Category Archives: pop culture

An earlier foray into the mash-up of popular culture and history came with my chapter in Twilight and History. I’m sharing some notes that didn’t make it into the final version of the chapter on Carlisle, patriarch of the ethical Cullen vampire clan. Be warned: this gets very dirty, very quickly: sewer dirt, but only of the virtual variety!

No Secrets in Open Sewers?

In Twilight, Edward, the hero, provided a brief narrative of his adoptive father Carlisle Cullen’s background, growing up in seventeenth-century London. The story is brief and hinges upon Carlisle’s taking up, with great reluctance, the witch-hunting schemes of his puritanical father. Carlisle is said to have stirred up more than he bargained for, an ancient group of vampires, hiding in the sewers of London.

Now, the modern sewer system of London is, like many other public works, an artifact of the Victorian era, some two hundred years after Carlisle’s day. Does this mean that Carlisle Cullen time-travelled in his witch hunts? No! There were sewers in Stuart London but they were a hodgepodge of above-ground and underground places that could really turn your stomach or put your life at risk, seeking to explore them.

Mind Your Step!

To get a perspective on the subject, I began with Emily Cockayne’s wonderful recent book Hubbub: filth, noise & stench in England 1600-1770 which focuses on the unpleasant, practical and very human history of early modern life. Refuse and excrement coursed through most cities in ditches, streams and rivers — literally open sewers. In more sophisticated parts of the cities, kennels (channels) flowed alongside the streets or lanes and occasionally roared with run-off water, flowing fast enough to drown the unwary!, as they carried away London’s filth with least risk to hem and health. While the Twilight vampires who reportedly lurked in the city of London, like the one that Carlisle spooked out, weren’t particularly prepossessing types, it’s unbelievable could have concealed their supernatural and sparkly nature in any of the city’s filth-choked open waterways.

Cesspits and Conduits

Open sewers weren’t the only way in which waste and water were carried through the city. In the basements and back gardens of residences, cesspits, cesspools and privies that sometimes connected to the open sewers were a primitive precursor to the more sophisticated sewers (shoars) built in English cities a century or more later. These weren’t failsafe systems as Samuel Pepys found to his dismay in 1660 when his neighbour’s cess discharged into his own cellar! When the nightcellar men came to take away the waste (their work wasn’t a public service as human waste was a valuable source of saltpeter for gunpowder manufacturing and also marketed in the countryside as fertilizer), the unpleasantness for the diarist grew as the workers had to remove the sewage through Pepys’ own house! (October 20, 1660 Diary of Samuel Pepys.)

London’s growing population strained the outdated systems of waste-management. Londoners complained about the situation, especially as waste contaminated the water used in households. “Rivers received a rich stew from the cities — from domestic and trade sources, particles of earth, soot, sand, turds and rainwater. Silty liquid arrived via streets, kennels and open ditches. A small but increasing amount arrived via subterranean sewers.” (Cockayne, 199) The first steps toward mandating a separation of waste and household water were articulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Roman Remains

Although a network of publicly-mandated and maintained sewers wasn’t in place by Carlisle Cullen’s days as a witch hunter, it’s plausible that he turned his attention to these cellars, cesspits, sewers and other shadowy areas where most other Londoners would have, like Pepys, assiduously avoided. But I suggest that there’s another part of London’s history where Carlisle’s nemesis, the ancient London vampire, lurked. A disused, antique sewer system, a legacy of Roman London, underlay parts of the old foundation of Roman Londinium and survived, partially intact, into the modern era. In the nineteenth century, John Hollingshead made a tour of Underground London with an informative guide he dubbed “Agrippa” in honour of the ancient remains of Roman sewers that were incorporated into the varied parts of the subterranean world he now explored. “Roman London means a small town, bounded on the East by Walbrook, and on the West by the Fleet. You cannot touch upon sewers without coming upon traces of the Romans; you cannot touch upon the Romans without meeting with traces of sewers.” (Hollingshead, 62-63)

Underground Rivers

Not just the remains of Roman-engineered sewers but other underground waterways lurked below the city’s streets and foundations. The Walbrook, the ancient river mentioned as one of the boundaries of Roman London in Hollingshead’s account, had been so buried by bridges and vaulting (as well as parts of the old London wall from which it took its name) that by 1598, John Stow could report that it had been entirely covered over. Entire buildings, such as St. Margaret’s church in Coleman Street ward, literally were built over the Walbrook’s course. (Stow, 222) The Walbrook and other small waterways were victims of London’s growth. By the 1660s, when Carlisle took over his father’s witch hunts, there would have been a wealth of locations in the literal underside of the city where those of stout heart and strong stomach could explore.

