I'd have thought that the Peer-commoner intermarriage exploded in the 1860s and onward due to changes in economic realities: explosion of the middle classes, including the very rich industrial titans (who were still technically middle class), the beginning of the agricultural depression that reduced incomes for the peers, and, of course, those huge Victorian family sizes due to better healthcare. So many daughters to marry off! Many would have married the wealthy new middle classes, usually those up and coming men who befriended the sons of the peers at school and university. The implication given in your example is that daughters of earls started marrying common shop clerks, but I suspect that was not the case.
Interestingly enough, I'm reminded of Anthony Trollope and the De Courcy family who appear in several of his Barsetshire books. Earl De Courcy had a sister, Lady Arabella, who married the squire of Greshamsbury (untitled ancient gentry, but still a step down). They had a son and nine daughters! A minor storyline in Dr. Thorne involves one of the daughters, Augusta Gresham, who starts shyly courting the family solicitor, Mr. Gazebee (middle class!) but is told by her cousin, Lady Amelia De Courcy, one of the four unmarried De Courcy daughters, that it was beneath the family dignity to contemplate marriage with a mere commoner and a solicitor to boot! Poor Augusta withdraws her affections, only for Lady Amelia to slyly slip in and marry Mr. Gazebee.
Ultimately, Lady Amelia realized it was better to be mistress of her own comfortable suburban villa and to have her own carriage and servants and family as the wife of a prosperous London attorney than to remain the unmarried spinster daughter of an increasingly impoverished earl.
Another De Courcy daughter, Lady Alexandrina, figures prominently in The Small House at Allington as someone with two failed engagements due to lack of agreements over her dowry/settlement, and swoops in to marry the (untitled) beloved of another character, a gentleman who works in the city in some capacity, but the marriage fails as she realizes her husband would never love, or even like, her, and she takes the classic Victorian exit from the scenes by duly dying of a broken heart.
The marriage market for the abundance of daughters was a persistent theme in Trollope's books. The daughters of the aristocracy who'd taken these kinds of marriages for granted now had to compete with an even more attractive type of bride: newly rich. Even Earl De Courcy's younger son is married off to the daughter of a newly rich factory owner.
Another comment - re reading. As the infamous Thomas Hobbes once said, ‘Reading is a pernicious habit. It destroys all originality of sentiment."
What is lacking from the article about reading ourselves to death is that the attention span while reading has greatly changed too. We may be reading more words, but we are reading fewer books. This is telling. And even the size of books have shrunk. It used to be that 400 pages/100k words was a standard new fiction, but now the pressure is to whittle it down to 300 pages or thereabouts. Just glance at all the new publications in the bookstore and try to remember the same shelves from even a decade ago.
We are losing the capacity to read long books. The occasional big bestseller still breaks through but the mid-list is increasingly shrinking.
I can sympathize. I have a towering stack of books I want to read but after spending all day on the computer at work, it's hard to sit down and rest with a book. Inevitably I start going for the more slender volumes. And this is even creeping over into my work. The long reports and analyses that used to be commonplace in my field are becoming shorter and punchier and more graphic oriented. We've had discussions about this inevitable creep at work and the implications. People don't want to read long blocks of text any more. And we're losing that capacity to do it ourselves. Everything has to be reduced to soundbites and readable on a smart phone screen.
Because of the latter, we live in a world dominated by headlines and twitter and those news releases that flitter across our screen - not long articles and stories. It must absolutely have a dopamine effect too, especially in these political days. The brain is stimulated by by headlines proclaiming an injustice, but we don't read further and get a better sense of the situation, which would most likely have us saying, wait, hold on, ok, this is more complicated than the headline suggests, there's nuances involved, I now see the different perspective, and so forth.
Ed - you, as a writer with a Substack, surely must be aware of the differences in writing a Substack versus a lengthy column in published magazine? Do you see your writing style shifting? Paragraphs getting smaller and more direct?
The problem I have with social media, and the smart phones, is that if You can't *read* anything that isn't measure in *characters...* Yeah, I exaggerate. But not by much.
