Sunday e-mail 31st March
All about prison, graffiti, and prison graffiti.
In Stendhal’s novel, The Charterhouse of Parma, the hero, Fabrizio, passes his prison sentence peering passionately from his window to spy his paramour. Clelia tends to her birds in the gardens nearby. The pair first saw each other about fifty pages earlier, through a different window. Love hit them completely and instantaneously: a glass takes less time to shatter on a stone floor. When eventually he escapes, Fabrizio writes a note to his jailer, who happens to be Clelia’s father. Apologising like a perfect gentleman, he explains that he misses his cell. His time there was happy, after all.
Free, Fabrizio goes to live with his aunt, and spends the next couple of chapters skulking about, pining petulantly after Clelia.
Eighteenth-century convicts used to pine, too, as they awaited their dates, not with Clelia, but with Jack Ketch. They made their marks on the walls and windows of their cells. They’d varve into the wood images of cityscapes, towns that they knew, churches… I am here, they were saying. I am here. Even a scrawl in the timber is something. So, too, is a Note on Substack, a newsletter, a screenshot of one’s ever-increasing subscribers’ list. We are here, we are here. Perhaps someone will spy us through a window and fall in love.
Graffiti was sometimes used as a crude form of social media. Into a window, one ‘desponding lover’ of the eighteenth century carved these words: ‘This Glass, my Fair’s the Emblem of your Mind, Which brittle, slipp’ry, pois’nous oft we find’. Replied his Fair: ‘I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass, Can’t prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass’. If only Twitter were so literary!
If Fabrizio is an object of satire, Stendhal treats him with some affection after all, as if gently mocking his younger, romantic self. Taking a break, as I did recently, from The Charterhouse of Parma, to read a review of a book called Writing on the Walls: Graffiti, rebellion & the making of 18th-century Britain, I was struck by…well, what was it that I was struck by? I couldn’t quite say, but something was there worth thinking about. Is Fabrizio less pitiful than we take him to be? Fabrizio lives only in the moment, after all, the moment of his lover’s presence. If the future does not seem to matter to him, neither does posterity. Fabrizio would have run no Substack.
And, speaking, as we were, of words… I know you will be excited to learn this week’s hot topic in Crime & Psychology! But try to calm yourself, please. Take a tablet if you need it – your friendly neighbourhood Crime & Psychology guy doesn’t want to be responsible for any hyperventilation, any breathlessness, any racing pulse or tachycardia… I’ll give you a clue. The merest whisper. Just a homeopathic hint of the tremendous treasures that lie in wait on Wednesday…
This week’s bullet list is five of the best words from our much-loved, often-imitated, never-equalled Dictionary of Crime:
BARNABY: Cockney rhyming slang for ‘judge’, by way of the Charles Dickens novel, Barnaby Rudge. As in, ‘The Barnaby’s the geezer what’s got a syrup on his barnet’ – literally, ‘The judge is the gentleman with the wig atop his head’.
FREEDOM SPEEDING: The kind that happens after leaving an area of heavy traffic in which one had to drive very slowly and carefully. It relates to the psychological idea of ‘risk homeostasis’, which implies that we try to keep our level of driving risk stable, so that if one part of our trip seems extremely safe, we may compensate on others.
HAMARTOPHOBIA: Fear of sin
QUACKSALVER: Con artist of a particular kind - one who claims to have medical expertise but does not. Probably tries to sell over-priced, useless, and possibly poisonous remedies. The earliest use of the term seems to have been in the 16th century. It’s the word from which we derive the more modern derogatory term for a doctor – quack.
TAIL DRAWER: Flash term for man who steals your sword while you are actually wearing it.
Want to know more about flash or Cockney rhyming slang? Sick of confusing your slubberdegullions with your badmashes? Tired of bullies laughing at you and calling you a wand waver or vakabon? Or maybe you just love this kind of thing and can’t wait to read more? In any case, be here on Wednesday, for you dare not miss…The Dictionary of Crime Part 3!! Plus more scintillating Psychology of several sorts that you can shake a stick at!
Until then, friends, blip a blue button below.