An enchantress of Gothic fiction and inventor of the sewing machine share a birthday. Plus, a summer poem of longing by Christina Rossetti.
The date is July 9th, Tuesday, and today I’m heading from Los Angeles, California to Portland, Oregon, in the USA.
Today is the birthday of Elias Howe, American inventor of the sewing machine.
Born in 1819 in Massachusetts, Elias Howe was reportedly interested in machines and how they worked from an early age. He began working in a cotton factory in Boston as soon as he was old enough. To survive the hard financial times of 1837 and preceding years, Howe bounced from factory to factory. The exposure to a variety of early mechanisms would prove helpful in his engineering knowledge.
During his time at a textile mill, a boss casually mentioned that the person who invented a sewing machine would be wealthy indeed. There were other sewing machines on the market, but none were commercially successful. Twenty-two years old and full of ambition, Howe spent the next five years tinkering with a sewing machine invention in his spare time, and was rewarded with a patent in 1846.
With technical brilliance but lacking marketing know-how, Howe’s patent was not picked up by any manufacturers. Growing poorer by the day, Howe sold a copy of his patent to a businessman in England and moved there with his family to further tinker on his machine so that it could handle leather fabrics.
When he returned to the States several years later, he was angered to find rampant and blatant patent infringement of his sewing machine! After lengthy litigation, in 1854, Howe was able to reap the rewards of his invention and enjoyed the profits until his death in 1867. The basic principles of his sewing machine are still used in sewing machines today.
Today is the birthday of Ann Radcliffe, English novelist.
For a writer of some truly terrifying stuff, Radcliffe had a rather quiet childhood. She was brought up with all the necessary comforts and then some. Her father was a successful hat maker (or haberdasher) who started a second business running a china shop in the tourist town of Bath, England. She mixed in upper-middle class company but was not very outgoing despite her classic beautiful looks.
In 1787, a 23-year-old Ann married the dashing William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate, journalist, and editor of the English Chronicle. Mr. Radcliffe often worked late, and as a new wife with plenty of time on her hands, Mrs. Radcliffe began writing stories. When her husband would return spent for the evening, Ann would read to him her stories.
Ann Radcliffe used her favorite landscape paintings as the basis for descriptions of places in her books. She in fact never visited most of the places she described in her six novels.
Although Radcliffe, referred to her novels as ‘romances,’ they were more accurately a Gothic Romances. She is credited with restoring the reputation of the Gothic genre since any supernatural elements were dispelled with logical explanations by the end of her stories. Her novels weren’t very deep reads, but she always made sure to put male and female characters on equal footing.
The fact that Radcliffe was the highest paid writer in the 1790s was a testament to her popularity. The extra income allowed for her and her husband to take trips abroad with their dog Chance, enjoying the countries of Holland and Germany.
The most widely read of her novels was The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in four volumes. It is The Mysteries of Udolpho that Jane Austen explicitly mentions and parodies to an extent, in Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey.
Radcliffe’s work influenced countless authors including the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
A Bird Song
Christina Rossetti
It’s a year almost that I have not seen her:
Oh, last summer green things were greener,
Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.
It’s surely summer, for there’s a swallow:
Come one swallow, his mate will follow,
The bird race quicken and wheel and thicken.
Oh happy swallow whose mate will follow
O’er height, o’er hollow! I’d be a swallow,
To build this weather one nest together.