Counting Chickens

The Orpington Montage may sound like a novel by Robert Ludlum, but, as you see, it isn't.

Link via boynton. The extraordinary thing, I find, here, is that, apparently, if one wanted one's chickens photographed by Arthur Rice, one sent them to him by train, in a hamper, for two shillings and ninepence, and then he sent them back!

Boynton's post also includes a link to an album of photographs at the National Library of Wales taken in the mid-19th century by a certain Mary Dilwyn. Besides the images of chickens, and other birds, here (see numbers: 24 25 34 35 36 38), there are some beautiful studies of flowers (numbers 5 16 and 21, for example), and some remarkable portraits of children, (number 28 particularly) including a girl (number 39) who reminds me rather of a young Emily Dickinson.

I couldn't find a Dickinson poem that mentioned chickens, but I did find this fragment:

Jennie Hitchcock's mother was buried yesterday, so there is one orphan more, and her father is very sick besides. My father and mother went to the service, and mother said while the minister prayed, a hen with her chickens came up, and tried to fly into the window. I suppose the dead lady used to feed them, and they wanted to bid her good-by.

The Amherst Transcript?

(And I'll bet you'll not find another post which links Emily Dickinson and Robert Ludlum, even as loosely as this...)

Comments

[boynton]

A Bantam Connection?

That's a very fine chicken fragment.

[dave]

Why, thank you. No doubt you'll have also observed the inexhaustible bounty of poultry husbandry over at dirty beloved yesterday. Another very fine fragment, that.

[jmorrison]

semi-nonsequiter: pick-pick-piiiiick, pick-pick-piiiiick.

[dave]

sorry, there's no one here but us chickens...