Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
This week on the show, we talked about Washington Irving
and his influence on the holiday of Christmas. Um I
(00:24):
read some very spirited articles that were sort of alleging
that Charles Dickens had been unfairly given credit for a
lot of stuff that should have been Washington Irving's credit.
I don't know if I would go that far, but
it is really interesting to see some of the things
that that clearly influenced Charles Dickens and may have influenced
(00:48):
the twas the Night Before Christmas poem. We did not
talk in great detail about the legend of Sleepy Hollow
and to the is any version of that that really
scared me so much as a child, and a big
part of it. As a child, I had a very
(01:12):
clear sense of fairness, and if something was unfair, I
found it just incredibly stressful. And it makes it very
clear that if Ichabod Crane got back over the bridge,
he would be safe from the headless horseman. Nikobad Crane
gets over the bridge, but then the headless horseman throws
(01:35):
his flaming pumpkinhead. It scared me so much as a kid.
And then the next day at Kabod Crane's got and
I'm like, but he made it across the bridge. He
was supposed to be safe. It very much upset me
when I was little. Loved it. Um yeah, The Headless
Horseman remains favorite memory of the Magic Kingdom Halloween, p Aid.
(02:01):
I love all of that stuff, and I will I
made a strange in my head horror connection while we
were talking about watching because there's that segment where we
were talking about how he had put up notices about
how Diedrich Knickerbocker had gone missing right before he published
(02:21):
a book under that name, and I was like, oh
my god, he did the original Blair Witch marketing. Yeah,
um so that was Yeah, that's pretty cool. Are we
going to get to the ridiculous letters? Okay? So again,
(02:45):
I don't I don't know if Charles Dickens meant for
this to sound as suggestive as it sounded to me.
The first bit of this I found was just the
sentence questions come thronging to my hen as to the
lips of people who meet after long hoping to do so,
and I was like, are we on archive of our
(03:08):
own right now? Let me go see if somebody has
written Washington Irving Charles Dickens slash. There was also, as
I understand it, this was a dinner that Washington Irving hosted.
The topic of the conversation for the evening was on
(03:30):
copyright law. Charles Dickens gave this sort of address thanking
Washington Irving, and he said, I wish I had bookmarked it.
He was like, two nights out of seven, at least
two nights out of seven, I go upstairs to my
bedroom with Washington Irving under my arm, and I was like,
(03:55):
this sounds like something someone would write in there Dickens Irving. Yes,
it reminds me of I don't know if you remember
when we did our Bram Stoker episode and he wrote
that letter to Walt Whitman that was similarly like same.
I had the intense and really like way suggestive wording,
(04:19):
and I had the same thing where I'm like, is
this just like a thing where it's like the turn
of phrases of the day today sound a little less
sivious or no? No, He was clearly pretty much in
love with Walt women. Um yeah, uh yeah, I Um.
(04:41):
I went down a whole rabbit hole of trying to
find I was like, can I get my hands on
more of these letters? Because there are various collections of letters,
and I could not get more of them. But I
was like, are they all like this? Did they all
have this tone? At least on Dickens's part? Um, I
did not have the Washington Irving letter that prompted that
(05:04):
response from Dickens to see what Washington Irving's letter had
sounded like. But then I think about, have you ever
had that moment where someone you really admire just like
off handedly reaches out to you or said something and
you're so worried about saying the right thing, or like
you meet someone that you really admire and then you
(05:25):
end up sounding like a way overblown, like intense nerd.
I mean, I see how that could also be the case. Yeah.
