Captain Cuttle's Mailbag edited by Edward Welch

Miscellaneous books are difficult to write about; old ones even more so. I'm going to try to explain what this book is, but I may be like a blind man describing an elephant - it's weird and quirky and very much of its time while also being a surprisingly early example of what looks a lot like a random listserv.

Captain Cuttle's Mailbag is a collection of entries, organized into thematic chapters, from the first series (1849-1855) of the weekly London magazine Notes and Queries. It was compiled for publication in 2017 by Edward Welch, whose short bio describes him mostly as a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. He also gave it the descriptive subtitle - as required for nearly every nonfiction book - "History, Folklore & Victorian Pedantry from the pages of 'Notes & Queries.'"

Notes & Queries was a reader-contributed periodical, described at launch as "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, antiquaries, genealogists, etc." Welch doesn't give us much of a sense of how it was laid out or organized, but the way it seemed to work was: some guy would send either an interesting note on some random thing he had noticed or researched, or a query about something similarly obscure. That note would be published, and sometimes other guys, from elsewhere in the UK, would chime in on the same subject, to amplify what the first guy said, give a wider context, or run off in their own direction - and those would be published in later weeks, leading to what could be a slow-motion conversation.

N&Q seems to have been made up of a bewildering myriad of small items every week - again, not a million miles away from some early-90s email listserv. Welch organized this book into four large sections - Anecdotes of History, Relics of Folklore, Language and Literature, and Scientific Investigation - each of which is broken into maybe half-a-dozen chapters on more specific topics. Contributors don't really recur in this book, so it's one long string of variously pedantic and stuffed-shirt Victorian men (some clearly more cranks than others) writing in their best "serious" style to one another to impress each other with their erudition and/or request information for deeply specific and often pointless-sounding researches.

It's generally amusing and fun: the short pieces make it a good book to dip into at random times, and the organization means you can read four or five bits on epitaphs, or rural superstitions, or all the birds named in Shakespeare when you feel in the mood. The mindset is deeply Victorian, as you would expect: there's an occasional comment on something being "suitable for reading in the family," meaning that there's nothing that could possibly be offensive to the most nervous five-year-old girl imaginable. One might also detect certain attitudes towards the rural peasantry, foreigners, and women that the reader (one hopes) does not share.

It's a neat book that gets a reader deeply into the mindset of a previous era, and provides that useful parallax view: that people back then were still people, with a lot of the same concerns, issues, and problems as we do today, but that they also had substantially different backgrounds, standard ideas, prejudices, and mindsets. So they're the same as us...except in the ways they're massively different.