Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
Speaker 1: This week on the show, we talked about Washington Irving
Speaker 1: and his influence on the holiday of Christmas. Um I
Speaker 1: read some very spirited articles that were sort of alleging
Speaker 1: that Charles Dickens had been unfairly given credit for a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that should have been Washington Irving's credit.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I would go that far, but
Speaker 1: it is really interesting to see some of the things
Speaker 1: that that clearly influenced Charles Dickens and may have influenced
Speaker 1: the twas the Night Before Christmas poem. We did not
Speaker 1: talk in great detail about the legend of Sleepy Hollow
Speaker 1: and to the is any version of that that really
Speaker 1: scared me so much as a child, and a big
Speaker 1: part of it. As a child, I had a very
Speaker 1: clear sense of fairness, and if something was unfair, I
Speaker 1: found it just incredibly stressful. And it makes it very
Speaker 1: clear that if Ichabod Crane got back over the bridge,
Speaker 1: he would be safe from the headless horseman. Nikobad Crane
Speaker 1: gets over the bridge, but then the headless horseman throws
Speaker 1: his flaming pumpkinhead. It scared me so much as a kid.
Speaker 1: And then the next day at Kabod Crane's got and
Speaker 1: I'm like, but he made it across the bridge. He
Speaker 1: was supposed to be safe. It very much upset me
Speaker 1: when I was little. Loved it. Um yeah, The Headless
Speaker 1: Horseman remains favorite memory of the Magic Kingdom Halloween, p Aid.
Speaker 1: I love all of that stuff, and I will I
Speaker 1: made a strange in my head horror connection while we
Speaker 1: were talking about watching because there's that segment where we
Speaker 1: were talking about how he had put up notices about
Speaker 1: how Diedrich Knickerbocker had gone missing right before he published
Speaker 1: a book under that name, and I was like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, he did the original Blair Witch marketing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um so that was Yeah, that's pretty cool. Are we
Speaker 1: going to get to the ridiculous letters? Okay? So again,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know if Charles Dickens meant for
Speaker 1: this to sound as suggestive as it sounded to me.
Speaker 1: The first bit of this I found was just the
Speaker 1: sentence questions come thronging to my hen as to the
Speaker 1: lips of people who meet after long hoping to do so,
Speaker 1: and I was like, are we on archive of our
Speaker 1: own right now? Let me go see if somebody has
Speaker 1: written Washington Irving Charles Dickens slash. There was also, as
Speaker 1: I understand it, this was a dinner that Washington Irving hosted.
Speaker 1: The topic of the conversation for the evening was on
Speaker 1: copyright law. Charles Dickens gave this sort of address thanking
Speaker 1: Washington Irving, and he said, I wish I had bookmarked it.
Speaker 1: He was like, two nights out of seven, at least
Speaker 1: two nights out of seven, I go upstairs to my
Speaker 1: bedroom with Washington Irving under my arm, and I was like,
Speaker 1: this sounds like something someone would write in there Dickens Irving. Yes,
Speaker 1: it reminds me of I don't know if you remember
Speaker 1: when we did our Bram Stoker episode and he wrote
Speaker 1: that letter to Walt Whitman that was similarly like same.
Speaker 1: I had the intense and really like way suggestive wording,
Speaker 1: and I had the same thing where I'm like, is
Speaker 1: this just like a thing where it's like the turn
Speaker 1: of phrases of the day today sound a little less
Speaker 1: sivious or no? No, He was clearly pretty much in
Speaker 1: love with Walt women. Um yeah, uh yeah, I Um.
Speaker 1: I went down a whole rabbit hole of trying to
Speaker 1: find I was like, can I get my hands on
Speaker 1: more of these letters? Because there are various collections of letters,
Speaker 1: and I could not get more of them. But I
Speaker 1: was like, are they all like this? Did they all
Speaker 1: have this tone? At least on Dickens's part? Um, I
Speaker 1: did not have the Washington Irving letter that prompted that
Speaker 1: response from Dickens to see what Washington Irving's letter had
Speaker 1: sounded like. But then I think about, have you ever
Speaker 1: had that moment where someone you really admire just like
Speaker 1: off handedly reaches out to you or said something and
Speaker 1: you're so worried about saying the right thing, or like
Speaker 1: you meet someone that you really admire and then you
Speaker 1: end up sounding like a way overblown, like intense nerd.
