Word of the Day: Flibbertigibbet

Middle English onomatopoeia. Means a flighty, chatty, and rather unfocussed character. Often female, faerie or both. Sometimes a child, possibly male. Or a mooncalf. And all this without the influence of alcohol.

Now that Victorian and steampunk are in vogue, it's a word I see more often. I'm not sure where I first saw it, but I suspect it was either in the writings of Pamela Lyndon Travers (although that would've been post-Victorian) or Edith Nesbit Bland.

Queen Steam

The Age of Steam is Victorian by nature; it spans what is often called the 'Long 19th Century' of human history (1776-1914, by some accounts), as did much of Victoria's life and reign as Queen of England. This is an important coincidence.

Why? Because of the whole relatively new genre of steampunk, which in fits and starts (much like an early steam engine) began during that period, with authors such as Verne and Wells, and continued sporadically to flower in the spirit of Golden-Ageism.

As I've often remarked to my students, 1901 was when the certainties of the world seemed to shift — the queen of half the world had died after being Queen for more than 60 years, two generations at least of all mankind. Fifteen years later, in 1916, another certainty crumbled when the Battle of the Somme saw 1.5 million casualties, mostly due to machine guns, barbed wire, mud, germs and explosive bombardment.

Steampunk harks back to the mythical Golden Age of Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix. It was a time when scientific invention still remembered its mythic roots, the time of Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde, Sherlock Holmes. Tarzan of the Apes came along in 1912. It was a good time, and a dark time, and the inspiration for those who would revive the baroque of its ideas in the 1960s.

In 1886, Arsenal Football Club, the Citadel of the Wyverns, Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola, and the Statue of Liberty all arrived. And that was just one of those wonder-filled years of the Victorian Era.

I have been reading a lot of this steampunk stuff in the last few months. It has become rather the rage in some literary circles, and for a long time, I diligently avoided it because of that. But I am, as the Gnome pointed out, a member of a society which has strangely Victorian traits — liberality and adventure mixed with formality and custom. And so, I have succumbed.

I wonder to what extent that world still affects (or afflicts) the neo-moderns. Post-modernism may be passé now, but yet there is still a love for brass and steam, elegance and velvet, iron and raw courage. These things have their counterparts in many ages, but seldom have they formed such a durable mixture. Or maybe I feel that way only because I am an incurable romantic.

Humbled

I think of two sets of lyrics, I suppose, when I see or hear the word 'humbled'.

The way I've been wired over the years (or the way my genes betray me, take your pick), one set is religious in origin, one is familial (pehaps tribal) in nature. And both are very English, I think.

The first one is A E Housman's 1887. It's a moving poem on Queen Victoria's jubilee year. But more than that, it is a celebration of the virtues that Housman looked for and described in the men of his time and his country. Here's the fourth verse.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save.

I don't think I'm as good as any of the ancestors I've known. I think I'm less competent, more wicked, inclined more often to steer away from onerous responsibilities. Which brings me to the 1870 hymn, At The Name Of Jesus. This is the fourth verse.

Humbled for a season, to receive a name
From the lips of sinners unto whom He came,
Faithfully He bore it, spotless to the last,
Brought it back victorious when from death He passed.

The Victorians are often mocked for their social traits. But they were surprisingly full-blooded, and their era was full of literary triumphs and tempered optimism. They could meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat them both just the same, as Kipling wrote in 1895. When Queen Victoria died in 1901, an age preeminent in significance to the 20th and 21st centuries died with her. And that humbles me too.