Oriental album. Characters,costumes, and modes of life, in the valley of the Nile.; PRISSE D'AVENNES, AE (1807-1879); JAMES AUGUSTUS ST. JOHN (1801-1875)

“more finely shaped and better placed.’ (J.A .St John) GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER wrote a series of novels based on the ‘Flashman papers’. These journals were allegedly written by Flashman, the bully from ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays,’ and concern his adventures as a soldier in the British Army during the nineteenth century.

The novels achieved considerable popularity and such was their authenticity, that a few critics believed the papers to be genuine. This authenticity was, in large part, due to Fraser’s research. One source that he used for his last novel ‘wp|Flashman on the March|Flashman on the March]]’ - whose theme is a military engagement in Abyssinia - had been the travel books of James Augustus St John.

Fraser included notes at the end of his novels and comments:

J.A St John who travelled to Abyssinia in the 1840’s and

seems to have spent most of his time goggling at boobies,

on which he was obviously an authority. He has drooling

descriptions of slave girls, and a most scholarly passage

in which he compares Ethiopian juggs to Egyptian ones,

and finds the former “more finely shaped and better

placed.’^[1]

But other writers seemed to have used the books of James Augustus St John as source material; though not in quite the same fashion that George Macdonald Fraser had done!

In 1852, Henry Mayhew compiled three volumes of ‘LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR’ which he subtitles:

A cyclopedia of the conditions and earnings of

‘THOSE THAT WILL WORK

THOSE THAT CANNOT WORK

A fourth volume was added in 1861, subtitled ‘THOSE THAT WILL NOT WORK’ and Mayhew lists ‘Prostitutes, thieves, swindlers and beggars by ‘SEVERAL CONTRIBUTORS.’  

In the chapter on prostitutes, there is a description of a a small village of mud huts outside Cairo, where the Ghawazee, who were both dancers and prostitutes, lived; and a visit is thus described:

....numbers of the Ghawazee dwelt here and when Mr J.A. St

John visited their abode, came out to meet him, dressed in ele-

gant attire, with a profusion of ornaments. All were young -

none were more than twenty, many not more than ten years of

age. Some were exceedingly handsome, while others, to a

European judge, appeared quite the reverse. In this village

lived a considerable number of the Ghawazee, The greater

part of their lives was passed in the coffee house, where they

lounged all day on cushions, sipping coffee, singing, and in-

dulging in licentious conversation....’^[2]

It all seems rather demur and J.A St John is credited in a footnote at the end of the section, along with other writers - including one of his sons, Bayly St John.

Lane’s Modern Egyptians;^[3][4]Poole’s Englishwoman in Egypt;

St John’s Egypt and Mohammed Ali; St.John’s Egypt and

Nubia; St John’s Oriental Album; Cadalvene and Breuvery,

L’Egypt; Mugin’s Histoire de L”Gypt; Burkhardft’s Arabic

Proverbs; Expedition Francaise a L;egypt; Nieburhr’’s

travels in Egypt, &c, Thackeray’s From Cornhill to Cairo;

Warburton’s Crescent and the Cross; Bayly St.-Johns Levantine

Family;....^[5]

Returning to an earlier passage in the section of ‘London Labour and London Poor,’ where the customs and sexual proclivities of the ancient Greeks are con- sidered, there is another footnote: *Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece by J.A.St John’^[6]

Returning to the first paragraph of the section - of this precursor to a twentieth century sociology of comparative sexual mores- Mayhew, draws attention to its author: “For the better performance of this task I have availed myself of the services and assistance of my friend, Mr Horace St John, whom I shall now leave to lay before the reader, the many an curious and interesting facts which he has collected at my request in connection with the ancient and foreign part of the subject, after which I shall return to the consideration of that branch of the general inquiry connected more immediately with the prostitution in this country.^[7]

The writings of the St John family were, and still are, used as source documents for their period.

James Augustus St John was, according to ‘Men of Our Time’ (the precursor to ‘Who was Who” ‘one of the most voluminous and accomplished writers of the age. The writer of this eulogy continues later in the article: “James Augustus St john at length in 1842, published in three volumes his ‘Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece’ his most important work, which had he written nothing else, would have secured him a place in English literature By this work which occu- pied him more or less upwards of twelve years, he has never realised one far- thing, having been simple enough to an arrangement by which his remuneration for this amount of labour was to be contingent on a second edition, foredoomed, of course, never to make its appearance! The learning, industry and judgement displayed in these volumes are worthy of all praise and cannot fail to render at one time or another, a standard work of reference, which must find itself into every well selected library. Meanwhile its contents have been plundered with- out compunction by more than one pseudo-learned pundit who with better luck and more liberal publishers, have managed to survive on Mr St john’s unre- quited labours.”^[8]

It would seem that James Augustus’s book has achieved fame by the labours of his son, Horace!