Would You Break the Law? - Smuggling #2

            I love this comment on the character of smugglers:

            "…a person who…would have been in every respect, an excellent citizen had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so."

            Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 1776.

Smuggling - the art of concealment?

            In the 13th century custom houses were concerned with collecting export duties on the wool that made England wealthy. It was the 18th century that saw heavy taxation placed on the import of goods - leaving meagre number of officers to enforce collection - hopelessly outnumbered by spirited Englishmen determined to defraud the crown of revenue.

            In the 18th century smugglers saw themselves not so much as law breakers but 'free traders.' Indeed, such was the sympathy for cheating the crown of tax that whole communities mobilised themselves to unload illegal landings of tobacco, brandy and tea

.

            So who were these smugglers?

            This quote about Niton, Isle of Wight, sheds some light on the answer.

            "The whole population are smugglers. Everyone has an ostensible occupation, but nobody gets money from it….here are fishermen who never fish…and farmers who farming consists of …standing like herons on look out posts."

            Sidney Dobell, 1860

            Daniel Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe) wrote of Lymingtion in 1724;

            "I do not find they have any commerce, except smuggling and roguing, which… is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast."

Celebrated author, Daniel Defoe.

It seems everyone was either involved with the illegal importing of foreign goods, or the purchasing of them, as John Wesley recounts of St. Ives.

            "well-nigh one and all bought and sold uncustomed goods."

John Wesley had plenty of opportunity for observing those around him.

Those involved in the illegal trade were not just shady characters or poor fishermen, but stretched to doctors, clerics and even rich aristocrats in search of excitement. The Rev. Forbes Phillips in his book "The Romance of Smuggling" tells a story of one of his predecessors at the vicarage. Apparently one visitor to the parish spotted illegal activity on the shore and cried out,

            "Smuggling! Oh, the shame of it! Is there no magistrate to hand, no justice of the peace? Is there no clergyman, no minister?"

            The naïve visitor's protests were silenced when the locals pointed out it was the vicar holding the lantern.

Smugglers on-shore, awaiting the arrival of their load.

Of course the incentive for taking part in, or turning a blind eye to, smuggling was financial. At a time when everything from salt to silk, and tea to tobacco was taxed, cutting out the governments share meant people might be able to afford a little comfort in their lives. Such was the way of the world back then, that a little casual handling of illegal goods was looked on as common place, as in this diary entry by Parson Woodforde.

            "Andrews the smuggler brought me this night about 11 o'clock a bag of Hyson Tea, 6 lb weight. He frightened us a little by whistling under the parlour window just as we were going to bed. I gave him some Geneva (gin) and paid for the tea at 10/6 a lb."

Smuggled goods being transported ashore.

In Hope's Betrayal, our heroine Hope Tyler, turns to smuggling as a means of supporting her ailing father. So the question is, would you break the law if all around you were doing the same, and is it acceptable to defraud the government? Do share you thoughts and leave a comment.

How do you smuggle a cat into a football stadium?

             

Mouse-Skin Eyebrows - A Short History of Makeup.



The modern beauty is not afraid to wear false eyelashes, but how would she feel about adding mouse-skin eyebrows?

            This is not such an odd question as it sounds, because as we discovered in earlier posts, lead-based makeup had several unwanted effects on the skin, which included making hair fall out. Whilst this could be of benefit for a hirsute top lip, it's not so great when fashion in the 17th century demanded bold black eyebrows.

            "All the ladies have…snowy foreheads and bosoms, jet eye-brows and scarlet lips."   Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1716, describing fashionable ladies at the theatre.

Ester Boardman - 1780 - who wore mouse-skin eyebrows.

            One way round this was to use black-lead to paint on a defined brow, and the other was to trim a glossy mouse pelt into shape and glue it to the forehead!

            It seems ladies were quite philosophical about setting mouse traps to provide a fresh, glossy pelt for the next day.

            On little things, as sages write,

            Depends our human joy or sorrow,

            If we don’t catch a mouse tonight,

            Alas! No eyebrows for tomorrow.

