholera. And, after a great struggle, he succeeded. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/defaultwebready-94fd752.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Rings chalked on a Bombay (Mumbai) house indicate plague victims during a 19th-century epidemic. A lab in the city headed by Waldemar Haffkine responded by producing vaccines on a huge scale (Photo by the Wellcome Collection)" title="Rings chalked on a Bombay (Mumbai) house indicate plague victims during a 19th-century epidemic. A lab in the city headed by Waldemar Haffkine responded by producing vaccines on a huge scale (Photo by the Wellcome Collection)" /> Cholera, at that point, was finally receding somewhat from Europe. So Haffkine decided that the only way he would be able to demonstrate the acceptability of a vaccine to the public was with a series of controlled experiments. He would recruit a cohort of subjects, half of whom would get inoculated and half of whom wouldn’t. At that time, the British ambassador in Paris was the Marquess of Dufferin, who’d been viceroy of India; he was also extraordinarily interested in the possibility of inoculation against cholera, so gave Haffkine the opportunity to work there. Read more | The race for a cure: how we found vaccines for 4 of history's most dangerous diseases When Haffkine reached India, he discovered that the medical service there did not want to know. They assumed that simply disinfecting contaminated water would combat the problem, and weren’t interested in learning about microbiology or germ theory, in understanding the deep science of how these organisms live and multiply, or in how disease can be contained. So Haffkine had very little support and even fewer funds. Despite such reticence from the local medical community, Haffkine set to work inoculating not just Europeans in India but also the poorest of the poor. He began with people in Calcutta’s slums, then trained Indian doctors in inoculation, explaining why and how to do it. This is an extraordinary untold chapter in imperial history, when a gun-running Ukrainian-Russian Jew from a laboratory in Paris was working in India. Haffkine became famous in Britain, where people such as Joseph Lister lauded him as a hero. In 1899, he began work in Bombay (now Mumbai) heading up the first mass production line of vaccines, against plague. The disease had returned in a major way, killing approximately 12 million people between the mid-1890s and early 1920s, mostly in India and China. Haffkine’s lab sent out tens of thousands of doses each day across India, saving huge numbers of people. Read more | 14 surprising facts about the history of medicine He was constantly dogged by suspicion and hostility in India, though, because this was the era of the Great Game [when the British and Russian empires vied for dominance in Asia]. Because of his Russian origins, he was often viewed as eccentric or suspicious, and even at one point thought of as being a spy. And then, in 1902, a tragic catastrophe occurred. In the tiny village of Mulkowal in Punjab, 19 people died of tetanus poisoning caused by one contaminated batch of plague vaccine. It was discovered much later that the contamination actually happened not at the Bombay production facility but in the village. A rubber stopper had been dropped on the ground – inoculations in rural districts often took place in fields, in the open air – but, rather than being passed through heat sterilisation, as Haffkine had insisted, it was simply swished around in a carbolic solution. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/2H441XMwebready-c6792be.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Waldemar Haffkine inoculates people against cholera in the Calcutta slums, 1894. In spite of his life-saving work, the Ukrainian-Russian Jew was dogged by suspicion and hostility (Photo by Well/BOT/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Waldemar Haffkine inoculates people against cholera in the Calcutta slums, 1894. In spite of his life-saving work, the Ukrainian-Russian Jew was dogged by suspicion and hostility (Photo by Well/BOT/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Blame was directed at Haffkine, who was suspended and then fired in disgrace. The viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, was beside himself with rage: he held Haffkine responsible for what he viewed as a disaster that had undermined the credibility of the British empire. This was a period, after all, in which the empire wanted to be seen as tough and strict and paternalistic but also