Behind the Scenes Minis: Amy Levy and Pranksters

Holly and Tracy discuss how Vernon Lee factored into the story of Amy Levy's life. They also talk about what a pain in the neck Theodore Hook must have been.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio, Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And this week we talked
about Amy Levy, who somehow escaped both of our knowledge

(00:23):
until this. Yeah, so you the first version of the
episode outline that you sent to me was one that
wasn't finished yet, so it didn't have the introductory uh
text in it. Um so unlike normal, where if I
don't if I'm not already familiar with a person, that
little introduction clues me in, I had no clue in

(00:45):
And so I started reading it, like, who is this person?
Their name does not ring a bell at all? I
had don't think I have ever heard of them? Reading
reading reading Vernon Lee. I researched and wrote the podcast
episode on Violet Haagett, also known as Vernon Lee, and
I was like, Okay, even having done that, I don't
think this name rings a bell. So I stopped what

(01:06):
I was doing and I went back through my Vernon
Lee stuff and the only mention of her in the
entirety of that research is in the footnotes of one biography,
and only one of those footnotes has any substance to it,
like the other ones are most like this letter was
from Amy Levy and that's all that. It's like, it's

(01:28):
just clarifying who wrote a letter and the like the
one substantive note just kind of sums up that my
read on on her relationship. How however, there's all kinds
of relationships, but like it really read to me from
having researched Vernon Lee and then having read what you

(01:49):
prepared on Amy Levy, that it seems like Amy was
in love with her and that probably wasn't reciprocated, and
that just seems like what shines through. Um how each
of them is discussed in work about the other one,
yes for sure, and in that um uh, the main
biography that I referenced in that episode, there is also

(02:13):
mention of at least one other person kind of in
that social circle who similarly had some sort of crush
on Vernon Lee, and Vernon Lee was in at that
point of fairly long term relationship, although not everyone knew
about it, Like it seems like Amy Levy didn't clue
in that that was the case. Um. But it's it's again,

(02:33):
these are guesses based on what we know about her
and them, and at a time when people probably weren't
being entirely like Cavalier and open about discussing such things.
So there's a lot of guesswork. But it seems like
this would come up periodically for Vernon Lee, where somebody
would be like, but I've in love with you, and
she'd be like, nope, but without saying because I'm already

(02:55):
in love with this person. So it's all very fascinating. Um,
I really really do quite. I mean, I feel so
fortunate that again my friend Bernadette introduced me to this
subject because, um, I really have enjoyed reading Amy Levi's work.

(03:16):
I mean, it's extraordinarily good. Um. You can also find
online there are um basically free audio I think it's
audio box that does the audio books of her novels,
so they're easy. There's easy to get access to them,
which is really nice if somebody's curious. But um, and
they are. They're very very um. I mean, she was

(03:39):
clearly very talented and it is I mean, the thing
that really made me go WHOA was the first one
of the first things I stumbled across was that Oscar
wild piece, And I'm like to watch or to read
him being so you know, just heaping praise on on anybody,

(04:00):
and you know, particularly another writer. I was like, whoa, whoa,
wait really um, And then what's interesting is that going
through newspaper accounts, she's everywhere. There was no lack of
Amy Levy information in newspapers, and so she was very
popular and very well known. And then somehow just drifts
off of the mentions early on. You and I talked

(04:24):
about that some while we were while we were discussing
my whole total surprise at the sudden appearance of Vernon
Lee in the episode, uh, how it seemed like people
like just didn't quite know how to process her death
and how to talk about her afterward, aside from that
round of speculation about what her reasoning might have been, yeah,

(04:47):
which is always I mean, that is problematic in so
many ways to begin with, right, Like, trying to figure
out why someone decides to end their life when you
don't is literally just guesswork, which becomes really really dangerous.
And I think you know, in Clementina Black's letter, she

(05:08):
makes the very strong case that I think people don't
always think about it like this would actually be painful
for that person to know that people were making up
these kinds of theories about them that could hurt their family. Um.
So yeah, I was really really glad that I stumbled
across that particular article in a paper or that letter

(05:30):
that had been published. Yeah. It's a it's a hard one,
but also so good. And I really her verse is beautiful. Um.
I really enjoyed it a great deal. And like I said,
I feel very foolish because I focused a lot on
writers from that time and place in college, and yet