            Unfortunately these glued on brows had a habit of coming unstuck, and many a grand society lady had trouble keeping her dignity whilst covertly trying to reposition a wayward eyebrow that had slipped out of place. The poet Matthew Prior wrote in 1718:

            Helen was just slip into bed

            Her eyebrows on the toilet lay

            Away the kitten with them fled

            As fees belonging to her prey.

            Of course, there is nothing quite so beautiful as a smile that reveals a lovely set of white teeth, but when oral hygiene was poor and teeth frequently fell out (lead makeup again!) or were black with decay, this wasn’t easy. One solution was false teeth - hippo ivory was very popular as it was a good colour match to human teeth! And for those whose cheeks had sunk in, there was always 'plumpers'. These were defined in the Fop Dictionary, 1690 as:

            "Made of cork…very thin, round and light balls to plump out and fill up the cavities of the cheek."

            Heaven knows how anyone managed to talk whilst keeping plumpers and hippo-false teeth in place!

            Another artificial adornment to beauty was the use of patches. The Romans first used patches in emulation of the goddess, Venus. She was reputated to have a beauty spot, the one lovely touch of darkness that highlighted her otherwise perfect complexion. In England the idea caught on in the late 16th century and persisted well into the 18th.

            Beauty spots were make of black silk, velvet or fine leather and glued to specific parts of the face to highlight certain qualities. For instance a coquette would wear it by the corner of her mouth, a flirt by the corner of her eye, whilst a gallant as a dimple in the middle of the cheek. However, some people had no choice since they used patches to cover scars and pimples. There were others who became addicted to patches and wore far too many, giving the appearance of being covered by a swarm of flies!

A hamster trying out cheek plumpers.

            And finally, there were those who used patches used to denote political allegiance:

            Politically minded dames used their patches as party symbols: the Whigs patching on the right, and the Tories on the left side of their faces, while those who were neutral, decorated both cheeks.

            The Spectator 1711.

COUNTERFEITING and PAINTING - A Short History of Makeup.

Did you know in 12th century, there was a fashion for women to pluck all their hair back to the crown of the head, to give a bald, egg-shaped silhouette to their face? A high, elegant forehead, devoid of eyebrows or hair was considered highly attractive because it left the face delicate, vulnerable and pious looking. Chaucer describes one such beauty in his translation of 'Romaunt of the Rose.'

            "Her yellow hair, her lily-white brow…using no peynte [paint]."

            In this short series of blog posts, we look at the changing face of beauty and cosmetics.

            From early Christianity until well into the 15th century the use of cosmetics was frowned upon as 'giving entry to the devil'. In 'The Book of the Knight of La Tour' 1371, a moral tale is recounted of a woman who spends so long at her mirror that she is late for church.

            "As she looked in a mirror, instead of the mirror, the devil turned to her his arse [!] which was so foul and horrible that for fear she was sick."

Cat-Mirror prank photo courtesy of ROFLzoo.com

            The author, Geoffrey De La Tour Landry, goes on to write how when a lady 'plucked from her brows and forehead to have away the hair' in order to make herself 'the fairer and pleasing to the world' her vanity gave the devil a chance to enter her soul.

            "In every hole that her hair hath been plucked out…the devil [enters] a burning needle into the brain."

            This aversion to prettifying was because trying to improve what god had created was an implied criticism of his skill and a mark of ingratitude. It was feared that on judgement day god would refuse to recognise those that had altered his work with make-up. (An additional and unfortunate off shoot of this attitude was that people thought god marked out sinners with ugliness and deformity.)

Mary Tudor (Elizabeth's predecessor) with her severe looks.

Attitudes to makeup gradually changed during the Renaissance, with new opinions on beauty, especially in Italy making the use of 'complexion improvers' and 'tints' more widely accepted. In England, things also changed when Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne. When Elizabeth I was crowned in 1559, her ivory complexion looked young and virginal and she also wished to emphasise she was her father's (Henry VIII) child, so displayed her golden red hair. She needed to dissociate herself from her mother, Anne Boleyn, who had been accused of being a witch and Elizabeth adopted the view:

            "Beauty springs from god…and so one cannot have beauty without goodness."