interested in the physical welfare of its Indian subjects. Curzon went so far as to declare that Haffkine should be tried and hanged for his actions. There was, of course, a strong whiff of antisemitism surrounding this, although it wasn’t explicit. Haffkine tried to plead his case – giving lectures in Paris, writing to the great and the good – to no avail. Then another extraordinary figure, Ronald Ross – who had discovered that Anopheles mosquitoes transmitted the malaria parasite – launched a campaign that resulted in vindication for Haffkine, though not until 1907. Too late: his career and life had been ruined. How does that story reflect the wider issues of power and society at the time? It happened in an era of great pomp and circumstance – Elgar composing music, Kipling writing stories – but also at a moment when imperial authorities in India were beginning to feel the ground shift beneath their feet in ways that made them uneasy. They were concerned that the government, both in India and in the colonial office in London, should be seen to be doing things for the good of Indians themselves. And they were correspondingly eager to scapegoat someone or something – the someone being Haffkine, the something being the new science of microbiology – that had, as they saw it, rashly discarded the cult of disinfection. On the podcast | Gareth Williams explores efforts in history to combat lethal diseases, from smallpox to polio Cholera was constantly on their minds, but when plague came along – a disease that has nothing to do with contaminated water but everything to do with microorganisms living in fleas that bite and infect humans – a completely different mindset was needed to figure out what it was and how to deal with it. The authorities continued their policy of disinfection, however, tracking down any body suspected of showing symptoms and inspecting people as they stepped off trains. They tore down houses, burned furniture and clothing, and separated families – often impoverished families – taking children from parents and husbands from wives. Haffkine pointed out that none of this was doing any good. When you destroy a house, the rats simply leave – and the fleas leave on the rats, carrying with them the microorganisms, spreading plague rather than getting rid of it. The authorities, of course, did not want to listen, and Haffkine was regarded as committing a heresy against the accepted method for containing infectious disease. How would you like your book to change our view of our own pandemic moment and our relationship with the wider world? This book is a passionate statement on behalf of science. I referred earlier to the paradox in which we’re trapped: on the one hand, humans are a marvel of ingenuity and astonishing resourcefulness. Yet at the same time, we seem to exist in this great pond of primitive terror and paranoia and superstition. So I would love it if this book could act as an antidote to some of the mistrust and suspicion that surrounds science, and to the sense that scientists are involved in some kind of scheme that only benefits themselves. If this history moves the dial even a tiny bit through the stories it tells, then that will make an old geezer marginally happier. This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Simon Schama on how inoculation changed the world
Simon Schama discusses how scientific ingenuity and the fear of contagion combined to produce life-saving vaccines
As the recent past will attest, the discovery of vaccines can not only save lives, but also change the course of human history. Speaking with Matt Elton, Simon Schama explores the story of inoculation, charting the individuals and organisations who played a pivotal role in its use against deadly diseases including plague, smallpox and cholera. Simon Schama is the author of Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations (Simon & Schuster, 2023) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Simon Schama explores the legacy of the 18th and 19th-century artistic movement on the modern world
Ahead of his new BBC Two series The Romantics and Us, the renowned art historian and broadcaster Simon Schama explores the legacy of the 18th and 19th-century artistic movement on the modern world.
Simon Schama discusses his experiences of making the major new BBC arts history series Civilisations
As the major new BBC arts history series Civilisations is due to air, we speak to Simon Schama, one of its three presenters, to discuss the making of the series and how he was inspired by Kenneth Clark’s original.