I fear a person that won't attempt to read anything long-form will be unable to hold serious, contrasting thoughts in their head. Soon, the only problems that will even be *attempted* will be as shallow as a tweet. While it seems the world is getting more and more complex.
"Richard Weaver wrote in Ideas Have Consequences that, in retrospect, the invention of writing was a mixed blessing."
He says this as if there is such a thing as an unmixed blessing.
'Writing, as the Native American activist Russell Means would have it, is a way of seemingly controlling the world, a way of shearing it of the intangible. It is “the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.” '
But Mr. Wilson quoted others, earlier in the article, who observed that spoken words are also an abstraction of reality. When I say, "There's a cat!" my words are not the cat. Maybe the cat isn't even in your line of sight, so you have only a mental, not visual, image of the cat.
If I say, "I feel cold," you don't know what I feel: you only guess at it from your own experiences and understanding of "cold."
TYTY. I skimmed over that part of M. West's fine article. On reading in detail, these things struck me:
"Marshall McLuhan, for example, claimed in The Gutenberg Galaxy that for all its obvious benefits, a byproduct of the phonetic alphabet was the emergence of what he called “schizophrenia” — a cultural split between our passionate, mystical side and our rational, empirical side."
"Writing, as the Native American activist Russell Means would have it, is a way of seemingly controlling the world, a way of shearing it of the intangible. It is “the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.” Maybe we just don’t know anymore what to do with the experience of experience — and putting it into writing, of course, only adds to the problem."
Dr. Iain McGilchrist wrote some books about the difference between the left hemisphere of the brain and the right. Though they are *physically* different, there seems to be a contingent that still believes they do basically the same things. Dr. McGilchrist has proposed otherwise.
The main difference not being *what* the hemispheres do, but *how* they process information. The left: Analytical, abstractly, numeric, reducing wholes down to parts and sub-parts. The right: Hmm. I guess I'd say it processes the whole-at-once, the living of things, experiencing rather than analyzing, and musical instruments, funny enough, are taken to be "living." Suchlike. I've been meaning to reread them, and You can see why.
Anyway, he's also a psychiatrist and he says the manner we've been thinking for a long time has been left-hemisphere dominant, and a lotta times filters out the perceptions of the right. Unfortunately. And he's says the way society works has a lotta aspects of schizophrenia.
I could go on, as I'm overly abstract myself. (But probably went on too far as it is. ;-) TYTY again, Ma'am.
TY for reply, but.. Naw. I was just shooting my mouth off. If You want an intelligent essay, and have an hour and $.99, Dr. McGilchrist wrote this: "The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning."
Scanning more text in an increasingly distracted frame of mind - information overload.
You might enjoy my rather rushed comment about book sizes shrinking and what all these changes may mean for how we respond to print information. Agree that we are losing the ability to achieve a deeper retention of information through slower, more in-depth reading of proper books rather than quick glances at short articles and twitter headlines. The former requires developing the reasoning, the latter stimulates the passions. If we lose sight of reason in favor of passion - well, it may describe much of what has happened in the last decade.
I just read the first page, but it was very interesting, M. Barrett. Turns out I already had "Decline of the West" on my book list. Just need the *time.* TYTY.
TYTY for video. Sorry, but I rarely watch them. I'm an example of 100% text orientation. But I avoid the Internet in general, and social media in particular, like the plague. (Other than Substacks.) I try not to get too abstract about things, but dunno how well I do that. TY again, M. Barrett.
I'd have thought that the Peer-commoner intermarriage exploded in the 1860s and onward due to changes in economic realities: explosion of the middle classes, including the very rich industrial titans (who were still technically middle class), the beginning of the agricultural depression that reduced incomes for the peers, and, of course, those huge Victorian family sizes due to better healthcare. So many daughters to marry off! Many would have married the wealthy new middle classes, usually those up and coming men who befriended the sons of the peers at school and university. The implication given in your example is that daughters of earls started marrying common shop clerks, but I suspect that was not the case.