            Castiglione

Elizabeth I in her coronation robes, emphasising her pale, virginal skin.

            And if that meant giving beauty a helping hand with cosmetics, then so be it. In short, Elizabeth set out to make herself an icon in order to inspire the devotion and allegiance of her subjects. She needed to create the impression of being more than a 'weak and feeble woman' - but against the costume of her huge and richly jewelled gowns her face ran the risk of becoming lost. Even though the church still held cosmetics to be bad:

            "A woman, through painting and dying her face, sheweth herself to be more than whorish. For she hath corrupted and defaced the workmanship of god on her."

Philip Stubbes 1585

             Elizabeth's response, just as her father had before her, was to set herself above the church. It is possible that a bout of smallpox in 1562 left her complexion scarred and started her obsession with make-up, specifically a blend of finely ground lead powder, mixed with vinegar and applied to give a luminous, finish that blended away imperfections.

As her youth ebbed, Elizabeth relied on lead based make-up to enhance her skin.

            Of course anything the queen did, would be copied by her courtiers and soon a fashion for makeup gripped those who wanted to appear fashionable. Elizabeth also used rouge to highlight her cheeks; red ochre to give a brownish red, or red mercuric sulphide to give brighter shades. Her lips were accented with a pencil of ground alabaster mixed with cochineal, mixed in a wax paste, formed into sticks and dried in the sun - the forerunner of modern lipsticks!

            Unfortunately, the lead used in Elizabeth's base, was highly toxic and ironically one of the side effects was pitting and scarring of the skin. The only remedy was to apply another, thicker coat of the toxic substance…

....and so the subject of next week's post is "Dying for Fashion" - a look at those who died as a result of using make up.

DEATH ON THE WALLS - Poison in Victorian Britain

            Wallpaper as a murder weapon? Poisoned in your sleep? This week's post recounts how a fashion for green could kill!

“A great deal of slow poisoning is going on in Great Britain.”

Dr William Hinds 1857

            In the 1850’s oil lamps, with their brighter light, replaced candles as the main source of household illumination, and so walls no longer needed to be pale reflective colours. Dark shades became fashionable and of these, there was a passion for Scheele’s Green and Schweinfurt Green. Anyone who was 'on trende' had to have a ‘green room,’ and manufacturers estimated that in 1858 there were an estimated 100 million squares miles of green wallpaper in Britain alone. Unfortunately, what people failed to realize was that their prized wallpaper was coloured with arsenic, and very likely poisoning them.

A fashionable green room.

            There first hint of trouble was recorded in the Limehouse district of London, in 1862. First one child, then a second, and tragically a third, died with symptoms similar to diphtheria. However an inspection of their home by the Medical Health Officer was of another opinion – he noted the green wallpaper in the children’s bedroom. After tests it became clear that the painful, constricted throats that ailed the children were not due to diphtheria, but arsenic found in the Scheele’s green wallpaper.

Limehouse, London, in 1899.

 

            A correspondence on the subject of arsenical wallpapers took place in The Times newspaper. One respondent, signing himself ‘A. Sufferer’ wrote that when he told his decorator that he was distributing poison, the man:

“…denied the possibility of ill resulting and offered to eat a pound of paper.”

            However the paper manufacturers had a lot to lose, and with much the same attitude as tobacco manufacturers’ in the 1960’s, decided to deny the evidence, saying things such as:

“Look, I can rub it [wallpaper] hard, I can lick it [wallpaper] a dozen times with my hand and nothing comes off.”

            Their defence was that good quality wallpapers didn’t shed arsenical dust and so couldn’t be poisoning people. It took until the 1890’s for science to show that arsenical vapour (not just solid arsenic) was deadly.

            To make matters worse, the Victorian remedy for illness was to be confined to a room and avoid cold air. This meant that people suffering with headaches, fatigue, chest complaints and nauseau (all symptoms of arsenical poisoning) were likely to take to their beds in a green bedroom with the windows tight shut against draughts and thus :

“Breath air loaded with the breathe of death.”

