Ghosts as a symptom of dyspepsia

Frankfort-Moore in his Italian Home

From A Mixed Grill : a Medley in Retrospect / by the author of "A Garden of Peace". London : Hutchinson, [1930.] The anonymous author was, in fact,  Frank Frankfort Moore (1855–1931) an Irish dramatist, biographer, novelist and poet. Born in Limerick, Ireland, Moore worked as a journalist (1876–92) before gaining fame as an author of fiction. The frontispiece of this book shows him in his 'Italian Home' - this was actually a house in St. Leonards called 'The Campanile' filled with Italian artefacts that was on sale  in 2010. On the subject of ghosts he is somewhat sceptical but most subjects, as the title implies, are seen from a slightly  gastronomic viewpoint:

All the great ghost-seers on record have been also eminent dyspeptics - men and women who were deficient in pep or who had ruined their digestions by irregularity in diet or by a wrong diet. The ghost is really a symptom and it is rightly so regarded by the medical profession. We all know the sort of person who is  associated with a ghost story - the ethereal girl like the sister of Sir Galahad who saw the Holy Grail - "I thought she might have risen and floated" - that girl has really risen and floated in innumerable ghost stories - the type of girl on whom that form of rash, known as the stigmata, has from time to time appeared. This may be the ghost of indulgence. In the days of gluttons there was a glut of ghosts, and there are few men of middle age to-day who have not had some experience of the man whose ghosts take the questionable shape of blue monkeys pr black cats, sometimes even of such minor crawling things as spiders or black beetles in natural colours, or, more frequently, snakes of no recognised classification. These are all the result of an over indulgence in the drug known as alcohol. Other drugs such as opium or cloral are productive of more pleasing spectral shapes; but this class of ghost has nothing in common with the phenomena of Spiritualism. Their capacity of self-expression does not go beyond the ordinary gibber. They are not worthy of serious consideration, except, of course, from the standpoint of a medical prognosis.

A humble variant is, of course, the nightmare, a horror due to such a ridiculous accident as a slipped pillow or a superfluous eiderdown, but more frequently to an incautious or a too hasty supper...

A Scottish Seal of Approval

Another Jot from the loyal RH, scholar, idler, gent and swordsman. The book mentioned is a signed book of mathematics (sort of) from 1775 and not in the British Library but obtainable online as we speak, signed by the author, for a paltry $50.

A Scottish Seal of Approval

Remember those Edwardian newspaper ads for Dr Collis Browne’s ‘Chlorodyne’—a patent medicine that purported to clear up cholera and diarrhoea, but which would certainly not cure the former, as it  contained mainly laudanum and tincture of cannabis, both of which, incidentally, would be banned today. Every bottle had Browne’s printed signature on it. Going a little further back, each label for Warren’s patent boot blacking bore the printed signature of its manufacturer, a fact to which  the teenage Charles Dickens, whose job in 1824 involved sticking these labels onto the pots, could attest .

I cannot recall any grocery or pharmaceutical product that bore the manufacturer’s signature before the days of Warren, but I might be wrong. Robert Warren was a marketing pioneer (as John Strachan’s excellent study, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period, discusses at some length). But look in vain in Strachan for books of the Romantic period that bore the author’s printed signature. As for a handwritten signature, I’ve come across none whatsoever. You have to go back  to the Age of Johnson to find just one example. The second edition of Tables of Interest at 4, 4 1/2 and 5 per cent, which Cadell and Murray bought out in 1775 warns the buyer on page two not to accept  any book bearing Mr Thomson’s name on the title page that does not also feature his actual signature. So there it is, written in ink, at the bottom of page two. Amazing !

The reason for all this wariness must have something to do with the frequent acts of book piracy that prevailed before the Copyright Act was passed in 1842. It would seem that the first edition of Mr Thomson’s book had been a victim of piracy soon after it had appeared in Edinburgh in 1768.Book piracy in the 1760s seems to have been particularly prevalent. My own edition of Pope’s Works, which came out a year earlier, was a pirated edition by A. Donaldson, a notorious offender from Scotland, who may have been the culprit in the case of Thomson’s Tables.