Simon Schama speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about his new book, which looks at the lives of Jews – from rabbis to bare-knuckle boxers – across four centuries…
This article was first published in the December 2017 edition of BBC History Magazine Your new book spans more than 400 years of Jewish history – from the turn of the 16th century to the end of the 19th. What are some of the central themes you cover? For more than half a millennium, the life of a Jew was one where you never knew whether you were going to be holed up in a ghetto, expelled from your country, or accused of murdering Christian children to drink their blood. It could be a very transitory life. What intrigued me was what Jews could make of that transitory life while staying put in one religion. My central theme was whether or not Jews were given the chance to fulfil two compatible lives – one as a member of the country in which they settled, the other being life as a Jew. While some countries made that relatively easy, others made it incredibly difficult. That’s the real heart of the book, and the idea behind the title Belonging. How did different societies across the globe view and treat Jews in this period? It really depended what the dominant religion was in any given society. In most of the societies that I discuss it was Christianity. Jews in Christian societies laboured under two difficulties. Firstly, they were inevitably part of the Christian story. Christians believed that the second coming couldn’t happen – in other words the entire Christian story couldn’t be fulfilled – unless the Jews became Christians. So there was a constant pressure to convert. Sometimes, close proximity or friendship between Jewish rabbis and enlightened cardinals yielded real mutual sympathy on this issue. But at other times, the inability – or impossibility – of converting Jews created an extraordinary sense of grudge. It could trigger irrational fury. This obstinacy also stoked a feeling that Jews could never be persuaded to convert because they only ultimately belonged to each other and to themselves. Christian societies also saw the horrific perpetuation of the idea of blood libel. It’s extraordinary how through the 18th, 19th and even into the 20th century, many people still genuinely believed that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals. That belief saw Jews transformed into vampiric monsters. Things were slightly different in Muslim societies, where the Jews were less a matter of paranoia than contempt. In Turkey for example, there was a good degree of peaceful coexistence, partly because the Ottoman empire had a relatively (though not entirely) relaxed attitude to the profession of other faiths. It was possible for Jews and non-Jews to live in the same street, or sometimes even the same house. However, there were moments that proved things could very easily go downhill. The book also highlights instances of Jews thriving in the societies they lived in. Can you give us some examples? While the Jews feature in both the Christian and Islamic stories, they don’t feature at all in Confucianism or Buddhism. Ming China, for example, was structured around Confucian ethics, meaning that the idea of religious domination was completely insignificant. So in this period, China was one country where Jews could slip in (as did Muslims) as just another slightly obscure, eccentric cult. The documentation of Jewish lives in China isn’t as rich as we’d like, but there are stone inscriptions that give us a sense of what was going on. You could find Jews as army officers, mandarin bureaucrats, tax inspectors and school inspectors in Ming China. That was exceptionally unusual for the time. Similarly, in American history, we can find all kinds of examples of Jews being able to do things that they weren’t able to do elsewhere in this period. Many people did have to battle anti-Semitism, but we do see Jews acting as soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, as dry goods store owners, or actors and actresses. It may be hard to believe today, but America was built on inclusiveness (with of course the very dramatic exception of the African-American population). It was a country of immigrants, meaning that in this period it didn’t have a ferocious exclusive patriotism. You look at a colourful array of characters, from poets and political leaders to actors and army officers. Who did you find most fascinating to research? The book is very much the story of Jews rather than the story of Judaism. Jewish history can often end up as an endless procession of rabbis, philosophers and religious thinkers. While I do feature plenty of those figures, I really wanted to look at the characters that aren’t traditionally dealt with in Jewish history. One person whose story I’m particularly fond of is Leone de Sommi Portaleone, an actor and manager who was also a kind of practical rabbi responsible for [the Italian city of] Mantua’s Jewish community in the second half of the 16th century. Interestingly, the Jewish actors in his stage company were accepted as part of the city’s cultural scene relatively unproblematically. This may not have prevented a ghetto being imposed in Mantua in the early 17th century, but for a while, Jews in the city were part of a genuine feedback