A typical Victorian sick room scene.

           As stories spread people became more suspicious of that their décor was making them ill. When one lady sickened, and her pet cat’s fur fell out, she swapped rooms with her maid and she made a full recovery…whilst the maid took sick. It didn’t take long for infamous green wallpaper to appear in fiction…as a murder weapon.

            In ‘Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts’ a story was published about the orphan, Sir Frederick Staunton. Now Freddie’s guardian, his Uncle, wished the boy harm so that he could inherit, and sent his ward to stay with the local vicar. His instructions were to give the boy the best room in the house, a room decorated with a wallpaper of a:  “..rich, deep, emerald hue.”  Apparently the room was cursed by a monk in the time of Henry VIII,

“Several deaths had occurred in the green chamber in particular, for the most part blooming girls who had faded and pined under ‘the curse’ until their dim eyes had looked their last at the emerald-tinted walls.” 

Fortunately for a sickening Freddie, a visiting physician spotted the true cause of the boy’s ill health and all ended happily.

A Victorian green dining room - (courtesy of the Guardian.com)

            Unhappily, arsenic wasn’t just present in green wallpaper, but also in blue, pink, yellow, brown, gray and white. In 1870’s America, the Michigan Board of Health assembled books of samples of arsenical wallpaper, called ‘Shadows from the Walls of Death’ to be circulated to every state library and increase awareness of this silent danger.

            Even so, it Queen Victoria was seemingly unaware of the danger when in 1879 she abraided a guest for being late for his audience. His defence was that he had slept poorly because of the green wallpaper in his bedroom. Astonished to learn of the dangers of arsenical papers the Queen had every bit of wallpaper stripped out of Buckingham Palace.

A typical Willam Morris design - courtesy of V&A museum.

            Not everyone was so easily convinced. The famous artist and designer, William Morris,  only removed green arsenic pigments from his wallpapers under protest, writing in 1885:

“….it is hardly possible to imagine….a greater folly…than the arsenic scare.”

            Eventually in the 1870’s it was public fear of poisoning that saw the decline in fashion for green. Some manufacturers’ tried to forestall this by printing ‘Free From Arsenic’ on the back of their papers. This backfired since when tests were run on these ‘arsenic free’ papers, they were found to contain very high levels indeed. Public confidence never recovered and green walls went out of fashion!  

Sometimes it's easy to ignore the obvious.....

CORPSE CANDLES - Poison in Victorian Britain.

"An abominable smell like garlic."

            So far in this series we've discovered that poison surrounded the Victorians: in their food, medicines…and even in the candles that lit their homes!

            This week our story starts on a summer's evening in 1837 when Mr. Everitt, preparing to retire for the night, blew out his candle. Mr Everitt, who just happened to be a professor of chemistry, became alarmed by the scent of garlic - which he knew to be  the characteristic smell given off by heated arsenic. The next day Everitt went to his laboratory where he determined that the smouldering candle did indeed give off arsenical vapours.

            Everitt's candle was one of a variety of 'composition candles', newly available on the British market. These candles had the advantage of burning like high quality wax (as opposed to tallow) but at a fraction of the price. What's even more interesting is that these candles originated from France - where they were banned!

            In 1810 the French scientist, Michel Chevreul, found a way of separating cheap tallow (beef or mutton fat) into solid and liquid components. The solid part he called 'stearine' and had a higher melting point that crude tallow, which made it more desirable for candles. But stearine was more brittle and less glossy than wax, so Parisian manufacturers hit on a secret additive that when poured into the moulds corrected these problems. The nature of this additive was a closely guarded secret, kept from the public. But in 1834 the French authorities got wind that arsenic was the magic ingredient - and prohibited all future manufacture.

"Every trace of arsenicated candles was obliterated from the capital of France."

