... having been breathed out

The munificent dildo of india rubber [...] does appear as staple fare in Victorian pornography, either carefully highlighted as in the case of The Story of a Dildoe or casually inserted in random scenarios of sexual pleasure, as in several episodes in the Pearl: "The godemiches [dildos] were brought forth, and proved to be of monstrous size, to our ideas; they were made of the finest vulcanised india rubber, beautifully molded and finished with all appendages complete." In most of these instances, the material of the dildo is always remarked on and cited as a guarantee of the dildo's superiority and efficiency. In one case, it is a "big india-rubber instrument" tucked away in a drawer on the dressing table; on another occasion the dildo disappears, but the qualities of the india rubber are still extolled: "What do you think of my sweetheart? Isn't she a beauty? There's an elastic belly to spend on, and I can assure you it has a moist engaging entrance to it—feels like velvet, and clutches like India rubber."

I describe these appearances of the india-rubber dildo for two reasons: first, the reification of india rubber in these pornographic texts as efficient, modern, lifelike, and beautiful resonates strongly with the history of the [cultivation and] manufacture of india rubber, a history powerfully linked to the management of colonial India.[...] The raw material for the manufacture of india rubber, Woodruff tells us, originally came from the "moist clayey lands of the Amazon basin, and extending over a large district of Central and South America." He points out, however, that this dependency on raw materials from the Amazon was carefully altered by English entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, who wanted to ensure that the raw materials came from areas over which they had colonial control: "Sir Clements R. Markham had already transplanted the quinine-yielding chichona tree from South America to India and in 1870... he turned to the cultivation of rubber. The plants and seeds which he brought back with him... were soon distributed through the Botanical Gardens at Kew to the tropical colonies. The story of the distribution of these supplies in the nineteenth century is... in part the story of Britain's role as the leading mercantile nation."

As Woodruff demonstrates, the manufacture of india rubber announced in many ways the ingenuity of British rule: plunder the raw materials from one part of the New World (South America), take them to a centralized space in the metropole (the Botanical Gardens at Kew), then redistribute them along the shores of a British colony (India), and you have the makings of a booming rubber industry. Woodruff's history thus provides the india-rubber dildo with a complicated and insistently colonial referent of its own. Technologies of sexuality fuse with technologies of colonial industry [...]

[Furthermore, t]he technologies of manufacturing india rubber in the late nineteenth century much resembled the technologies of colonial rule in India. The first stage in the manufacture of india rubber in the metropole was purification: the raw rubber had to be rid of any "foreign matter. The rubber was cut up by hand and the more obvious forms of adulteration... introduced by the native as good measure removed." The rubber was then fed into a filtering machine, where it was cleaned further, and added into a plasticizing machine that moulded and "kneaded the rubber effectively." Once through that process, it was passed into a "softening machine," where critical artificial chemicals were incorporated into the rubber to ensure its appropriate malleability. It was only "when the material had been cleansed, ground, softened and compounded" that it was ready for the process of vulcanization. [...]

Such a manufacture was echoed in the process of creating the perfect native subject. Gauri Vishwanathan delineates how the business of empire building was facilitated through the intellectual purification of the native Indians, which supposedly obtained from the introduction of English-language literature and the careful filtering out of native literary and intellectual traditions. The emphasis, as in the india-rubber manufacturing process, was on slowly curing the natives of their "adulterating" instincts, on somehow incorporating alongside those instincts a respect and need for English rule.

oulfis

For English travel writer George Best, climate theory fell apart when he saw on an Arctic voyage in 1577 that the Inuit people in northeastern Canada were darker than the people living in the hotter south. In a 1578 account of the expedition, Best shied away from climate theory in explaining "the Ethiopians blacknesse." He found an alternative: "holy Scripture," or the curse theory that had recently been articulated by a Dominican Friar in Peru and a handful of French intellectuals, a theory more enticing to slaveholders. In Best's whimsical interpretation of Genesis, Noah orders his White and "Angelike" sons to abstain from sex with their wives on the Ark, and then tells them that the first child born after the flood would inherit the earth. When the evil, tyrannical, and hypersexual Ham has sex on the Ark, God wills that Ham's descendants shall be "so blacke and loathesome," in Best's telling, "that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde."