loop of cultural curiosity. An equally fascinating character was Sarra Copia [1592–1641], a brilliant, heroic, eloquent, funny, feisty woman who lived in the Venice ghetto. Copia got a terrible crush on an elderly Christian poet and diplomat called Ansaldo Cebà. They shared this weird, slightly creepy, semi-romantic relationship through a series of letters, in which Sarra consistently refused Cebà’s attempts to persuade her to convert to Christianity. She was fabulously out-there, really brave and very funny; I rather loved her. Another incredibly important figure was Daniel Mendoza [1764-1836]. Mendoza was a bare-knuckle boxer in Georgian England whose spectacular career overthrew a lot of stereotypes about Jews. His exploits may not have been the beginning of Jewish toughness but they were a gigantic step into it. Mendoza was certainly no pussycat. He was motivated by a desire to show that Jews were not weak or passive, always with their backs hunched over books. Through his crude form of brutish physicality, Mendoza wanted to re-embody what it meant to be a Jew. You can definitely see a bit of Muhammad Ali in him. He realised that he was seen as exotic, but rather than running away from that fact, he made it a central part of his persona. Mendoza’s story is a perfect example of a moment of exuberant, almost flamboyant breakthrough, where a Jewish figure found a place in the public consciousness of their home culture while still being seen as distinctly Jewish. Prejudice and persecution are an inevitable part of this story – what forms did anti-Semitism take during this period? I start the book at a moment when the church seemed to repudiate the idea that Jews should be distinguished by dress code. However, things very quickly backtracked to a point where Jews were forced to wear different clothes from everybody else. They were thought not to be fit to dwell with other citizens, and the 16th century saw the ghettoisation of Rome and Venice. The Venice ghetto was locked at night and guarded by patrols. Things were even worse in Rome, where elderly Jews were stripped naked and pelted with rotten fruit by jeering crowds, in so-called ‘games’ that were supposed to be terribly funny. We go all the way from these acts of confinement and public humiliation through to full-blooded pogroms and massacres. In 1648, for example, many, many thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered in Polish Ukraine for absolutely no reason whatsoever. One of the most chilling things that I discovered during my research was a list of ways to kill Jews, drawn up in late 19th-century France as a response to the Dreyfus affair [in which Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of treason]. This list thinks up all manner of hideous deaths for the Jews, from burning them alive in glass furnaces to dissecting them alive in anatomy classes or shredding them into dog food. Its virulence and bitterness is shocking. There was no torment invented by the Nazis that wasn’t first voiced by the French in 1899. So you name it, Jews went through it. Why is this subject still so pressing and relevant to reflect on? That’s a gigantic question. I didn’t write the book with an eye on today at all, but the modern hostility to people on the move does make this story feel prescient. The question of whether or not it’s possible to belong to two communities at the same time remains an issue for people all over the world. I feel that we have been on a ride towards a world divided; between people who are perfectly happy living with strangers, and those who only want neighbours that look, sound or pray just like themselves. Now we are seeing those two visions colliding. And the latter is so deeply wired to our viscera, our guts, that it’s become a monster. Simon Schama is a historian, author and broadcaster who has written and presented a number of programmes for the BBC, including A History of Britain and The Story of the Jews. His books include: The Face of Britain, Citizens and Landscape and Memory. He is professor of art history and history at Columbia University Book: Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492–1900 by Simon Schama (Bodley Head, 800 pages, £25)
In 2015, Simon Schama joined forces with the National Portrait Gallery and the BBC to explore the history and development of British portraiture. Here, using the themes of love, people, fame, self and power, Simon selects some of the most significant British photographs, paintings and caricatures of the past 800 years...