            But meanwhile, French candle makers sold the secret to their London counterparts and for two years, 1835 - 6, stearine-arsenic candles lit British homes, oblivious to the danger until one evening Professor Everitt smelt garlic.

            Everitt made his findings public and alarming notices were posted:

"Death in the candle…. may with propriety be called - Corpse Candles." The Lancet.

            Undesirable as inhaling arsenic may be, it seems perhaps these claims were a little exaggerated. Clinical trials where birds were exposed to burning composition candles demonstrated small finches in a distressed state and then died after several hours, but of larger mammals such as guinea pigs and rabbits, none died. 

The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

But the report written by the medical committee put forward this question:

"Let us suppose,…that London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, whose chandeliers held 152 tapers…were to be lighted with stearine candles…In that case 608 grains of arsenious acid would be vaporised and floating in the air during the time of the performance. Is anyone prepared to assert that not one of the individuals present ..would not receive the slightest injury?"

            In other words - why take the risk? Especially since it was also found that the addition of a harmless ingredient, chalk, had the same beneficial effects against brittleness, as arsenic!

            And finally, in 1859 another chemist reported the smell of garlic from his candle. However, in this case the cause was the green pigment colouring the wax, Scheele's green. At this time there was a craze for green in home furnishings and …you guessed it…Scheele's green owed it's vivid pigment to the presence of arsenic (more of this next week.)

DEATH IN THE POT - Poison in Victorian Britain.

In this week's post about poison in Victorian Britain, we look at the hidden dangers in food. We start with the chilling tale of the sweet-shop owner, Joseph Neal, and his peppermint drops.



Punch parody of sweet making in Victorian Britain.

One Monday in October, 1858, Mr Neal sent his assistant to buy a quantity of plaster of Paris from the druggist. The reason? It was much cheaper than sugar and could be used as 'daft' or an inexpensive substitute to bulk up sweets. The assistant called on the chemist, who sent his apprentice to the cellar, where he weighed out twelve pounds of daft. Unfortunately, the new assistant measured out and mistakenly sold him the wrong white powder - arsenic. This deadly poison was taken back to the sweet shop where it was incorporated into peppermint drops - which killed twelve people and made over a hundred seriously ill.

Victorian Bradford - where Joseph Neal had his sweet shop.

But how did the chemist's apprentice get confused? The poison was labelled "Arsenic" but on the base of barrel. Also, the 'Sale of Arsenic Act' required the poison to be coloured before leaving the shop, but took no account of tubs of arsenic in storerooms waiting to be dispensed.

Peppermint creams.

The nub of the peppermint problem was substituting ingredients to increase profit, but this was nothing new. (A medieval test for sugar in beer was to sit a man in leather breeches on a stool covered in beer. When the ale dried, if the man stuck to the seat, the brewer was guilty of adulteration.) More seriously, it was not unusual to brighten sweets with the addition of red lead glaze, or copper to tinned pickles.

It was said that merchants were so driven by money that:

"the possible sacrifice of even a fellow creature's life is a secondary consideration."

In the 1820's the German chemist, Friedrich Accum took on a person crusade to stop food adulteration, the practice being so widespread:

"There is death in the pot."

Even bread and cheese commonly contained adulterants.

Even before Accum, in the 1790's an article in The Tatler warns about a:

"Fraternity of chemical operators, who work undergrounds…hidden from view…transmuting base ingredients [sub standard wine]…into the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France."

They did this by adding alum (to brighten colour) gypsum (to remove cloudiness) and sugar of lead (to counteract acidity). Not only that, but they often used bottles bought from pedlars who in turn had bought them from druggists who had previously used them to store arsenic!

Interestingly, one victim of adulterated wine was Francis Blandy (see Part One), when he partook of tainted wine in the Red Lion, Henley. His two drinking companions died; whilst he survived (He was later poisoned by his daughter who thought she was giving him 'forgiveness powder.')