The first major debate between racists had invaded the English discourse. This argument about the cause of inferior Blackness—curse or climate, nature or nurture—would rage for decades, and eventually influence settlers to America. Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate.

George Best produced his curse theory in 1578, in the era between Henry VII and Oliver Cromwell, a time during which the English nation was experiencing the snowballing, conflicting passions of overseas adventure and domestic control, or, to use historian Winthrop Jordan's words, of "voyages of discovery overseas" and "inward voyages of discovery." The mercantile expansion abroad, the progressively commercialized economy at home, the fabulous profits, the exciting adventure stories, and the class warfare all destabilized the social order in Elizabethan England, a social order being intensely scrutinized by the rising congregation of morally strict, hyper-dictating, pious Puritans.

George Best used Africans as "social mirrors," to use Jordan's phrase, for the hypersexuality, greed, and lack of discipline—the Devil's machinations—that he "found first" in England "but could not speak of." Normalizing negative behavior in faraway African people allowed writers to de-normalize negative behavior in White people, to de-normalize what they witnessed during intense appraisals of self and nation.

Dear Mrs. Morcom,

I want to say how very sorry I am about Chris. During the last year I worked with him continually and I am sure I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my work, and in such things as astronomy (to which he introduced me) as something to be shared with him and I think he felt a little the same about me. Although that interest is partly gone, I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do. I feel sure that you could not possibly have had a greater loss.

Yours sincerely, Alan Turing

I should be extremely grateful if you could find me sometime a little snap-shot of Chris, to remind me of his example and of his efforts to make me careful and neat. I shall miss his face so, and the way he used to smile at me sideways. Fortunately I have kept all his letters.

There is one criticism of my biography made by Leonard Woolf that I still don’t accept. ‘I do not think that he [Lytton] had any very strong passions or emotions,’ he wrote, ’… he was hardly ever completely serious when he had a pen in his hand, writing the tragedy or comedy of his perpetual love affairs to Maynard Keynes, James [Strachey], or me…’ […]

[But] In Lytton Strachey’s life, comedy and tragedy were not separated, nor does his sense of humour imply a lack of seriousness—indeed quite the contrary. Homosexuality was 'irrelevant’ to Leonard Woolf and, to my mind, he underrated its significance in releasing Strachey from lonely confinement in his own body. He also underrated the intensity and precariousness of Strachey’s passions during the long shadowy period of history that followed Wilde’s imprisonment.

At Cambridge, the most memorable event of the summer [1909] term was staged by Geoffrey [Keynes], now in his final year at Pembroke. He and two friends had invited the novelist Henry James to visit Cambridge, Henry James accepting, so Maynard [Keynes] informed Duncan [Grant], ‘in an enormous letter even more complicated than a novel…’ On Sunday 13 June 1909 Maynard gave a breakfast party for Henry James at King’s. It was not a success. He had invited, among others, Harry Norton, who responded to each remark with manic laughter. Henry James was not amused. Desmond MacCarthy found him sitting disconsolately over 'a cold poached egg bleeding to death’ surrounded by a respectful circle of silent undergraduates. However, the visit did produce a classic James remark. Told that the youth with fair hair who sometimes smiled was called Rupert Brooke, who also wrote poetry which was no good, Henry James replied, 'Well, I must say I am relieved, for with that appearance if he had also talent it would be too unfair.’

• Every single person in pre-WWI England wanted to bone Rupert Brooke.
• Horrible breakfast parties read about at second hand are almost as amusing as horrible dinner parties read about at second hand.
• The image of Henry James sitting disconsolately over a cold poached egg, surrounded by silent undergraduates while one lone man laughs manically, will be a balm to call upon in my darker moments.
• If that doesn’t cheer me up, imagining the complexity of James’s acceptance letter should do the trick.

More would not swear; then what could he do but die? What could he do but splash to the scaffold, on a day in July when the torrents never stopped, except for a brief hour in the evening and that too late for Thomas More; he died with his hose wet, splashed to the knees, and his feet paddling like a duck’s. [Cromwell] doesn’t exactly miss the man. It’s just that sometimes, he forgets he’s dead. It’s as if they’re deep in conversation, and suddenly the conversation stops, he says something and no answer comes back. As if they’d been walking along and More had dropped into a hole in the road, a pit as deep as a man, slopping with rainwater.