This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine Love Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), 1860 and 1870 Charles Dodgson, better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll, met the Liddell family in 1856. Dodgson would entertain Alice and her siblings with his stories, and they in turn became the subjects of another of his passions: photography. Alice – pictured below left when she was eight – was a particular favourite of the aspiring writer, becoming the inspiration for the high-spirited Alice in his 1865 children’s classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Like many Victorian image-makers, Dodgson loved to capture pictures of children – particularly girls – during their ‘age of innocence’, before the awkwardness of adolescence set in,” says Simon Schama. “The frank, composed stare of the young, fresh-faced Alice in contrast to the passive-aggressive pose of her 20-year-old self suggests a dramatic change in the sitter during the 10-year period between the two sittings.” Dodgson had, in fact, cut contact with the Liddells at some point between the two sittings. Some speculated that Alice’s mother had grown uncomfortable with his attentions towards her daughter, or that his infatuation with Alice had even to led to a proposal of marriage. King George IV by Richard Cosway, c1780–82 Designed to be kept on, or about, the body like a piece of jewellery, miniature portraits – mainly of loved ones, and often boasting accompanying locks of hair – peaked in popularity during the 18th century. The future George IV – a hopeless romantic – was a particular fan of the genre, and almost always sent the object of his devotion a miniature of himself. The image below, which may have been painted as a gift for actress Mary Robinson, sees George painted against a cloudy sky, and was designed to show off his features to their best advantage. “Richard Cosway, who became painter to the Prince of Wales in 1785, was soon painting two or three miniatures a year – the prince’s amorous turnover being high,” says Schama. “Ironically, it was his mother, Queen Charlotte, who inspired his love of the medium. She habitually wore a miniature of her husband, given to her as a wedding present, over her heart as a public expression of her devotion.” People Surveillance photograph of militant suffragettes by Criminal Record Office, 1914 After labelling the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) a terror organisation, in 1912, the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office began compiling a photo dossier – the first such security surveillance file – of imprisoned suffragettes. The images were taken using the first long-distance lens made in Britain, and usually showed women exercising in prison yards. They were then distributed to institutions deemed to be under threat of attack by suffragettes, including the National Gallery, which had seen suffragette Mary Richardson attack a Velázquez masterpiece – the Rokeby Venus – with a meat cleaver in March 1914. Says Schama: “One photograph – of suffragette Evelyn Manesta (no 10) – was even doctored so that the policeman’s arm that gripped her neck in the original version subsequently resembled a harmless scarf!” Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Job ben Solomon) by William Hoare, 1733 Pictured in the costume of the Fulbe people of his native Senegambia, west Africa, Diallo – a slave-owner – was himself taken into slavery in 1731, on his return from a slave-selling mission. Diallo was sent to work on a plantation, but eventually found himself in London, where he was celebrated for, among other things, his skills as a translator of Arabic. His is the first known portrait to honour an African subject as an individual and equal. “Devout black men and women were the first to find their way into solo portraiture,” says Schama. “Here, Diallo is shown with one of the three Qur’ans he wrote from memory, as a symbol of his Muslim piety.” Fame Kitty Fisher by Nathaniel Hone, 1765 Dubbed the ‘first celebrity’ in the sense that she was famous simply for being famous, 18th-century courtesan Kitty Fisher was a master of her own image. She shot to fame with a brilliantly conceived stunt in St James’s Park in 1759, which saw her fall spectacularly from her horse during which it was revealed that she was not wearing underwear. “The incident, which had been staged for maximum exposure, was immediately reported, drawn, printed and sung in ballads,” says Schama. “Kitty had successfully made herself a name.” Knowing she needed to capitalise on her new notoriety, Kitty employed the services of leading portraitist Joshua Reynolds. Soon, images of the courtesan were appearing in all sorts of mediums, including tiny miniatures that could be concealed inside watch cases or snuff boxes, to be viewed discreetly. “Kitty intuitively grasped the conditions which could give her her opportunity,” says Schama, “and she knew exactly what she wanted from a painter: an image that was simultaneously refined and teasingly sensual.” This painting above, by Nathaniel Hone, was described by the Public Advertiser as “a portrait of a lady whose charms are well known to the town”. The reflection in the goldfish bowl shows a crowd of people looking through a window at the goldfish, reflecting Kitty’s life in the public eye. The image even contains a play on her name: the kitten (Kitty) is trying to get into the bowl of fish. Emma, Lady Hamilton by George Romney, c1785 Born into a poor blacksmithing family in Cheshire, Emma Hamilton (born Amy or Emy Lyon) was a woman who knew how to use and display her considerable beauty to its best advantage. After a period of time in London theatres, Emma became mistress to a string of older men before catching the eye of the most fashionable painter of the day: George Romney. “Emma sat for Romney 118 times between 1782 and 1784,” says Schama, “and he became entranced with her. His paintings depict Emma in simple cottons and muslins, glowing with flesh-and-blood warmth. Through his works, she became a sensation, and her