And finally.
You would have expected the Victorian parliament to bring in rigorous laws, prohibiting the use of food adulteration - but not a bit of it! On the one side a public outcry led to an anti-adulteration bill being put before the House of Commons in 1857, but it was voted down, as was a similar bill in 1859. Oratory denounced the legislation as interference, that it:

"Treated the people of this country like children"

In other words, people could make their own decisions about what they bought and if might harm them - much like fast food today?

"Soon government would have such power as even to lay down the proportion of water a man might put in his grog."

Echoes of rebellion against the modern 'Nanny' state?

Additives? What additives?

ACCIDENTAL MURDER - Poison in Victorian Britain.

Part ONE - A Story of Agony.

"Murder…by poison is the most dreadful, as it takes a man unguarded and gives him no opportunity to defend himself"

Counsel for the Crown in the Mary Blandy case. 1752

Welcome to a new series of blog posts about poison in Victorian Britain. Murder by poisoning was an obsession with the Victorians - whilst ignoring the poison surrounding them in their homes; from the rat bait that could be mistaken for flour, to the pigment in wallpaper. Over the next few weeks we will look at the poisoner's art, accidental poisonings, dangers in the home and at work, and how physicians poisoned their patients.

The Case of Mary Blandy.

The root of the Victorian horror of poisoning can be found a hundred years earlier, in the case of Mary Blandy.

In childhood Mary was disfigured by smallpox, but with a dowry of 10,000 pounds she had hopes of marriage. However, none of her suitors met the stringent standards set by her father, Francis Blandy. Then along came Captain William Cranstoun, who although a short, pock-marked, clumsy man, had the advantage of being a scion of Scottish aristocracy and his suit was welcomed by Mr Blandy.

Mary and William became engaged, but then disaster! Francis Blandy found out his prospective son-in-law was already married. Captain Cranstoun left in disgrace, but unknown to Mr Blandy, kept up a correspondence with the infatuated Mary.

Cranstoun wrote to the besotted woman, enclosing a 'powder of forgiveness' to put into her father's tea. Apparently, with this potion, her father's objection to them being together would vanish and all would be well. She did as instructed on numerous occasions, even doubling the dose when it seemed to have little effect and then Mr Blandy grew ill, suffering terribly:

"A fireball in his stomach" and "one of the effects being that the teeth dropping out of his head, whole from their sockets."

Servants noticed a strange white residue at the bottom of his tea cup and called a physician, who concluded the powder was arsenic. When the father was informed his daughter was likely poisoning him, he replied:

"Poor love-sick girl! What will not a woman do for the man she loves!"

Francis died 14 August 1751, but he had exaggerated his wealth and his daughter's dowry was a fraction of the 10,000 pounds he advertised. So who knows if Cranstoun would have resorted to a capital offence so such a lesser amount?

Mary was arrested and imprisoned at Oxford, and her story dominated the newspapers, and a play written about her story. "The Fair Parricide, A Tragedy in Three Acts."

We will never know whether Mary had been duped or a willing accessory to murdering her father - but she was hung on 6 April 1752.

On news of Mary's arrest Cranstoun fled to France and evaded punishment. However, nine months later he became ill, the symptoms not unlike those of poisoning:

"Such torments…such great agonies as to make him wish for death some days before he died."

Mary's ghost is said to walk the grounds of Park Place, Henley-On-Thams.

The poison used by Mary Blandy was arsenic. The poison can be absorbed through the skin, gut or mucous membranes such as the vagina or rectum. In the 18th century one servant, who failed to kill his mistress with arsenic laced soup, succeeded by adding it to her enema liquid!

Indeed, a 16th Century German farmer is attributed with murdering three wives by inserting an arsenic coated finger into their vaginas after coition.

So if arsenic had been around for a long time, why did the Victorian's fear of it reach near hysterical proportions? Find out next week!

Easter Lilies are poisonous to cats and cause kidney failure.

Next week: Death Clubs.

The Great Seducers- Forewarned is Forearmed!

            In this, the last post on 'The Great Seducers' I look at the other side of the coin - their victims! Just as the seducers can be categorised, so can the people they prey on. So here goes - if you're not a master seducer, then caste your eye over the following list and see where you are most vulnerable to their attentions.

