The Second Female Blondin: Tragedy on the Tight-rope

Who could believe that there could be more than one! Or that tragedy waited for both? The confusion over Madame Genevieve’s identity (see below: The Female Blondin, May, 2009)  helps mask the fact that there was more than one ‘Female Blondin’.  In actuality, any young woman who took to the high wire in the 1860s was likely to carry the soubriquet ‘the Female Blondin’, in part because the Thames crossing was on everyone’s lips, but also because the great Blondin himself continued to make headlines.

Blondin at Aston Park

In the summer of Madame Genevieve’s triumph, John Leach had titled his painting of a fashionable young woman at the seaside walking along a plank ‘The Female Blondin outdone! Grand morning performance on the narrow plank by the darling xxxx’.  An American newspaper reported fifteen-year-old Miss Sarah Abbot’s crossing of the Severn that same year under the headline ‘Another Female Blondin’.

In August, 1862, just months after Madame Genevieve’s crippling fall at Highbury Barn, Blondin made an appearance at Aston Park near Birmingham as the headline act.  Despite the outcries and warnings in the press, the public were as eager as ever to see high-wire acts and there were no shortage of people, trained and untrained to satisfy that yearning.  The following July, 1867, Selena Powell, who, according to the Observer, had taken up the title of Madame Genevieve or The Female Blondin after Miss Young’s accident, replaced Blondin on the bill at Aston. Like her namesake, Miss Powell was destined for disaster. The rope  stretched between two trees was worn, and probably never designed to hold the weight of a person. As she began her crossing, thirty feet over the heads of the spectators, the rope gave way and  Selena Powell fell to her death. Rather callously the other amusements planned for the evening went forward, except, as one newspaper wryly noted, ‘those in which the dead woman was to have taken a prominent part’.

Once again there was outrage.  The mayor of Birmingham suffered the indignity of a letter from the Queen: ‘Her Majesty cannot refrain from making known through you her personal feelings of horror that one of her subjects – a female—should have been sacrificed to the gratification of the demoralizing taste, unfortunately prevalent, for exhibitions attended with the greatest danger to the performers’.  Mayor Charles Sturge replied that although Aston Park was outside his jurisdiction, they had learned their lesson, and would ‘limit its use exclusively to the healthy exercise and rational recreation of the people.’ But he concluded:  ‘I trust that exhibitions of so dangerous and demoralizing a character may be interdicted by parliamentary enactment.’

No illustrations remain of Selena Powell. Blondin, as may be seen from the poster below, continued his high-wire act well into the 1890s, performing in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Crystal Palace in 1893.  He died from diabetes in Ealing, London, in 1897 and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.   Kathleen Whalen Moss

Blondin in Jack & the Beanstalk

Images:  The one fete of the year (Circuses 4 (44) ProQuest durable URL

Jack and the Beanstalk (London Playbills Crystal Palace-Daly’s (24) ProQuest durable URL

The Chocolate Girl; or, The maid who became a princess

 The Chocolate Girl (known also as La Belle Chocolatière, or Das Schokoladenmädchen) is one of the most famous works by the Swiss artist, Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789), and depicts a pretty maid serving a tray of hot chocolate.

The Chocolate Girl: an engraving by A. H. Payne, c. 1840

The charming story behind the commission of the painting reads like a romantic fairy-tale. It is thought that the girl in the picture, Anna Baltauf, lived in Vienna and worked as a server in one of the chocolate shops which had become hugely popular throughout Europe during the 18th century.  As the daughter of an impoverished Viennese knight, she had little chance of good marriage, however in the summer of 1745, a young Austrian nobleman named Prince Dietrichstein visited the shop. He fell in love with Anna and asked her to marry him, despite his family’s objections, and so the chocolate girl became a princess. As a wedding present to his bride, the prince commissioned the portrait from Liotard, an artist of the Viennese court. Anna is shown in the maid’s costume she was wearing when her future husband first saw her.

