A failed witch

[wolfinthewood]

I collect memories of books I have come across shelved in the wrong sections in secondhand bookshops: not the ones that have just been thrust in any old where, but the ones that have plainly been put in the wrong place because of a misapprehension about their contents. Rosamond Lehmann’s novels A Note in Music and The Ballad and the Source regularly turn up in music sections. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici is often to be found under theology. Browne would probably have approved of that, but I suspect it would sell better under English literature. More oddly, I once found a copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis in a theology section: presumably the word ‘Confessio’ suggested religion to the bookseller. I cherish the memory of the time I found Virginia Woolf’s Orlando among the biographies.

In the same tradition, I found my copy of Hugh Miller’s My Schools and Schoolmasters on a shelf labelled ‘education’. For those who don’t know it, it’s an autobiographical work, about his formative years. Miller was a Scottish stone-mason who became a self-taught expert on geology and a very successful journalist and writer. His Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, which I also have, is a good collection of folktales and folklore. But I have long been intrigued by this passage from My Schools and Schoolmasters:

There was a decaying cottage a few doors away, that had for its inmate a cross-tempered old crone, who strove hard to set up as a witch, but broke down from sheer want of the necessary capital. She had been one of the underground workers of Niddry in her time; and, being as little intelligent as most of the other collier-women of the neighbourhood, she had not the necessary witch-lore to adapt her pretensions to the capacity of belief which obtained in the district. And so the general estimate formed regarding her was that to which our landlady occasionally gave expression. “Donnart* auld bodie,” Peggy used to say; “though she threaps hersel’** a witch, she’s nae mair witch than I am: she’s only just trying, in her feckless auld age, to make folk stand in her reverence.” Old Alie was, however, a curiosity in her way — quite malignant enough to be a real witch, and fitted, if with a few more advantages of acquirement, she had been ante-dated an age or two, to become as hopeful a candidate for a tar-barrel as most of her class.

*Donnart: stupid

**threaps hersel’: maintains herself to be

Hugh Miller (1802–1856)

from My Schools and Schoolmasters [Chapter XV] (1852)


This was at Niddry Mill, near Edinburgh, in 1824.


<link>