The Reformed Pleasure Seeker.

In their younger years they were happy go lucky but the day came when they decided to settle down to marriage and a family. But from time to time this leaves a lingering sense of resentment or loss, when they think of recapturing those lost pleasures an elicit relationship…

The Disillusioned Dreamer.

As children they were loners, immersing themselves in books and films. They dreamed of romantic heroes and as they grew older, became disillusioned by the pettiness of everyday life. They learn to compromise but deep down, still hunger for something grander and more romantic.

The Pampered Princess.

The classic spoilt child whose every whim was met by their adoring parents. As adults when their parents are no longer available, they tend to get bored and restless. They seek pleasure and move from job to job, looking for fulfilment. What they really want is a person who will spoil them and give them what they crave.

The New-Age Prude.

The prude is concerned about appearances, about political correctness, fairness and tastefulness. Deep down they are excited by transgressive pleasures and as an over correction, run in the opposite direction. They are judgemental and addicted to routine …and attracted to those they feel need reforming, making them vulnerable to those who confide in them and seem open to redemption.

The Neglected Star.

At one point in their life the crushed star was the centre of attention; perhaps an athlete or a high achiever, but that time passed. To cope they tamp down their desires, but attention makes them glow, and someone who makes them the feel special is powerful indeed.

The Intellectual.

The intellectual debates and analyses the simplest thing, and are actually trapped in a mental prison of their own making. Unconsciously they long to have their reason overwhelmed by someone who is purely physical.

The Ageing Beauty.

She constantly worries about her fading looks, and so pretends she doesn’t value beauty. Her weakness is some one who worships her looks, but crucially, also celebrates her intellect and humour.

The Roué

They often appear cynical and jaded, having led lives of pleasure fuelled by money and position. Their weakness is the young and seemingly innocent, qualities they begin to covet in themselves.

The Drifter.

They have an inner emptiness, searching the world for a cause to satisfy them. They are vulnerable to someone who seems worthy of follower, who represents a noble cause or high ideals.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. From your observations of human nature…what others can you suggest?

The Great Seducers - The STAR.

"She had the one essential star quality: she could be magnificent doing nothing."

Lili Darvas (actress) on Marlene Dietrich.

            The star represents the real and the unreal. The cinema star is a creation of a real actor in an imaginary role, that appeals to the need of the viewer for escape from the monotony of life. What the true star knows is how to carry this experience over into real world beyond the cinema screen, and appeal to the fantasies of those watching.

Marlene Dietrich

"The collective seduction produced by modern times is that of film stars or cinema idols. They were our only myth in an age incapable of generating great figures of seduction comparable to those of mythology or art."

Jean Baudrillard.

            Stars stand out from the crowd, they draw attention just by being present.

They are ethereal, unobtainable and represent whatever our imagination superimposes on them. Stars have that power by projecting a glittering, desirable but elusive quality.

            This is perfectly illustrated by the story of the young actress, Marlene Dietrich at a casting session. Whilst the other girls tried to catch the casting director's eye, she merely stood, smoking a cigarette with slow, languid gestures. She had a sinuous way of moving, even a coldness in her eye, that marked her apart and by the time she came to the front of the line, she had already got the part.

"The cool, bright face which didn’t ask for anything, which simply existed, waiting….One could dream into it anything."

Erich Remarque on Marlene Dietrich.

            What Dietrich had learnt was to be aloof, and by being still, she drew attention. She also challenged those looking at her, staring directly at people, in an almost masculine way. She created a provocative aura that meant eyes followed her every move and when she was on stage everyone watched her. But this was no accident, she studied her facial expressions from every angle, taking photographs and angled mirrors, to visualise how she appeared to others, nothing was left to chance. In other words, even when she wasn’t on stage, she was acting. She saw herself as an object, much like a statue of a greek goddess, and learnt to radiate and dazzle with her movements and facial expression.



One way of avoiding the paparazzi!

"The savage worships idols of wood and stone; the civilized man, idols of flesh and blood."

George Bernard Shaw