Das Schokoladenmädchen: the original portrait by Jean-Etienne Liotard

It is impossible to say just how much truth there is to this tale, however it is certain that in 1881 Henry L. Pierce, then president of the Walter Baker chocolate company, visited the painting in the Dresden Art Gallery and was captivated by it and by Anna’s story.  He immediately registered La Belle Chocolatière as one of the first US trademarks and the image has graced the company’s boxes and packaging ever since. The original portrait of Princess Dietrichstein, the Chocolate Girl, still hangs in the Dresden gallery, where it remains one of the museum’s most popular attractions. – Ken Gibb

Images:
The chocolate girl. John Johnson Shelfmark: Cocoa, Chocolate and Confectionery 5 (54) (ProQuest durable URL)

Copyright  © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Momotarō: ‘Peach-Boy’.

At first glance, these matchbox labels may transport the inexperienced phillumenist instantly to childhood memories of Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the giant peach’. On further inspection, however, the characters illustrated in these Japanese wood blocks reveal a more obscure origin.

The story of Momotarō, although largely unfamiliar in the West, is a well known and loved Japanese folk-tale. Momotarō (often directly translated as ‘Peach Boy’) was the miracle child of an elderly couple who had not been favoured with the good fortune of having their own children.

Whilst washing clothes in the river one day, the old woman heard muffled cries coming from inside a giant peach which she had found floating downstream. She had pulled the peach out  of the water with the idea of sharing it with her husband for lunch. On breaking open the peach, she found Momotarō in the middle and claimed him as her own son. The old couple was very happy finally to have a child of their own and lavished upon the boy love, attention, and a good education.

When Momotarō reached the age of about 15, filled with a love of his country, and desirous of an adventure, he set off on a quest to rid Japan of the ogres which had been plaguing the Japanese people for a number of years. On his travels he befriended a monkey, a dog, and a pheasant, all of which joined him on his quest. When the party reached the Island of Ogres, between them, Momotarō and his friends managed to outwit and destroy each and every ogre. They returned home triumphant, carrying many riches and precious jewels. By ridding the land of ogres, Momotarō and his animal companions not only released the Japanese people from the terror of ogres, but also became very rich and famous. Momotarō and his parents lived happily ever after.

Matchbox labels are eminently collectible today, and there are numerous websites and exhibitions which display fabulous collections ranging in subject from World War II propaganda to portraits of famous actors and actresses. The Japanese matchbox industry started somewhat slowly, as the local market was hindered by suspicions that matches were Christian magic. Once established, however, Japan soon became one of the leading manufacturers of matches, and arguably amongst the most interesting in terms of design and production of the labels.  Those illustrated here were produced in Japan from 1876 to about 1890, using traditional woodblock printing techniques. - Elizabeth Mathew

Reference: Japanese prints: Japanese matchbox labels: Ramat-Gan, The Yechiel Nahari Museum of Far Eastern Art, 2005.

Images:

Carrying the peach. John Johnson Shelfmark: Labels 12 (83a) Proquest durable URL

Emerging from the peach. John Johnson Shelfmark: Labels 12 (83c) Proquest durable URL

Lifting the peach. John Johnson Shelfmark: Labels 12 (83b) Proquest durable URL

Copyright © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

The Female Blondin

Blondin

 In 1859 a Frenchman named Blondin took the world by storm when he crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Two years later, in July, he arrived at the Crystal Palace in London to reprise his remarkable performance, which included carrying his manager across the rope on his back, and cooking a pancake mid-way across.

Blondin’s popularity spawned a rash of tightrope-walking imitators, but the story of Madame Genevieve, who was known as ‘The Female Blondin’, is one of the most compelling.

In August, 1861, Madame Genevieve, whose real name is reported variously as A. Young, Selena Young, or Selena Powell, nearly came to grief in her attempt to be the first person to cross the Thames on a high wire.

Female Blondin

A tightrope was stretched across the river from the Battersea Power Station to Cremorne Gardens, a popular 19th-century pleasure garden on the north bank of the Thames.  Great crowds gathered on either side, and small boats filled the river to watch her daring attempt.