Speaker 1: I mean, I see how that could also be the case. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I just had an embarrassing memory that I don't even
Speaker 1: we'll just just tamp that down. It was it was
Speaker 1: meeting like not even meeting, like being at the same
Speaker 1: bar as a as a famous person at Dragon Con
Speaker 1: and just like in that moment, being mature and professional
Speaker 1: and saying something like I really like your work, thank
Speaker 1: you so much, which is just just practice saying that
Speaker 1: if you're going to be around some famous people, just
Speaker 1: that's fine. But then like I turned to a friend
Speaker 1: of mine and what I said next was not nearly
Speaker 1: the ah yeah, yeah, yeah, listen, everybody makes a misstep
Speaker 1: now and again. Sure, I will tell you I did
Speaker 1: not realize how much of an influence because I associate Washington, Irving,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned at the top of the episode, with
Speaker 1: Halloween things and Sleepy Hollow specifically, I really did not
Speaker 1: know how much of an influence he had on Christmas
Speaker 1: in the US. Yeah. It was that's um, you know
Speaker 1: something I had seen little headlines of articles floating around
Speaker 1: and had not really looked into and I didn't realize
Speaker 1: until doing the research for this episod showed that it
Speaker 1: wasn't that he wrote fictional stories that were about Christmas,
Speaker 1: sort of akin to a Christmas Carol. That these were
Speaker 1: like essays that, uh, you know, might have been fictionalized
Speaker 1: in some ways, but we're based on a holiday that
Speaker 1: he spent in England and kind of like importing English
Speaker 1: traditions back to North America, which makes it kind of
Speaker 1: a circular thing because it was, like Christmas, not really
Speaker 1: widely adopted in North America, more adopted in England. Washington
Speaker 1: Irving writes the stuff that starts popularizing it more in
Speaker 1: North America, and then like that loops back over to
Speaker 1: Charles Dickens, who like reincorporated some of the same ideas
Speaker 1: into his own, writing back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 1: How people think of Christmas as a celebration. Yeah, it's um,
Speaker 1: it's fancy again. Like I said at the end of that,
Speaker 1: I think if Washington Irving walked into like any retail
Speaker 1: establishment on December five in the US, they would like,
Speaker 1: what is going on? Yeah? Yeah, I'm like that. And
Speaker 1: you know, I was raised Methodist. It's not even like
Speaker 1: I was not raised in a religion that was celebrating
Speaker 1: this is a holiday. Yeah I don't. I'm fine with
Speaker 1: all of the ridiculous holiday everything, so yeah, I haven't. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's not even an immunity to it. I love that stuff.
Speaker 1: So yeah. This week on the show, we talked about
Speaker 1: Jeff row Tull not the band, although hearing his story
Speaker 1: made me wonder why anyone would name themselves after him.
Speaker 1: So Jeff R. Tell is a as a band I'm
Speaker 1: aware of, not a band I've ever, like extensively listened
Speaker 1: to you. If I had, I might have known who
Speaker 1: Jethrotele was named for. I think I just probably assumed
Speaker 1: Jethro Tell was named for someone in the band. That's
Speaker 1: what I would have told you without hesitation. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I didn't go trying to figure that out. But I
Speaker 1: read just a random sentence somewhere that claimed that they
Speaker 1: had changed their name a whole bunch of times, and
Speaker 1: someone just suggested the name Jethro Tell and they went
Speaker 1: with it. I don't know if that's totally accurate, but
Speaker 1: sure seems like that seems reasonable to me. That seems
Speaker 1: like a reason to band would would pick a name. UM.
Speaker 1: Doing research on this was challenging because there were a
Speaker 1: lot of results about the bands everywhere I was trying
Speaker 1: to look, uh, not as much when I was diving
Speaker 1: into like academic journals because while there are you know,
Speaker 1: academic articles about music and musicians and including recent music
Speaker 1: and musicians, UM that I found more stuff that was
Speaker 1: actually about agriculture without having to put in quite as
Speaker 1: many qualifiers to try to weed out all the band stuff.
Speaker 1: I was I kept giggling about what this is gonna
Speaker 1: do to like search algorithms in podcast apps. Um, is
Speaker 1: this episode gonna randomly show up on music roundups or something.