(05:52):
nary a word that I can recall ever uttered about
her tracy. We talked about some practical jokes and pranks
this week we did. I have so many thoughts. Yeah,

(06:16):
I really thought the spaghetti tree one was a lot
more recent than it really was somehow, Like I knew
the basic lore of the spaghetti tree thing, and that
it had been a newscast, and that there were some
folks that believed the whole thing. But I really thought
that was like a nine nineties newscast, not a nineteen

(06:37):
fifties newscast. No. Yeah, I mean I think because it
does come up a bit. I mean, that's more than
sixty years old at this point. I don't know, if
you have the thing that I have, where like time
is real rubbery, where I'm like the year two thousand
that was like three years ago, right, So it happens
to me a lot um So that may be part

(06:57):
of what contributes to it. But it has been talked
about three years, so I could see where you would
think that was more recent. I will say, Um, regarding Carberry,
you know, his story is only eight years away, less
than eight years really from its hundredth anniversary. So I
wonder if the people at Brown who keep that myth
alive will do something spectacular for it. That'd be cool. Yeah,

(07:20):
I mean, what's really really interesting about his story is
that he does show up in a lot of perfectly
respectable places in print, in journals, in books, etcetera. And
like I even saw I think it was a t
w A ad where like the customer endorsement was by

(07:43):
Josiah Carberry about what a great service it was, which
I mean, it is very clear that like there are
people who are alums who keep that story alive in
other ways throughout There is also a second version of
it that we didn't get into it that popped up
at Wesleyan, which happened around the time that the professor
that started it transferred to that school, So clearly this

(08:05):
was his brain child, and like has has populated throughout
North America at least in a variety of ways. And
I do love that there are people that love the
story so much that they will try to wedge his
name into places it maybe doesn't belong. Um. For the
most part, it always seems like harmless fun. It never

(08:27):
seems like they're trying to really undermine anybody. Um, let
me talk about Theodore. Yeah. So um, when you told
me what you were working on for this episode, I
was like, ah, yeah, I've had the Berner Street hoax
on my on my list for a long time. But
every kind of every time I kind of looked at it,
I was like, not quite enough there, And then we

(08:48):
had a conversation about it. M hm. And I probably
could do, as I said, an entire episode on Theodore Hook,
but that would become a depressing episode of like a
privileged person gets away with doing lots of crappy things
and people celebrate him as a wit. Yeah, including sticking

(09:08):
his friends with the bill. I didn't like that. No,
he did something like that all the time, and the
thing was like, listen, when I was younger, I was
a little bit of a practical joker. I was that
kid that got in trouble for doing things like, um,
you know, at one of our pre graduation sort of
solemn programs, I wore pig slippers under my gown and

(09:29):
it made the principle real mad um, you know, I
would do stuff like that. So there was part of me,
particularly when they talked about his dad sending him to
Oxford to try to get him on a real career
path and him making jokes during the entrance questions, I
was like, oh, I completely identify with this person. And
then as it unfurls and he becomes more and more

(09:49):
of a pain in the neck to people and thinks
it's surely hilarious, I was like, I identify with him
less and less. Yeah, yeah, I I I do think
it's a great disservice that we have no idea what
happened with that poor woman after all of that madness
at her house that she didn't ask for and had
nothing to do with. I mean, I I really do

(10:14):
as as people listen, I wonder if anybody did what
I did, And I hope some people did, because it
is very sobering to think about, Like what if tomorrow
morning you woke up at five am with someone at
your house insisting you had ordered a service and you
finally convinced them that you did not, and then ten
more people just like them with the same service show
up insisting the same thing, and then that happens for

(10:37):
the next thirteen hours. Yeah, I don't I couldn't handle it.
I would have a breakdown at around our three which
completely fall apart. Well, and it's like today there are
there are connotations that weren't so much a thing when
it actually happened, like people who've had to deal with
identity theft, or we had a whole big problem uh

(11:02):
some time ago, um the you know before before our
job was only doing podcasts stuff, we had two different
freelancers who had the same name, and a person incorrectly
merged there two things and the accounts payable system into
one thing, and the the existence of two people with

(11:25):
the same name like caused such a huge problem. Like
those kinds of things were not quite as present in
the same way as when this prank happened. I'm sure
there were people with the same name in the nineteenth
century and it caused lots problems, but like not in
the way that a computer can propagate that problem to
every possible place, right, Um, yeah, yeah, it seems like