The audience watched spellbound as she began her perilous journey. Halfway across, she faltered, then stopped. Several breathless minutes later, she began again with the wire, in the words of a bystander, ‘swaying like a swing’. This was taking too long! Night was approaching—could she see the rope in the dusk? A second stop. Another, more hesitant start. The audience gasped when she dropped her pole, which fell into the river below.  Seconds later she dropped to the rope, and hand over hand made her way to one of the guy wires, where she managed to climb down  to one of the waiting lifeboats. The relieved crowd, overwhelmed by her bravery and resolve, cheered her madly, impressed with the way she held her nerve. Newspapers later reported that the lead weights attached to the guidelines had been stolen, leading to the failure of her act. The following week, after repairs to the wire, she made a second attempt, successfully making the crossing in less than  seven minutes.

The Female Blondin’s story, though, does not end on this upbeat note.  The following year, during a performance at Highbury Barn in North London, she fell while attempting a high-wire crossing with fireworks. This accident  left her crippled for life, and spurred an outcry. An editorial in Punch summed up the opinion of the press:  ‘All who went to look at her encouraged by their presence her dangerous performance… The taste for seeing fellow creatures put their lives and limbs in danger we cannot call “romantic,” but view rather as disgusting.’ (Nov. 22, 1862).

Five years, and several more accidents and deaths passed before the first UK legislation, the Dangerous Performances Act, prevented children from taking part in such exploits, and it wasn’t until another rash of accidents spurred further outcry that in the 1890s the act was extended to young women and boys under 16. – Kathy Whalen Moss

Blondin the hero of Niagara on the High Rope over the Great Lake. John Johnson Shelfmark: Circuses 4 (47). ProQuest durable URL

The Female Blondin. John Johnson Shelfmark: Circuses 4 (59).
ProQuest durable URL

Copyright © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

The life and adventures of Toby, the Sapient Pig

Handbill advertising Toby, the Sapient Pig

Billed as ‘the greatest curiosity of the present day’, Toby the Sapient Pig trotted into the limelight around 1817. He made his London debut at the Royal Promenade Rooms, in the Spring Gardens, where he captivated audiences with his promises to ‘spell and read, cast accounts, play at cards; tell any person what o’clock it is to a minute by their own watch… tell the age of any one in company’, and, most remarkably, ‘discover a person’s thoughts’, a trick indeed ‘never heard of before to be exhibited by an animal of the swine race’. Unsurprisingly, his enterprising handler Mr. Hoare was a former magician, who had turned to training novel animal acts (he would later appear in company with a Learned Goose). 

An earlier sapient pig going through its tricks.

There had been a previous wave of performing pigs in the late 18^th century, but something about Toby appears to have particularly gripped the public imagination. Verses were written comparing him favourably to the greatest actors of the day, like Edmund Kean, and ‘Toby’ quickly became the generic name for all of his porcine competitors. His fame was such that, boasting he was ‘the first of my race that ever wielded the pen’ (an earlier literary pig had merely dictated its memoirs), Toby even wrote his own autobiography, The life and adventures of Toby, the sapient pig: with his opinions on men and manners. Written by himself (London, c. 1817). 

Embellished with a frontispiece showing ‘the author in deep study’—or Toby settled comfortably in a pigsty with his nose in a book—the work was full of playful conceits. Describing his father as an ‘independent gentleman, who roamed at large’, and his mother as a ‘spinster… of a prolific nature’, Toby mused on the idea that his unusual talents resulted from his mother’s love of books:  

‘My mother, in the early stages of her pregnancy, unwittingly entered a gentleman’s flower garden; where … she came obliquely to the entrance of his library…she entered, and in a short time cast her eye over the numerous volumes it contained; such was her haste, she disordered some, while others she minutely perused, nay absolutely bereived [sic] of their leaves, chewing and swallowing them, so great was her avidity’. 