Speaker 1: They'll be like, this is not what I was after. Nope,
Speaker 1: sorry boy, what a crab? Yeah, I had. The more
Speaker 1: I read about him, the more I felt like he
Speaker 1: was really a jerk, and he really just seemed resentful
Speaker 1: of all the people who worked for him. He had
Speaker 1: that statement where he was like, it was four times
Speaker 1: less labor to do it this way, And I was like,
Speaker 1: are you really telling me that having your workers dig
Speaker 1: a channel, carefully, put the seed in, and cover it up,
Speaker 1: you're telling me that took them less work than for
Speaker 1: rowing the seed by hand. I don't. I don't think
Speaker 1: your assessment of that is correct. And I think probably,
Speaker 1: having you know, worked for money for more than twenty
Speaker 1: years at this point, I know for sure when a
Speaker 1: boss has come to give me a task that was
Speaker 1: a complete pain and a big time suck to do,
Speaker 1: if that same boss came back to tell me to
Speaker 1: do the same task, uh, regardless of the fact that
Speaker 1: it had been a huge time suck in a pain,
Speaker 1: I also would have been frustrated Jethro Tell would probably
Speaker 1: say I was balking just to spite him, when really
Speaker 1: I was saying, no, this is this is way more work, dude. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean all of his um feelings about his workers
Speaker 1: just kind of give me the no thank you sir. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't like it. Um. There have been
Speaker 1: other episodes where like the historiography involved in a historical thing,
Speaker 1: like I've been able to sort of sort of better
Speaker 1: trace how that progressed. My general sense is that there
Speaker 1: was a time when Jethrow Tell was sort of like
Speaker 1: held up as this example of British ingenuity who had
Speaker 1: invented the seed drill that was an immediate success, and
Speaker 1: all of his husband dry methods were a revolutionary to
Speaker 1: British agriculture. And it's like some of those things are
Speaker 1: they have a grain of truth in them. He did
Speaker 1: make a seed drill, he wasn't the first person on
Speaker 1: Earth ever to use one. Apparently, his instructions for building
Speaker 1: one were so complicated that he took them out of
Speaker 1: one of the additions of the book because he was like,
Speaker 1: if anybody tries to follow these instructions, this is not
Speaker 1: gonna work. And they're just gonna be mad at me. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's been in more recent years that people have
Speaker 1: been more like Jethrow Tull was kind of a crackpot. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: we have to talk about the mouths. Okay, Yeah, Never
Speaker 1: has the word mouth started to feel so weird and
Speaker 1: uncomfortable to me? And was thinking about it on the
Speaker 1: ends of roots. It reminded me so much of animal fuels, sure,
Speaker 1: and that whole um other strange story. Yeah, of thinking
Speaker 1: you know that tiny things worked in a way that
Speaker 1: they did not. M hmm. Yeah. I have so many
Speaker 1: questions that I cannot ever have answered about how he
Speaker 1: landed at root mouths? How did how do you think
Speaker 1: plants move these root mouths? Exactly? Um? And so the
Speaker 1: Horsehoeing Husbandry is like four something pages long. So thoroughly
Speaker 1: reading a four hundred and something page long book, especially
Speaker 1: because it has long essays in it. And I have
Speaker 1: said but or I enjoy reading things with long s
Speaker 1: is in them. But after the last uh, working on
Speaker 1: this and working on platypuses, I'm a little burned out
Speaker 1: on figuring out what the long sas are supposed to be,
Speaker 1: whether they are an F or an s Uh. So
Speaker 1: it's possible that he elucidated more somewhere in that book
Speaker 1: about exactly what these mouths look like, but I don't
Speaker 1: think he did, And so I'm not sure if he
Speaker 1: was sort of envisioning this as more like a poor,
Speaker 1: like a poor in the root, or whether he was
Speaker 1: really thinking like a little mouth with a little tiny teeth,
Speaker 1: like a little like if you had medusa hair with
Speaker 1: little snake mouths on the ends of the roots that
Speaker 1: were nana eating, eating the little soil particles. That's just
Speaker 1: not how it works. So that is also a thing
Speaker 1: that feels a little like child logic to me, like
Speaker 1: if you think that your roots are munching on little
Speaker 1: pieces of dirt. See, I think of it not so
Speaker 1: much as child logic as I do the fancy of
Speaker 1: someone who is extremely confident and has never been questioned
Speaker 1: by someone he respected. Sure, of course it's animal mouse,
Speaker 1: what else? What else could be happening with roots? Of course,
Speaker 1: that's what it is. The finer you make the dirt,
Speaker 1: the easier the root mouth can eat, it can slurp
Speaker 1: it right in. It's not it's not how it works.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah. I found one volume of Switzer's for buttles,
Speaker 1: and I think there were just so many gems in
Speaker 1: it of him just basically destroying everything he thought was
Speaker 1: strong about jethroats all. Uh. It was all a pleasure
Speaker 1: to read, except I did get tired of puzzling out
Speaker 1: the long esses. Yeah, I um. I wish that there
Speaker 1: were some way to figure out how many of his
Speaker 1: claims regarding his success were FIBs. Oh yeah, I wish
Speaker 1: there were a way to go back and like sift
Speaker 1: through the land he lived on and be like, no,
Speaker 1: we have evidence that wheat crop number seven was a
Speaker 1: train wreck. I don't know what you think of thirteen
Speaker 1: years equals, but that's not accurate. Remember when you plowed
Speaker 1: that whole crop under because it failed? That might right,
Speaker 1: just making that up? That's not a thing, Yeah, it's yeah.
Speaker 1: I I have lots of questions I'll say about how successful.
Speaker 1: Like he had some pretty high file, high profile supporters.
Speaker 1: He thought he was for sure onto something, but his
Speaker 1: detractors were also very vocal. Jethro Toll, may you rest
Speaker 1: in peace. That's the nicest thing I can say about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope your workers had someone who was less of
Speaker 1: a jerk. Uh. Uh, If you would like to send
Speaker 1: us a note for history podcast at i heart radio
Speaker 1: dot com. We will be back tomorrow with a Saturday Classic,
Speaker 1: and then next week was something new. Everybody, take care
Speaker 1: of yourself this weekend. Stuff you missed in History Class
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