Too far north

[shewhomust]

Yet the nineteenth-century expansion of the world that was known of and reckoned with did bring in a couple of trophies. 'Ask where's the North?' Pope had written. 'At York, 'tis on the Tweed;/In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there/At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where...' North in eighteenth-century slang meant clever; it drew on stereotypes of canny Yorkshiremen and cunning Scots. Too far north meant too clever by half. By the second half of the 1800s, at the very least, almost everybody knew where a north was in terms larger than the compass of the British Isles, leaping straight from York to the ice; that north was a place where the Navy went. The new slang sense of north from the 1860s on, meaning strong, where drinks were concerned, came from the Navy. Grog that was due north was absolutely neat, no water in it at all. Too far north - desperately, incapably drunk - now carried the sense of being hopelessly lost up there in the ultima Thule of booze. Elaborated into a jovial saloon-bar or shipboard witticism, it even brought together the degrees proof of spirits with the degrees of north latitude. Another point north, Steward: mix that a bit stronger, won't you?

From Francis Spufford's I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, which I am very much enjoying.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a lovely passage. I very much like Francis Spufford's work.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I love The Child that Books Built, but was disappointed in Backroom Boys - so it's a relief as well as a pleasure to be enjoying this one so much.

[anef.livejournal.com]

Having been to see the Scott of the Antarctic centenary concert last weekend, I am now reading Magnetic North by Sara Wheeler. It is very good, but there are a lot of depressing things in it, mostly the effect of "civilised people" on the landscape, the wildlife, the native peoples, the climate etc etc.

I think I have the Spufford somewhere on the TBR shelves, but it escapes me for the moment.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

The Spufford is only obliquely about the polar regions as real places, and much more about - well, that snippet is quite representative, although much of it is worked out at greater length.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I read a book on "English" literature and found that Scotland used to be known as "North Britain" in a literary sense at least - just post the Act of Union in 1707.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Was that widespread, do you think, or a deliberate stylistc device?