Toby told of being talent-spotted at a young age by his trainer (who made him a special cart to ride around in), claimed to have been named for whether he might be famous or not in a pun on Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘To be, or not to be’, and described an upbringing to rival that of any clever schoolboy. He also talked at length about the performance advertised in this very handbill, and confessed that he felt nervous before his London debut, convinced it would ‘make me or mar me for ever’. Happily for Toby, he was apparently a raging success: 

‘…the house was crowded at an early hour by persons of the first rank and fashion: such an assemblage of beauty I had never before witnessed. My first appearance was greeted with loud and reiterated plaudits; from every part handkerchiefs waving—fans rapping—placards exhibited; in fact, the tumults of applause were greater than ever was known before.’ 

Priced at one shilling, Toby’s magnum opus was printed and sold—and, one suspects, also authored—by Nicholas Hoare, Toby’s canny trainer and manager. The autobiography was, of course, also a powerful advertisement for Toby’s performances, as suggested by the verse with which ‘Toby’ chose to conclude his tale. Supposedly written by a gentleman much moved by the sight of Toby spelling out his letters, it was carefully calculated to entice curious punters: 

His symptoms of sense, deep astonishment raise,

And elicit applause of wonder and praise…

Of the crowds who the Sapient Toby have seen,

Not one of them all disappointed have been;

But all to their friends have been proved to repeat,

That a visit to Toby, indeed is a treat.

But then, for a shilling, who wouldn’t queue up for a look at a mind-reading pig called Toby? – Amanda Flynn

Images:

Toby the Sapient Pig. John Johnson Shelfmark: Animals on Show 2 (70). ProQuest Durable URL

The wonderful pig of knowledge. John Johnson Shelfmark: Animals on Show 2 (74). ProQuest Durable URL 

Copyright © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Evenden’s Digestive Ginger Candy for indigestion, spasms, flatulence, &c.

The majority of items that the conservators are repairing for the project are paper based. This particular item is a little more unusual in that the print on paper, with a decorative paper border, is adhered to a wooden board. It may possibly have been the lid to a box.

Before conservation

As can be seen in the first image, the board was found to be broken into two parts. To make it easier to handle during the scanning process and to preserve it for the future, the item was repaired.

First, the paper along the split edges was lifted 1cm away from the board using spatulas and a scalpel.

 Meanwhile, over a gentle heat, 2gsms of leaf gelatine was dissolved in 50 mls of reverse osmosis water.

 The gelatine was applied with a fine brush along the broken edges and the two parts brought together. It was then clamped and left to dry.

During conservation

To make the joint stronger, small splints of parchment were placed along the joint on both sides of the object. The edges of the splints were pared so that they were unobtrusive and they were adhered to the wooden surface with gelatine. Parchment was selected because as the splints dried they tightened.

After the splints had dried, the lifted paper was pasted back down over the parchment splints using wheat starch paste as the adhesive.

After conservation

This work was undertaken by a trained conservator. – Julia Bearman

Evenden’s Digestive Ginger Candy for indigestion, spasms, flatulence, &c.  John Johnson Shelfmark: Patent Medicines 3 (7)

Copyright  © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Adventure and Morality: The Boy’s Own

While other parts of the John Johnson Collection may certainly be prettier, the prospectuses of books and journals are the unsung heroes of the booktrade section. There is a wealth of information contained within their pages which illuminates the world of popular fiction and essay writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In particular, prospectuses of children’s serial publications provide us with a glimpse into the function of journals in family life. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of cheap publication and it is during this period that children’s serial literature was produced on a mass scale. The most well-known of these journals is perhaps the Boy’s Own Paper which was first published in 1879.  The Religious Tract Society created the journal in order to bring moral instruction to young boys through a heady mixture of adventure, sport, humour and suspense.

A prospectus of the Boy's Own Paper from 1895

This prospectus from 1895 demonstrates the lively illustrations used in the Boy’s Own Paper, designed to capture the eye of booksellers and readers alike. The authors who are listed in this prospectus include popular writers such as George Manville-Fenn (1831-1909), who was prolific in his production of fiction for both children and adults.   

The heroic boy reading his Boy's Own in 1893

Adventure, health, courage, all seen as essential to the British character, were promoted alongside articles by the clergy which set these attributes in a religious context.  Famous writers such as Jules Verne and sporting heros, such as W. G. Grace, also contributed regularly to The Boy’s Own Paper, making it, perhaps, the most successful magazine of its kind.

