Natalie was kind enough to include a piece of Aubrey blogging I did on Mary Herbert in her round of hosting the history carnival. She comments a little adversely on Aubrey’s remarks about Ms Herbert’s sexual tastes (see here). I think this is a bit unfair. Aubrey never knowingly misses out on gossip, the more salacious the better, but he’s never censorious. She was young, it was life, now here’s a great story is the attitude.
Now if you want nasty, censorious, semi-pornographic, and completely xenophobic, I give you Ned Ward:
We then proceeded to the ‘Change, turned right, and jostled in among a parcel of swarthy buggerantoes who would ogle a handsome young man with as much lust as a true-bred English whoremaster would gaze upon a beautiful virgin.
I bet you wouldn’t be able to start a description of what later became the Stock Exchange like that in these days of political correctness gone mad. Oh, no. That was his description of some Italians he met. Just don’t get him started on the Dutch:
After we had squeezed ourself through a crowd of bum-firking Italians, we fell in with a crowd of strait-laced monsters in fur and thrum caps, with huge logger-heads, effeminate waists and buttocks like a Flanders mare, with slovenly mein and swinish looks, whose upper lips were gracefully adorned with turd coloured whiskers.
I can almost imagine Tommy Airmiles Friedman starting one of his globollocks articles like that. Written in 1709, and taken from The Commerce of Everyday Life, a collection of 18th century journalism. That’s not too far from Aubrey’s time, but the general tone is completely different: smug, moralizing, purse proud and status worshipping seems to sum up the general tone. Curiously and depressingly modern, in fact.
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