Interestingly enough, I'm reminded of Anthony Trollope and the De Courcy family who appear in several of his Barsetshire books. Earl De Courcy had a sister, Lady Arabella, who married the squire of Greshamsbury (untitled ancient gentry, but still a step down). They had a son and nine daughters! A minor storyline in Dr. Thorne involves one of the daughters, Augusta Gresham, who starts shyly courting the family solicitor, Mr. Gazebee (middle class!) but is told by her cousin, Lady Amelia De Courcy, one of the four unmarried De Courcy daughters, that it was beneath the family dignity to contemplate marriage with a mere commoner and a solicitor to boot! Poor Augusta withdraws her affections, only for Lady Amelia to slyly slip in and marry Mr. Gazebee.
Ultimately, Lady Amelia realized it was better to be mistress of her own comfortable suburban villa and to have her own carriage and servants and family as the wife of a prosperous London attorney than to remain the unmarried spinster daughter of an increasingly impoverished earl.
Another De Courcy daughter, Lady Alexandrina, figures prominently in The Small House at Allington as someone with two failed engagements due to lack of agreements over her dowry/settlement, and swoops in to marry the (untitled) beloved of another character, a gentleman who works in the city in some capacity, but the marriage fails as she realizes her husband would never love, or even like, her, and she takes the classic Victorian exit from the scenes by duly dying of a broken heart.
The marriage market for the abundance of daughters was a persistent theme in Trollope's books. The daughters of the aristocracy who'd taken these kinds of marriages for granted now had to compete with an even more attractive type of bride: newly rich. Even Earl De Courcy's younger son is married off to the daughter of a newly rich factory owner.
"Peer–commoner intermarriage rose by 40%; titled women married husbands 44 percentile ranks poorer in terms of family landholdings."
Fascinating. I wonder if the incidence of birth defects and other consanguinity indicators also declined in the succeeding years.
Another comment - re reading. As the infamous Thomas Hobbes once said, ‘Reading is a pernicious habit. It destroys all originality of sentiment."
What is lacking from the article about reading ourselves to death is that the attention span while reading has greatly changed too. We may be reading more words, but we are reading fewer books. This is telling. And even the size of books have shrunk. It used to be that 400 pages/100k words was a standard new fiction, but now the pressure is to whittle it down to 300 pages or thereabouts. Just glance at all the new publications in the bookstore and try to remember the same shelves from even a decade ago.
We are losing the capacity to read long books. The occasional big bestseller still breaks through but the mid-list is increasingly shrinking.
I can sympathize. I have a towering stack of books I want to read but after spending all day on the computer at work, it's hard to sit down and rest with a book. Inevitably I start going for the more slender volumes. And this is even creeping over into my work. The long reports and analyses that used to be commonplace in my field are becoming shorter and punchier and more graphic oriented. We've had discussions about this inevitable creep at work and the implications. People don't want to read long blocks of text any more. And we're losing that capacity to do it ourselves. Everything has to be reduced to soundbites and readable on a smart phone screen.
Because of the latter, we live in a world dominated by headlines and twitter and those news releases that flitter across our screen - not long articles and stories. It must absolutely have a dopamine effect too, especially in these political days. The brain is stimulated by by headlines proclaiming an injustice, but we don't read further and get a better sense of the situation, which would most likely have us saying, wait, hold on, ok, this is more complicated than the headline suggests, there's nuances involved, I now see the different perspective, and so forth.
Ed - you, as a writer with a Substack, surely must be aware of the differences in writing a Substack versus a lengthy column in published magazine? Do you see your writing style shifting? Paragraphs getting smaller and more direct?
The problem I have with social media, and the smart phones, is that if You can't *read* anything that isn't measure in *characters...* Yeah, I exaggerate. But not by much.
I fear a person that won't attempt to read anything long-form will be unable to hold serious, contrasting thoughts in their head. Soon, the only problems that will even be *attempted* will be as shallow as a tweet. While it seems the world is getting more and more complex.
ICBW. And I hope I *am* wrong.
Kit Wilson's article is very interesting.