I just had an embarrassing memory that I don't even
we'll just just tamp that down. It was it was
(05:48):
meeting like not even meeting, like being at the same
bar as a as a famous person at Dragon Con
and just like in that moment, being mature and professional
and saying something like I really like your work, thank
you so much, which is just just practice saying that
(06:10):
if you're going to be around some famous people, just
that's fine. But then like I turned to a friend
of mine and what I said next was not nearly
the ah yeah, yeah, yeah, listen, everybody makes a misstep
now and again. Sure, I will tell you I did
(06:32):
not realize how much of an influence because I associate Washington, Irving,
as you mentioned at the top of the episode, with
Halloween things and Sleepy Hollow specifically, I really did not
know how much of an influence he had on Christmas
in the US. Yeah. It was that's um, you know
something I had seen little headlines of articles floating around
(06:54):
and had not really looked into and I didn't realize
until doing the research for this episod showed that it
wasn't that he wrote fictional stories that were about Christmas,
sort of akin to a Christmas Carol. That these were
like essays that, uh, you know, might have been fictionalized
in some ways, but we're based on a holiday that
(07:16):
he spent in England and kind of like importing English
traditions back to North America, which makes it kind of
a circular thing because it was, like Christmas, not really
widely adopted in North America, more adopted in England. Washington
Irving writes the stuff that starts popularizing it more in
North America, and then like that loops back over to
(07:36):
Charles Dickens, who like reincorporated some of the same ideas
into his own, writing back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.
How people think of Christmas as a celebration. Yeah, it's um,
it's fancy again. Like I said at the end of that,
I think if Washington Irving walked into like any retail
(07:59):
establishment on December five in the US, they would like,
what is going on? Yeah? Yeah, I'm like that. And
you know, I was raised Methodist. It's not even like
I was not raised in a religion that was celebrating
this is a holiday. Yeah I don't. I'm fine with
(08:19):
all of the ridiculous holiday everything, so yeah, I haven't. Uh,
it's not even an immunity to it. I love that stuff.
So yeah. This week on the show, we talked about
(08:41):
Jeff row Tull not the band, although hearing his story
made me wonder why anyone would name themselves after him.
So Jeff R. Tell is a as a band I'm
aware of, not a band I've ever, like extensively listened
to you. If I had, I might have known who
(09:02):
Jethrotele was named for. I think I just probably assumed
Jethro Tell was named for someone in the band. That's
what I would have told you without hesitation. Yeah, And
I didn't go trying to figure that out. But I
read just a random sentence somewhere that claimed that they
had changed their name a whole bunch of times, and
(09:23):
someone just suggested the name Jethro Tell and they went
with it. I don't know if that's totally accurate, but
sure seems like that seems reasonable to me. That seems
like a reason to band would would pick a name. UM.
Doing research on this was challenging because there were a
(09:45):
lot of results about the bands everywhere I was trying
to look, uh, not as much when I was diving
into like academic journals because while there are you know,
academic articles about music and musicians and including recent music
and musicians, UM that I found more stuff that was
actually about agriculture without having to put in quite as
(10:08):
many qualifiers to try to weed out all the band stuff.
I was I kept giggling about what this is gonna
do to like search algorithms in podcast apps. Um, is
this episode gonna randomly show up on music roundups or something.
They'll be like, this is not what I was after. Nope,
(10:32):
sorry boy, what a crab? Yeah, I had. The more
I read about him, the more I felt like he
was really a jerk, and he really just seemed resentful
of all the people who worked for him. He had
that statement where he was like, it was four times
less labor to do it this way, And I was like,
are you really telling me that having your workers dig
(10:53):
a channel, carefully, put the seed in, and cover it up,
you're telling me that took them less work than for
rowing the seed by hand. I don't. I don't think
your assessment of that is correct. And I think probably,
having you know, worked for money for more than twenty
(11:13):
years at this point, I know for sure when a
boss has come to give me a task that was
a complete pain and a big time suck to do,
if that same boss came back to tell me to
do the same task, uh, regardless of the fact that
it had been a huge time suck in a pain,
I also would have been frustrated Jethro Tell would probably
(11:37):
say I was balking just to spite him, when really
I was saying, no, this is this is way more work, dude. Yeah,
I mean all of his um feelings about his workers
just kind of give me the no thank you sir. Yeah,
I don't I don't like it. Um. There have been
(12:00):
other episodes where like the historiography involved in a historical thing,
like I've been able to sort of sort of better
trace how that progressed. My general sense is that there
was a time when Jethrow Tell was sort of like
held up as this example of British ingenuity who had
(12:22):
invented the seed drill that was an immediate success, and
all of his husband dry methods were a revolutionary to
British agriculture. And it's like some of those things are
they have a grain of truth in them. He did
make a seed drill, he wasn't the first person on
Earth ever to use one. Apparently, his instructions for building
(12:43):
one were so complicated that he took them out of
one of the additions of the book because he was like,
if anybody tries to follow these instructions, this is not
gonna work. And they're just gonna be mad at me. Uh.