History in the Sewers

Today, we’re finding that old cesspits and the like are a valuable source for historians and archaeologists as we’ve recently been reminded with excavations underway in Stratford to explore William Shakespeare’s cesspit. But given the relative isolation of this cesspit, far removed from the old Roman sewers that London or York enjoyed, I expect the archaeologists will be safe from encounters with any of Stephenie Meyer’s vampires!

Bibliography:

• Cockayne, Emily. Hubbub: filth, noise & stench in England 1600-1770. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).


• Hollingshead, John. Underground London. (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1862).


• Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. http://www.pepysdiary.com/. (1660-1669)


• Stow, John. A survey of London. (London: John Wolfe, 1598). STC 23341.

(Note: an earlier version of this post was published on my blog in April, 2010 but since that couldn’t be saved, I’m updating it and reposting it here.)

In my chapters for Harry Potter and History, I made much of Anne Boleyn, not just for her interesting and significant life, but also because she figures into the Harry Potter mythos, albeit in a small way. In an online game on her website, author J. K. Rowling revealed that in her story world Anne Boleyn was a Squib (someone born to wizarding parents who never developed magical abilities).

While Anne is hardly the focus of the series, I was amused that Rowling seemingly couldn’t let such a delicious character entirely pass by her story world. Anne Boleyn’s life is endlessly fascinating, having been fodder for films (The Other Boleyn Girl, Anne of the Thousand Days – both adapted from other media), television series (The Tudors arguably launched itself off of the fascinating story of Anne’s rise and fall) and, of course, novels. Anne Boleyn is a cultural industry, in and of herself.

There are literally dozens, perhaps even hundreds of novels featuring Anne Boleyn. As others have rightly noted, her life story has a tabloid quality about it that immediately captures readers’ interest with frissons of excitement over questions of adultery, treason and execution, all at a royal court. But for Rowling, the greatest appeal had to be Anne’s association with witchcraft, most fully articulated by Retha Warnicke in The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (although Eric Ives disputes her interpretation strongly in his own writings on Anne such as The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn). Charges that she bewitched the king are interesting, but hardly the meat of what was held against her in her trial. (More interesting is Warnicke’s link between her miscarriage and witchcraft accusations.)

Whether or not the charges of witchcraft levied against Anne were serious and significant in her downfall wasn’t a concern for Rowling when she whimsically picked on the detail of the charges to incorporate Anne Boleyn into wizarding world history. It’s simply a fun concept for author and readers. Are we to imagine that Anne’s mother, perhaps, had attended Hogwarts in her youth? Was Anne sadly disappointed in her ambition to do the same, only reluctantly turning toward capturing a king’s interest instead of achieving renown in the magical world? Did she employ potions and charms to win the king’s heart? Unless Rowling revisits the wizarding world in the sixteenth century, such speculation will only be fodder for blog posts and fanfiction.

I got my hands on copies of Harry Potter and History (Amazon.com) just the other day. As you can see, I’m very pleased, not only because I have two chapters in the collection, but also because I have a whackload of new fun reading to zip through.

Professional Pride: In writing for a pop culture project, a scholar needs to do right by their field. You don’t spin stories out of nothing or rely on tertiary sources if you want to grab readers’ attention and paint a compelling picture of how the fictional world they know relates to history. So you dig for hooks (I used Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to explain the roles and limits of British women in real world history for “Witches vs. Women: What Muggles Could Learn from Wizarding History”). You’ll also find quotes from primary sources as well as insights credited to dozens of historians whose books, chapters, articles and scholarly encyclopedia entries filling the end notes for my chapter. Many historians are also mentioned by name in the body of the text.

Fandom Lore: A pop culture historian also has to know the pop culture source. This doesn’t mean just popping in a DVD and watching the movie version: it means reading the texts (if they exist) and critically exploring the story world. I’m a self-confessed fan of many books and shows. I have been “into” fandom for a long time. When you sign on to write about a pop culture topic, you have to develop or refresh your knowledge of that source material. So, yes, I’ve read all of the Twilight books now (more than once) as well as all of Rowling’s Harry Potter books (including the ancillary Quidditch Through The Ages, Fantastic Beasts and the Tales of Beedle the Bard). I also had repeatedly watched every episode of Battlestar Galactica that had yet aired before “The Battle for History in Battlestar Galactica” went off to the editors of Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television. (Yes, I know I’ve been “Jossed” but the final edits were done before the last half of season four aired.)

Respect for the Reader: Writing for a popular audience is often described as “dumbing down” a subject. I believe that it’s a true test of scholarly mettle to communicate clearly to a non-specialist. Someone who’s inspired to pick up your book, whether at the bookstore or online, and browse through it is giving you a chance to show them why they should care and what they can get from a little time spent reading on the subject. They may not have your specialist knowledge of history, but they may remember arcane details of the pop culture source in great detail. Why not use that knowledge for your own advantage and let the pop culture material lead readers to real historical learning that they’re likely to retain since it relates to another well-developed interest? You may also find that you learn something from the well-established fans, as well.