"Richard Weaver wrote in Ideas Have Consequences that, in retrospect, the invention of writing was a mixed blessing."
He says this as if there is such a thing as an unmixed blessing.
'Writing, as the Native American activist Russell Means would have it, is a way of seemingly controlling the world, a way of shearing it of the intangible. It is “the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.” '
But Mr. Wilson quoted others, earlier in the article, who observed that spoken words are also an abstraction of reality. When I say, "There's a cat!" my words are not the cat. Maybe the cat isn't even in your line of sight, so you have only a mental, not visual, image of the cat.
If I say, "I feel cold," you don't know what I feel: you only guess at it from your own experiences and understanding of "cold."
Overall, though, really interesting ideas.
TYTY. I skimmed over that part of M. West's fine article. On reading in detail, these things struck me:
"Marshall McLuhan, for example, claimed in The Gutenberg Galaxy that for all its obvious benefits, a byproduct of the phonetic alphabet was the emergence of what he called “schizophrenia” — a cultural split between our passionate, mystical side and our rational, empirical side."
"Writing, as the Native American activist Russell Means would have it, is a way of seemingly controlling the world, a way of shearing it of the intangible. It is “the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.” Maybe we just don’t know anymore what to do with the experience of experience — and putting it into writing, of course, only adds to the problem."
Dr. Iain McGilchrist wrote some books about the difference between the left hemisphere of the brain and the right. Though they are *physically* different, there seems to be a contingent that still believes they do basically the same things. Dr. McGilchrist has proposed otherwise.
The main difference not being *what* the hemispheres do, but *how* they process information. The left: Analytical, abstractly, numeric, reducing wholes down to parts and sub-parts. The right: Hmm. I guess I'd say it processes the whole-at-once, the living of things, experiencing rather than analyzing, and musical instruments, funny enough, are taken to be "living." Suchlike. I've been meaning to reread them, and You can see why.
Anyway, he's also a psychiatrist and he says the manner we've been thinking for a long time has been left-hemisphere dominant, and a lotta times filters out the perceptions of the right. Unfortunately. And he's says the way society works has a lotta aspects of schizophrenia.
I could go on, as I'm overly abstract myself. (But probably went on too far as it is. ;-) TYTY again, Ma'am.
Thank you for the very interesting contribution!
TY for reply, but.. Naw. I was just shooting my mouth off. If You want an intelligent essay, and have an hour and $.99, Dr. McGilchrist wrote this: "The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning."
https://www.amazon.com/Divided-Brain-Search-Meaning-ebook/dp/B008JE7I2M/ref=sr_1_6
He also wrote two books, both long. I need to reread them something fierce. TY again.
I have $.99.
But You'd hafta take an hour away from "listening" to me, ME, *ME!* Ah well...
I'm going to church, and then I'll probably take a nap with my cat.
Placido Domingo to you!
TYTY, Sir.
the Beatles were certainly troubedours of the second reformation. hard to deny
Scanning more text in an increasingly distracted frame of mind - information overload.
You might enjoy my rather rushed comment about book sizes shrinking and what all these changes may mean for how we respond to print information. Agree that we are losing the ability to achieve a deeper retention of information through slower, more in-depth reading of proper books rather than quick glances at short articles and twitter headlines. The former requires developing the reasoning, the latter stimulates the passions. If we lose sight of reason in favor of passion - well, it may describe much of what has happened in the last decade.
I just read the first page, but it was very interesting, M. Barrett. Turns out I already had "Decline of the West" on my book list. Just need the *time.* TYTY.
Thank You. You are a *bundle* of information, M. Barrett! I've heard-a Spengler, but that's about it. Hope to get to it later. TYTY.
Oh! I didn't see the first link was only 10 minutes. I can handle that, and did. TYTY!
TYTY for video. Sorry, but I rarely watch them. I'm an example of 100% text orientation. But I avoid the Internet in general, and social media in particular, like the plague. (Other than Substacks.) I try not to get too abstract about things, but dunno how well I do that. TY again, M. Barrett.
TYTY. Always appreciate You.