face could be found in prints, and on china and snuffboxes, everywhere.” Already famous for her beauty and a renowned fashion icon, Emma – now married – caused an international scandal when she embarked on a very public affair with Lord Nelson. News of their relationship was greedily lapped up by the newspaper-buying public. Emma, like Kitty Fisher, had become one of the first celebrities of her day. Self Self-portrait from a Book of Hours by William de Brailes, c1240 “When 13th-century illuminator William de Brailes painted himself into the historiated capital ‘C’ of an English Book of Hours, it was not an ego-announcement, but rather a carefully judged combination of self-promotion and self-effacement,” says Schama. Depicted kneeling in prayer, eyes closed as the hand of God blesses him with a gentle two-fingered touch to the side of his face, de Brailes has also written in the margin in tiny French script: “W de brail q(ui) me depeint” (“W de Brailes, who painted me”). The image and script were de Brailes’ permanent, and effective, way of reminding his (now unknown) patroness – painted elsewhere in the book – of his skills as an illuminator every time she opened it to pray – eight times a day! In fact, de Brailes is the only 13th-century English non-monastic illuminator who is known to have signed his work, and this image is widely celebrated as being the first self-portrait in English art. “The images of de Brailes are probably not true likenesses, though,” says Schama. “Aside from the fact that mirrors were notoriously distorting surfaces, medieval artists were also all too aware of being taken to task for their preoccupation with depicting outward appearances – the vanities of the world.” Gerlach Flicke; Henry Strangwish (Strangways) by Gerlach Flicke, 1554 This tiny diptych – measuring just 8.8x11.9cm – was painted by Gerlach Flicke (below left), a German immigrant from Osnabrück, north-west Germany, while he was in prison, probably in the Tower of London. While incarcerated there, Flicke met and befriended gentleman-pirate Henry Strangwish (below right), the so-called Red Rover of the Channel in light of his fiery red hair. “The artist – depicted with his palette – wears an expression of what might, at first, seem like intense self-regard,” says Schama, “but it is more likely working conditions and the small, corroded mirror he was using that account for his intent peering.” The unlikely duo were imprisoned in the same cell: Strangwish for piracy, and Flicke possibly as part of Mary I’s persecution of Protestants, which had begun in 1553. Flicke was a known portrait artist who had painted men such as Thomas Cranmer. His work is the earliest known oil self-portrait produced in England. Its inscription reads: “Such was the face of Gerlach Flicke when he was a painter in the City of London. This he himself painted from a looking-glass for his dear friends. That they might have something by which to remember him after his death.” Flicke was eventually released but died in 1558; Strangwish died four years later. Power Winston Churchill by Yousuf Karsh, 1941 In 1941, with events at Pearl Harbor fresh in his mind and weary after a long session with the Canadian government, prime minister Winston Churchill walked into the Speaker’s Chamber to be greeted with a blaze of lights and Yousuf Karsh, a young Armenian-Canadian photographer. “With his face a mask of fury, cigar smouldering, Churchill agreed to a single shot being taken of him, but refused to remove his cigar,” says Schama. What happened next would result in one of the most iconic images (shown below) in British history. Determined to get the photograph he wanted, Karsh walked up to Churchill and pulled the cigar from his mouth. “He [Churchill] looked so belligerent he could have devoured me,” Karsh later recalled. This was the image he wanted; the camera shutter opened and closed. “Cheek could go either way with the prime minister and in this case he chose to be amused,” comments Schama. “He even agreed to another shot – a far more warmhearted image (inset, above).” “Yet it is the glowering image of Churchill that is now remembered. It spoke to millions of invincible resolution. It was the face of the finest hour.” William Pitt (An Excrescence; A Fungus; Alias – A Toadstool upon a Dung-hill) published by James Gillray; Hannah Humphrey, 1791 Widely celebrated as Britain’s first professional political caricaturist, James Gillray turned caricatures into powerful weapons of political and social criticism. One of Gillray’s primary targets of ridicule was Whig prime minister William Pitt. “Visual satire could be enjoyed by unlearned as well as learned people,” explains Schama. “For the first time in history – anywhere – politics had become entertainment and no caricaturist was more fought over than James Gillray.” Above, Pitt is depicted as a toadstool, planted on a dunghill, with his tentacle roots forming the shape of a crown – “a nod to the common accusation that Pitt’s government sustained itself by feeding off royal patronage”, says Schama. Gillray’s caricatures turned men of power into objects of comedy. Simon Schama is professor of history and art history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of The Face of Britain: The Nation Through Its Portraits, published by Viking.
