Behind the Scenes Minis: Amy Levy and Pranksters

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio, Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And this week we talked about Amy Levy, who somehow escaped both of our knowledge until this. Yeah, so you the first version of the episode outline that you sent to me was one that wasn't finished yet, so it didn't have the introductory uh text in it. Um so unlike normal, where if I don't if I'm not already familiar with a person, that little introduction clues me in, I had no clue in And so I started reading it, like, who is this person? Their name does not ring a bell at all? I had don't think I have ever heard of them? Reading reading reading Vernon Lee. I researched and wrote the podcast episode on Violet Haagett, also known as Vernon Lee, and I was like, Okay, even having done that, I don't think this name rings a bell. So I stopped what I was doing and I went back through my Vernon Lee stuff and the only mention of her in the entirety of that research is in the footnotes of one biography, and only one of those footnotes has any substance to it, like the other ones are most like this letter was from Amy Levy and that's all that. It's like, it's just clarifying who wrote a letter and the like the one substantive note just kind of sums up that my read on on her relationship. How however, there's all kinds of relationships, but like it really read to me from having researched Vernon Lee and then having read what you prepared on Amy Levy, that it seems like Amy was in love with her and that probably wasn't reciprocated, and that just seems like what shines through. Um how each of them is discussed in work about the other one, yes for sure, and in that um uh, the main biography that I referenced in that episode, there is also mention of at least one other person kind of in that social circle who similarly had some sort of crush on Vernon Lee, and Vernon Lee was in at that point of fairly long term relationship, although not everyone knew about it, Like it seems like Amy Levy didn't clue in that that was the case. Um. But it's it's again, these are guesses based on what we know about her and them, and at a time when people probably weren't being entirely like Cavalier and open about discussing such things. So there's a lot of guesswork. But it seems like this would come up periodically for Vernon Lee, where somebody would be like, but I've in love with you, and she'd be like, nope, but without saying because I'm already in love with this person. So it's all very fascinating. Um, I really really do quite. I mean, I feel so fortunate that again my friend Bernadette introduced me to this subject because, um, I really have enjoyed reading Amy Levi's work. I mean, it's extraordinarily good. Um. You can also find online there are um basically free audio I think it's audio box that does the audio books of her novels, so they're easy. There's easy to get access to them, which is really nice if somebody's curious. But um, and they are. They're very very um. I mean, she was clearly very talented and it is I mean, the thing that really made me go WHOA was the first one of the first things I stumbled across was that Oscar wild piece, And I'm like to watch or to read him being so you know, just heaping praise on on anybody, and you know, particularly another writer. I was like, whoa, whoa, wait really um, And then what's interesting is that going through newspaper accounts, she's everywhere. There was no lack of Amy Levy information in newspapers, and so she was very popular and very well known. And then somehow just drifts off of the mentions early on. You and I talked about that some while we were while we were discussing my whole total surprise at the sudden appearance of Vernon Lee in the episode, uh, how it seemed like people like just didn't quite know how to process her death and how to talk about her afterward, aside from that round of speculation about what her reasoning might have been, yeah, which is always I mean, that is problematic in so many ways to begin with, right, Like, trying to figure out why someone decides to end their life when you don't is literally just guesswork, which becomes really really dangerous. And I think you know, in Clementina Black's letter, she makes the very strong case that I think people don't always think about it like this would actually be painful for that person to know that people were making up these kinds of theories about them that could hurt their family. Um. So yeah, I was really really glad that I stumbled across that particular article in a paper or that letter that had been published. Yeah. It's a it's a hard one, but also so good. And I really her verse is beautiful. Um. I really enjoyed it a great deal. And like I said, I feel very foolish because I focused a lot on writers from that time and place in college, and yet nary a word that I can recall ever uttered about her tracy. We talked about some practical jokes and pranks this week we did. I have so many thoughts. Yeah, I really thought the spaghetti tree one was a lot more recent than it really was somehow, Like I knew the basic lore of the spaghetti tree thing, and that it had been a newscast, and that there were some folks that believed the whole thing. But I really thought that was like a nine nineties newscast, not a nineteen fifties newscast. No. Yeah, I mean I think because it does come up a bit. I mean, that's more than sixty years old at this point. I don't know, if you have the thing that I have, where like time is real rubbery, where I'm like the year two thousand that was like three years ago, right, So it happens to me a lot um So that may be part of what contributes to it. But it has been talked about three years, so I could see where you would think that was more recent. I will say, Um, regarding Carberry, you know, his story is only eight years away, less than eight years really from its hundredth anniversary. So I wonder if the people at Brown who keep that myth alive will do something spectacular for it. That'd be cool. Yeah, I mean, what's really really interesting about his story is that he does show up in a lot of perfectly respectable places in print, in journals, in books, etcetera. And like I even saw I think it was a t w A ad where like the customer endorsement was by Josiah Carberry about what a great service it was, which I mean, it is very clear that like there are people who are alums who keep that story alive in other ways throughout There is also a second version of it that we didn't get into it that popped up at Wesleyan, which happened around the time that the professor that started it transferred to that school, So clearly this was his brain child, and like has has populated throughout North America at least in a variety of ways. And I do love that there are people that love the story so much that they will try to wedge his name into places it maybe doesn't belong. Um. For the most part, it always seems like harmless fun. It never seems like they're trying to really undermine anybody. Um, let me talk about Theodore. Yeah. So um, when you told me what you were working on for this episode, I was like, ah, yeah, I've had the Berner Street hoax on my on my list for a long time. But every kind of every time I kind of looked at it, I was like, not quite enough there, And then we had a conversation about it. M hm. And I probably could do, as I said, an entire episode on Theodore Hook, but that would become a depressing episode of like a privileged person gets away with doing lots of crappy things