Journals were also produced specifically for girls. While the boys were reading high adventure, valiant sporting prowess and wholesome humour, the girls were learning how to cultivate calm, helpful characters, as the image in this prospectus for The Child’s Companion and Juvenile Instructor from 1898 shows.

A girl reading her Child’s Companion in 1898

These prospectuses give us a glimpse into the life of children in the late nineteenth century and the role some sectors of the book trade created for themselves as instructors of the next generation. – Elizabeth Brewster

Images:
Prospectus of The Boy’s Own Paper. John Johnson Shelfmark: Prospectuses of Journals 8 (12**d) ProQuest durable URL

Prospectus of The Boy’s Own Paper.  John Johnson Shelfmark: Prospectuses of Journals 8 (15) ProQuest durable URL

Prospectus of The Child’s Companion and Juvenile Instructor. John Johnson Shelfmark: Prospectuses of Journals 12 (52a) ProQuest durable URL

Copyright © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

A lady of pictures: the connoisseur in caricature

A lady composed of pictures

This female connoisseur holds her lorgnette at the ready, poised to prove her aesthetic sensibility and fashionable taste. Yet her own body is composed of the very miniatures, prints and portraits upon which she would train her quizzical gaze. On her broad skirts hang an assortment of landscapes, cameo portraits, popular prints of romantic figures such as Byron and Napoleon, and animal paintings, while she is crowned with a number of intimate miniatures in place of a hat. Even her feet appear to have been replaced by prints.

The image plays light-heartedly with ideas of what it means to be an individual, and about the power of things to represent the self. Teasingly, the paintings bestow meaning and animation on the connoisseur even as she pretends to define their own worth. They make up her identity; without the art there would, quite literally, be no connoisseur.

A composite picture, ‘The connoisseur’ lies in the tradition of Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1527-1593), the Italian painter best known for his curious portraits composed entirely from fantastical arrangements of vegetables, fruit, fish and beasts. Designed by George Spratt, she belongs to a series of whimsical lithographs called ‘Twelve original designs’, published c. 1830 by Charles Tilt (1797-1861).  Her unusual companions include, amongst others, an ’Antiquarian’, his body made up of medieval fragments and pieces of stained-glass window, a ‘Conchologist’ composed from her collection of rare and beautiful seashells, a ‘Mineralogist’ constructed from a selection of polished crystals, marbles and other minerals, and an ‘Entomologist’ with limbs formed from a living tangle of beetles, butterflies and grasshoppers. – Amanda Flynn

Image:

The connoisseur. John Johnson Shelfmark: Trade in Prints and Scraps 2 (1).  ProQuest durable URL

Copyright © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Bitter pills and blood-letting: 19th century medicine in satire

A patient undergoes bloodletting, or the euphemistically termed 'breathing a vein'.

Medicine, in the early nineteenth-century, was not a pleasant experience for the patient. It was an age of “heroic” medicine that consisted of “copious bleeding and massive doses of drugs.”¹  In 1804, James Gillray produced this series of satirical etchings that brilliantly charts the progress of disease in one unlucky patient…

In ‘Breathing a vein’ the patient stoically begins his treatment with a course of bloodletting, or phlebotomy. Beloved by both physicians and quacks in the early nineteenth-century, it was a standard medical practice (and, indeed, one of the oldest, dating from classical antiquity). It entailed drawing blood from one or more of the larger external veins, such as those in the forearm, in order to ‘cure’ a disease and restore the body’s natural balance —frequently physicians would take so much blood in one sitting that the patient would be left faint and swooning. Gillray plays with cruel wit upon the contrast between the title, ‘breathing a vein’, which suggests a light and pleasant experience, and the reality, as indicated by the fountain of blood gushing from the patient’s arm and his glum expression.

The patient awaits the effects of his purgative emetic...

His condition not having improved, the patient is shown in the second print trying a ‘Gentle emetic’ instead—a dose intended to cause a bout of (anything but gentle) vomiting. The pale-looking patient sits beside a waiting bowl, while the physician holds his head in readiness. 