(11:49):
it would have been. And when you consider right all
of them, the police presence that was required to deal
with it. You know, we talked about it all the time,
like X happened in a bun to. Police had to
go do that, which meant they weren't doing all the
other normal things they're supposed to do. Like there's literally
such a domino effect in every direction. And that one
article we quoted talked about it like those are doctors

(12:11):
who were like not only giving up the hours to
go see this person, but that meant they also couldn't
get out of the street to go do their other
visits to other patients that probably legitimately needed them. Um,
you know, similar things like that. And when you think
about a tradesperson in eighteen ten, they probably didn't have
a lot of like wiggle room in their day in

(12:32):
terms of like the amount of money they needed to
make in the amount of appointments they needed to hit
and if they could not get out after they had
already wasted X amount of time. Yeah, it's it's not
a very thoughtful thing to do to a whole lot
of people. Yeah, well, I I feel like we might
get emails from people who talk about protests blocking traffic,

(12:54):
but there's a huge difference between protesting a serious social
or political issue and causing a problem just to cause
a problem to yes, yes, um, yeah, anyway, I sound

(13:15):
like the crabbiest crab of crabtown when it comes to pranks.
But stuff like that is too well, yeah, I just um,
tell me about spaghetti trees, but please don't block off
hundreds of people's days. Yeah. Well, and there are enough
pranks that seem really mean spirited to me that I'm like,
this is not fun. And especially when people try to
prank other people in the workplace, and it's like you're

(13:37):
compelled to be there at work. It's not like you
could just be like, oh, I'm checking out for the
whole You might be able to if you have a
really lenient boss. But like when people do mean pranks
on their coworkers, don't do that. No, No, I think
the meanest prank I ever did, and I couldn't even
like keep it going for more than seconds was and

(14:00):
I was in college and I was working with one
of my professors on like my senior project, which was
a play, and I UM. I had given her a
card from me that said, like, guess who's pregnant? And
she panicked and I couldn't even like by the time
she had opened the card, I was like, I'm sorry,

(14:20):
it's not real, Like I couldn't. Yeah. I did basically
that same prank one time when I was in my
early my early twenties, and I just I did not
have my act together. My whole life was just like
full of drama all the time. And I had this
one particular friend that I talked to about all of
these you know, this perpetual dramatic chaos that was my life. Uh,

(14:45):
And it was similar, like less than a minute passed
before I was like, no, I'm not actually can't. I
can't do it now. Yeah, I don't like to cause
anybody stress or fear the I am a bigger fan
of surprises than prank's right, where like I UM during
that magical brief gap where it seemed like we might

(15:06):
be seeing the curb of the pandemic and people started traveling,
we went to Chicago to see my best friend, and
we brought one of our other best friends who she's
also close friends with, but she didn't know she was coming.
And like, I remember hugging my best friend after I
had gotten on the plane in the baggage claim area
and I literally just said, look over my right shoulder.
And that was like a super fun surprise that I

(15:27):
guess you could categorize as a prank, but it wasn't
really Like But that is about as far as I
want to go anymore in terms of surprising, even good
surprises can be dangerous, ye, unexpectedly stressful for people sometimes. Yes,
I have learned, although it had to be told to
me explicitly, that my husband does not like surprises. Uh.

(15:49):
It took me a while, which stinks because I am
really good at surprising people, but um yeah he he
literally at one point was like for his forty birthday,
I kind of went all out with surprise after surprise
after surprise, and like we were traveling and people would
show up, and at one point he just turned to
me and said, I'm really glad to see them, but
you have to tell me if anything else is happening,
because I can't take it anymore, and I was like, Okay,

(16:12):
I have a list of things I need to inform
you about. So, um, take into account how the surprised
person would feel. Uh, and certainly trivially so if you
are going to try to do a practical joker prank,
because yeah, they're not for everybody. Uh yeah, just everybody

(16:34):
be nice to each other. It seems so simple. Thank
you so much for hanging out with us this week.
We hope you have a wonderful weekend ahead. Uh. And
if you have time off, that it is RESTful and delightful,
and that you have only good surprises and they're at
whatever level you are comfortable with. If you do not
have time off, we hope that whatever is going on
in your life goes smoothly and that everybody is kind

(16:57):
to you. We will be right back here tomorrow with
a classic episod out, and then we'll see you again
on Monday with new stuff. Stuff you missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
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