and people celebrate him as a wit. Yeah, including sticking his friends with the bill. I didn't like that. No, he did something like that all the time, and the thing was like, listen, when I was younger, I was a little bit of a practical joker. I was that kid that got in trouble for doing things like, um, you know, at one of our pre graduation sort of solemn programs, I wore pig slippers under my gown and it made the principle real mad um, you know, I would do stuff like that. So there was part of me, particularly when they talked about his dad sending him to Oxford to try to get him on a real career path and him making jokes during the entrance questions, I was like, oh, I completely identify with this person. And then as it unfurls and he becomes more and more of a pain in the neck to people and thinks it's surely hilarious, I was like, I identify with him less and less. Yeah, yeah, I I I do think it's a great disservice that we have no idea what happened with that poor woman after all of that madness at her house that she didn't ask for and had nothing to do with. I mean, I I really do as as people listen, I wonder if anybody did what I did, And I hope some people did, because it is very sobering to think about, Like what if tomorrow morning you woke up at five am with someone at your house insisting you had ordered a service and you finally convinced them that you did not, and then ten more people just like them with the same service show up insisting the same thing, and then that happens for the next thirteen hours. Yeah, I don't I couldn't handle it. I would have a breakdown at around our three which completely fall apart. Well, and it's like today there are there are connotations that weren't so much a thing when it actually happened, like people who've had to deal with identity theft, or we had a whole big problem uh some time ago, um the you know before before our job was only doing podcasts stuff, we had two different freelancers who had the same name, and a person incorrectly merged there two things and the accounts payable system into one thing, and the the existence of two people with the same name like caused such a huge problem. Like those kinds of things were not quite as present in the same way as when this prank happened. I'm sure there were people with the same name in the nineteenth century and it caused lots problems, but like not in the way that a computer can propagate that problem to every possible place, right, Um, yeah, yeah, it seems like it would have been. And when you consider right all of them, the police presence that was required to deal with it. You know, we talked about it all the time, like X happened in a bun to. Police had to go do that, which meant they weren't doing all the other normal things they're supposed to do. Like there's literally such a domino effect in every direction. And that one article we quoted talked about it like those are doctors who were like not only giving up the hours to go see this person, but that meant they also couldn't get out of the street to go do their other visits to other patients that probably legitimately needed them. Um, you know, similar things like that. And when you think about a tradesperson in eighteen ten, they probably didn't have a lot of like wiggle room in their day in terms of like the amount of money they needed to make in the amount of appointments they needed to hit and if they could not get out after they had already wasted X amount of time. Yeah, it's it's not a very thoughtful thing to do to a whole lot of people. Yeah, well, I I feel like we might get emails from people who talk about protests blocking traffic, but there's a huge difference between protesting a serious social or political issue and causing a problem just to cause a problem to yes, yes, um, yeah, anyway, I sound like the crabbiest crab of crabtown when it comes to pranks. But stuff like that is too well, yeah, I just um, tell me about spaghetti trees, but please don't block off hundreds of people's days. Yeah. Well, and there are enough pranks that seem really mean spirited to me that I'm like, this is not fun. And especially when people try to prank other people in the workplace, and it's like you're compelled to be there at work. It's not like you could just be like, oh, I'm checking out for the whole You might be able to if you have a really lenient boss. But like when people do mean pranks on their coworkers, don't do that. No, No, I think the meanest prank I ever did, and I couldn't even like keep it going for more than seconds was and I was in college and I was working with one of my professors on like my senior project, which was a play, and I UM. I had given her a card from me that said, like, guess who's pregnant? And she panicked and I couldn't even like by the time she had opened the card, I was like, I'm sorry, it's not real, Like I couldn't. Yeah. I did basically that same prank one time when I was in my early my early twenties, and I just I did not have my act together. My whole life was just like full of drama all the time. And I had this one particular friend that I talked to about all of these you know, this perpetual dramatic chaos that was my life. Uh, And it was similar, like less than a minute passed before I was like, no, I'm not actually can't. I can't do it now. Yeah, I don't like to cause anybody stress or fear the I am a bigger fan of surprises than prank's right, where like I UM during that magical brief gap where it seemed like we might be seeing the curb of the pandemic and people started traveling, we went to Chicago to see my best friend, and we brought one of our other best friends who she's also close friends with, but she didn't know she was coming. And like, I remember hugging my best friend after I had gotten on the plane in the baggage claim area and I literally just said, look over my right shoulder. And that was like a super fun surprise that I guess you could categorize as a prank, but it wasn't really Like But that is about as far as I want to go anymore in terms of surprising, even good surprises can be dangerous, ye, unexpectedly stressful for people sometimes. Yes, I have learned, although it had to be told to me explicitly, that my husband does not like surprises. Uh. It took me a while, which stinks because I am really good at surprising people, but um yeah he he literally at one point was like for his forty birthday, I kind of went all out with surprise after surprise after surprise, and like we were traveling and people would show up, and at one point he just turned to me and said, I'm really glad to see them, but you have to tell me if anything else is happening, because I can't take it anymore, and I was like, Okay, I have a list of things I need to inform you about. So, um, take into account how the surprised person would feel. Uh, and certainly trivially so if you are going to try to do a practical joker prank, because yeah, they're not for everybody. Uh yeah, just everybody be nice to each other. It seems so simple. Thank you so much for hanging out with us this week. We hope you have a wonderful weekend ahead. Uh. And if you have time off, that it is RESTful and delightful, and that you have only good surprises and they're at whatever level you are comfortable with. If you do not have time off, we hope that whatever is going on in your life goes smoothly and that everybody is kind to you. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episod out, and then we'll see you again on Monday with new stuff. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.