And it's been in more recent years that people have
been more like Jethrow Tull was kind of a crackpot. Yeah, okay,
(13:04):
we have to talk about the mouths. Okay, Yeah, Never
has the word mouth started to feel so weird and
uncomfortable to me? And was thinking about it on the
ends of roots. It reminded me so much of animal fuels, sure,
and that whole um other strange story. Yeah, of thinking
(13:29):
you know that tiny things worked in a way that
they did not. M hmm. Yeah. I have so many
questions that I cannot ever have answered about how he
landed at root mouths? How did how do you think
plants move these root mouths? Exactly? Um? And so the
Horsehoeing Husbandry is like four something pages long. So thoroughly
(13:53):
reading a four hundred and something page long book, especially
because it has long essays in it. And I have
said but or I enjoy reading things with long s
is in them. But after the last uh, working on
this and working on platypuses, I'm a little burned out
on figuring out what the long sas are supposed to be,
whether they are an F or an s Uh. So
(14:15):
it's possible that he elucidated more somewhere in that book
about exactly what these mouths look like, but I don't
think he did, And so I'm not sure if he
was sort of envisioning this as more like a poor,
like a poor in the root, or whether he was
really thinking like a little mouth with a little tiny teeth,
like a little like if you had medusa hair with
(14:36):
little snake mouths on the ends of the roots that
were nana eating, eating the little soil particles. That's just
not how it works. So that is also a thing
that feels a little like child logic to me, like
if you think that your roots are munching on little
pieces of dirt. See, I think of it not so
much as child logic as I do the fancy of
(15:00):
someone who is extremely confident and has never been questioned
by someone he respected. Sure, of course it's animal mouse,
what else? What else could be happening with roots? Of course,
that's what it is. The finer you make the dirt,
the easier the root mouth can eat, it can slurp
it right in. It's not it's not how it works.
(15:24):
Uh yeah. I found one volume of Switzer's for buttles,
and I think there were just so many gems in
it of him just basically destroying everything he thought was
strong about jethroats all. Uh. It was all a pleasure
(15:48):
to read, except I did get tired of puzzling out
the long esses. Yeah, I um. I wish that there
were some way to figure out how many of his
claims regarding his success were FIBs. Oh yeah, I wish
(16:08):
there were a way to go back and like sift
through the land he lived on and be like, no,
we have evidence that wheat crop number seven was a
train wreck. I don't know what you think of thirteen
years equals, but that's not accurate. Remember when you plowed
that whole crop under because it failed? That might right,
just making that up? That's not a thing, Yeah, it's yeah.
(16:31):
I I have lots of questions I'll say about how successful.
Like he had some pretty high file, high profile supporters.
He thought he was for sure onto something, but his
detractors were also very vocal. Jethro Toll, may you rest
(16:52):
in peace. That's the nicest thing I can say about it. Yeah,
I hope your workers had someone who was less of
a jerk. Uh. Uh, If you would like to send
us a note for history podcast at i heart radio
dot com. We will be back tomorrow with a Saturday Classic,
(17:13):
and then next week was something new. Everybody, take care
of yourself this weekend. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
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