On the eve of Barack Obama's election, Simon Schama spoke to Rob Attar about war, politics, race and religion and what it is that makes the USA unique
Q: What do you think it is that sets America apart from the rest of the world? A: There are two crucial things. The first is that the nation was the result of a kind of manifesto, or a statement of intent called the Declaration of Independence, with all the impossibly optimistic ideals embedded in it. In other words, everybody is entitled to liberty and equality without problems or contradictions. The Declaration has been a living document for Americans, who are much more soaked in history than Europeans in particular believe. So there is this sense that to be an American is to subscribe to a set of political ideas rather than simply a culture, a habit, a landscape or a way of life. The second point about what makes America different is that it is a country that has always been founded on immigration and has actually welcomed immigration. That isn’t to say that America hasn’t violated some of its optimism about all nations being melted together. This aim has often been broken more than it’s been observed. In America, coming from somewhere else and still being a full American – a Polish American, an African American or a Chinese American – is possible in a way which can’t be taken for granted anywhere else in the world. Q: How much of America’s history was shaped by the early European settlers? A: I think they were important when it comes to ecstatic religion. This idea that America is a place of rebirth began with the Puritans in the 17th century but it also received a great jolt from people like Methodists John Wesley and George Whitefield who preached wildly and enthusiastically in the 1740s. In America you don’t just lose the chains of your old place of birth but you somehow have access to a particular kind of revelation. That concept has remained extremely strong from the 18th century. When you see moments of ecstatic religion in America it has a very long inheritance from England. You have to go back to the wild, almost raving place that was Cromwellian England because a lot of early America was a kind of transposition across the ocean of Cromwellian England, when everybody in the country was in a fever of religious ecstasy. That’s where it all comes from. European ideas of political liberty were influential at the more rational end of the spectrum. Before the War of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson went to his local circulating library and read-up documents about the Civil War and John Locke. He also read about the Commonwealth Men who had a political theory of contract whereby everybody contracts together to create a new political society of equals – that was very important. Q: In the opening chapter of your book you quote a 2007 Dick Cheney speech where he said America “has never been a warrior culture”. Is that something you would agree with? A: There is a very deeply embedded notion that America only goes to war in pursuit of self defence and for the liberation of others. I think that America, because of Jefferson, had a feeling that it never really wanted to be a martial culture. Unlike Britain, which ripped its children away from their families and sent them to military training, or Prussia, where people were brutally conscripted, America always thought of itself as having citizen soldiers. It didn’t have a large army until the Civil War. That being said, the first loss of that innocence came in the Mexican War when an enthusiastic volunteer army did actually go into battle for rip-snorting expansionist reasons. There are these two Jekyll and Hyde qualities in the way that America feels about war. On the one hand there is the notion of Alexander Hamilton that America must have a strong army and that it can’t be put in a position of relying on amateur soldiers or it will simply never be able to defend itself or assert its muscle in the world. On the other there is Jefferson’s view that if you have a cast of professional soldiers, if you have a huge military establishment, then you run the risk of crushing liberty. Q: Which of the wars involving America has been the most crucial to its development? A: That’s a tricky question. Obviously by definition the Revolutionary War was the premise of the country’s foundation. Then the Civil War was also very important. Left over from the Revolutionary War was the unresolved question of slavery and the terrible contradiction which Jefferson as a slaveholder knew all about: you promised equality but you lived off slavery. The Civil War and Lincoln’s unwillingness to procrastinate any longer on slavery was an extraordinary experience. Around 620,000 people died one way or another and the whole country was devastated. The Civil War was shocking in its ferocity and it is very hard to think of any comparable conflicts in Europe. There were lots of wars of mass slaughter such as the First World War but no civil wars, except for the Russian revolutionary Civil War, that were anything like it. One would like to say that the civil war chastened America for a long time but it is equally true to say that by the end of the 19th century that memory of chastening carnage was fading away. Politicians like Theodore Roosevelt came along saying that war is a national tonic and we must embrace the virility of military exercise. What I think the Civil War did was inject into the national bloodstream a deep sensibility that wars