The patient swallows his bitter tasting medicines.

In the third of the series, ‘Taking physick’, the patient—looking ever more wretched—screws up his face against the sour taste of his medicine. Few effective drugs existed, and those that physicians did prescribe were sometimes more harmful than helpful—and the effects they produced were ripe for caricature. In this case the man is probably taking a laxative intended to purge the system of deletrious material. A labelled bottle is clutched in his hand, and two others stand waiting on the mantelpiece. Physicians would often prescribe drugs to be taken repeatedly, many times over in a day, and the patient’s unshaven, dishevelled state suggests that he has been subject to this treatment for some time. Indeed, Gillray’s sly depiction of the man’s unbuttoned trousers and trailing shirttails suggests that he has spent much of his treatment in close confinement with his chamber pot.

In celebration of his recovery, the patient joyfully tucks into dinner.

In the fourth print, ‘Charming well again’, the patient is finally recovered (probably despite rather than because of his treatment), and beams with delight. His relief seems due not just to feeling well again, but also to having exchanged his noxious doses for a hearty meal of roast chicken. Clearly, he hasn’t wasted a moment of his recovery on such trifling matters as changing out of his sick clothes and nightcap; having paused just long enough to tuck a napkin under his chin, he has launched straight into dinner.  – Amanda Flynn         

¹Lois N. Manger, History of Medicine, New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1992, p. 205.

Images:

Breathing a vein. John Johnson Shelfmark: Trade in Prints and Scraps 8 (64). ProQuest durable URL

Gentle emetic. John Johnson Shelfmark: Trade in Prints and Scraps 8 (70). ProQuest durable URL

Taking physick. John Johnson Shelfmark: Trade in Prints and Scraps 8 (73). ProQuest durable URL

Charming well again. John Johnson Shelfmark: Trade in Prints and Scraps 8 (67). ProQuest durable URL

Copyright © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Exporting to the Empire: labels of the British cotton trade

A cotton label destined for the Indian market

The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera holds many thousands of rare advertising labels representing every imaginable product. Among the most visually striking are these chromolithographed labels produced by British companies for the export of cotton cloth.

Cotton as a commodity was of great importance to the British Empire of the 19th and early 20th centuries; the cotton industry had experienced massive expansion during the Industrial Revolution and by the mid-1830s cotton textiles accounted for more than the half the total value of all British foreign exports.

"East meets West" was a popular theme for exporters

Raw cotton was brought to mills in Scotland and the North West where it was processed into bolts and bales of cloth. Before leaving the mills each bolt was stamped with the mark of the exporter and a colourfully-decorated paper label was often added. These labels, also referred to as tickets, were attached to the ends of the bolts and acted as trade marks, identifying a particular mill or producer’s product in the marketplace. They were designed to be visually appealling to the cloth buyer and individual labels were often created to target a specific market. Bright, colourful designs were instrumental in selling British cotton to far-off markets in India, Africa, China and Japan.

As bale and bolt labels were supposed to catch the eye of the shopper, they often employed local scenes or symbols which would be familiar to intended buyers. The example below is one of many produced for the Indian market which show scenes of the state visit by the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, in 1875-6. Edward returned from India with four Asian elephants for London Zoo.

"For the King": a delightful label from the early 1900s

One of the earliest references to the labelling of cloth is mentioned in Wadsworth and De Lacy Mann’s The cotton trade and industrial Lancashire 1600-1780. Describing the textile trade with Africa in the late 17th century, the authors talk of fabric “packed in a stiff paper cover with a gaudy picture of an elephant , the device of the Royal Africa Company on the outside.” The gaudy elephant is probably an early version of the bale label, not too different from the one shown here. – Ken Gibb

Images:
Indian prince. John Johnson Shelfmark: Labels 17 (8) (ProQuest durable URL)

Rug merchant. John Johnson Shelfmark: Labels 17 (28) (ProQuest durable URL)

Elephant. John Johnson Shelfmark: Labels 17 (10) (ProQuest durable URL)

Copyright  © 2009 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reproduced with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.