represent the tearing apart of families. If you talk to veterans of the Second World War, or of Vietnam or of the Iraq war, there really is the sense that you had better make sure that the wars you fight are for a damn good cause and that they are about America’s defence or else you’re sacrificing your own children needlessly. Q: What have been some of America's most pivotal elections? A: The 1800 election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was incredibly important. That absolutely was first principles, about whether or not a libertarian form of democracy should prevail over the obligation to centralised power. Jefferson had to defend himself against a vicious campaign which said that to vote for him was to vote for no god. Jefferson was accused of being an atheist when in fact he was a deist, which is very different. The 1860 election was colossal, as were the primaries. It was essentially about the issue of whether compromise could be cobbled together on slavery, or whether someone like Abraham Lincoln could draw a line in the sand, which he did. The elections of 1932 and 1936 were also important. People on the Republican side lament the election of 1936 in particular as introducing a creeping form of socialism through Franklin Roosevelt. Herbert Hoover went down to a derisory defeat in 1932 and we often forget what a powerful, influential, intelligent and actually rather humane man Herbert Hoover was. However he was standing for a kind of liberal laissez-faire economics that just couldn’t hack it amid the economic pain of the time. However, Roosevelt only became the father of big interventionist government after he was elected. He was very careful beforehand not to present himself as some slightly more American version of Lenin or the Labour Party. I’d say the Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan election of 1980 was huge. Carter has had such a raw deal from history. He had many shortcomings as an executive, but in some cases like energy policy, I think he will be vindicated. Reagan’s triumph at this election introduced a dominion of conservative received wisdoms which lasted until it was buried by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Q: How do you think America sees its role in the world and how much has this changed over history? A: Here I’ll start with Thomas Jefferson again. We go back to him and back to him but the more you read of him the more astonished you are by the power of his thought. Jefferson believed the whole point of the American Revolution was not just to do something with the territorial landmass – to make it the land of liberty – but to be a new kind of nation in the world. At the same time Jefferson, like George Washington, wanted to avoid entangling alliances and did not want to brandish the sabre. But he thought that somehow by America’s sheer force of moral example it would create liberty all around the world. Jefferson couldn’t think of America’s position in the world as standing pat, he thought that America’s chance of flourishing was as a benevolent liberator. Alexander Hamilton was much more of a pragmatist. Hamilton was always more concerned about safeguarding American interests and about a fiercer, more raw execution of power. The retired generals I spoke to all think that America somehow clings to Jeffersonian ideas but is trapped inside a Hamiltonian big power reality. I don’t know whether you’ve read Eisenhower’s farewell address or not, but from a military president and someone whose whole background was the army, it was one of the most eloquently poignant warnings in all of America’s history. The whole thrust of what Eisenhower had to say about the military industrial complex was truly extraordinary. It went back to Washington’s farewell address in saying that American liberty has to watch out that the warrior aspects, the institutionalised aspects of American military power, aren’t self perpetuating. The remarkable fact about America is it has this debate over and over and over again. It just doesn’t let its military hest run away with itself and you have the other side of America – philanthropy, the Peace Corps, the sense of its mission to humanitarian benevolence, as with Africa for example. Even the Bush administration has been incredibly good, simply if you count the dollars, in the amount of aid channelled to Africa. This sense of missionary humanitarian benevolence isn’t to me so much hot air. It is a genuine part of the way Americans think about their place in the world. Q: Has the rest of the world misunderstood America? A: I don’t know how much American history is taught in British schools anymore, if any, since most of the modules are Adolf Hitler and Henrys. It is a complicated history, not a simple history. It’s a thrilling history and it’s a very disturbing history in a lot of ways but it does require people doing their homework and reporters going to places other than Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Washington. It’s a society made up of micro-republics called states and regions. Many of these are extremely unlike each other and have different racial, religious and cultural characteristics. The USA is a real federation of differences, despite the fact there is a KFC in every town. Simon Schama is university professor of history and art history at Columbia University, New York. He is also an acclaimed author and TV presenter. This article was first published in the October 2008 issue of BBC History Magazine