“The Victorian Garden Hermit (and Other Desirable Occupations)”
1: Introduction
2 Spassky’s Senior Speculation
3: Story + Bonus
1
I am delighted, honoured, and financially compensated to present my first sponsored Spassky at a Safe Distance!
Brought to you by Smacs & Son.’s Employment Agency: Do you need a change? Is work starting to feel like labour? Do you wish you belonged to a simpler time? Whatever your lamentation, Smacs & Son. is your salvation!
Established eight days after light itself, and bankrupt by the steam engine, Smacs & Son., offers older, simpler occupations to support an older, simpler way of life. There’s work of all ages for all ages!
Below, Smacs & Son. has provided three advertisements for their most popular employments. Apply before it’s too late!
Note: Applications are to be double-spaced, paperclipped, and sent by carrier pigeon. If you find a severed goat’s head in your mail-box at dawn the next day, consider yourself hired. The head will tell you how to proceed.
2
WANTED: Garden Hermit
Description: The Garden Hermit/Ornamental Druid was a position of prestige from the 15th century to the end of the 18th. It was then the fashion of noble families to make their garden appear like a real, living piece of nature(without having to deal with real, living, inhabitants of nature).
To complete the effect, some built hermitages and inhabited them with hermits, for though the neighbours might have trees and bushes and brooks they would certainly not have a hermitage. And if they did have a hermitage it was unlikely that a hermit was living in it.
Sir William Gells described the details of the profession in 1797: “The hermit is never to leave the place, or hold conversation with anyone for seven years, during which he is neither to wash himself or cleanse himself in any way whatever, but is to let his hair and nails both on hands and feet, grow as long as nature will permit them.”
Salary: Funded by a Swear-Jar.
Required Education/Experience: Has been told to Shut Up, and is still waiting to be told to Open Up.
Hours Per Week: All of them.
Competition In the Market: Unlikely.
Client(s) In Need of Garden Hermit: Sir Podger Perriwinkle, anarcho capitalist, in fervent hopes to win a political debate.
WANTED: Wife-Seller:
Description: In Victorian England, divorces were about as common as Prince Edward ascending to the throne; it was a hassle with paper-work and a stick of dynamite to the piggy-bank. Therefore, to get rid of one’s Insignificant Other (and the hassles thereto pertaining), husbands simply sold their wives. This was mostly consensual.
There would be an auction in the town’s square, after which the highest bidder would marry The-Bride-That-Was-and-Is-Now-To-Be, with whom he would not part until death did so (or until she started playing the gramophone at unseemly hours. Then it’s back to the square).
The job is simple: Marry, sell and repeat.
Salary: Low if your spouse is a fan of renaissance architecture.
Required Education/Experience: Can say “I do.” in a convincing manner.
Hours Per Week: One half of one if you insist on having no cake, no band and put photographers’ heads on pikes outside the premises as deterrence.
Competition In the Market: None if you inform your potential product that you read Spassky at a Safe Distance – the phenomenon is known as a monopoly.
Client(s) In Need of a Wife-Seller: His name is King Henry, but he shares his name with eight other Henrys,so one must barter with all of them before finding the right one.
WANTED: Body-Snatcher:
Description: In the early 19th century, anatomy was an unexplored subject, and was disallowed even the routinest Examination, Physical, or Check-Ups.
The problem was that living people were singularly contrary to getting dissected In the Name of Science. And it didn’t get any easier once these Contrary People was dead, because dead people usually have relatives that are alive(and have gotten it into their heads to commit the dead person in question to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life). Which is very inconvenient.
So it was up to the enterprising Body-Snatcher to break open graves and take the bodies to dissection anyway.
Body-Snatching became so profitable and prevalent that people started paying for fences to be put up around graves, steel bars to go on top of them, and torpedoes to be put inside them (that could very easily turn a bodysnatcher into a body-to-be-snatched).
Luckily, these devices are now very rare.
Salary: “Pound for pound.”
Required Education/Experience: Thinks the Hippocratic Oath is a rhetorical statement.
Hours Per Week: Night-shift hours.
Competition In the Market: Earthquakes.
Client(s) In Need of a Body Snatcher: An odd sod in Switzerland. Name rhymes with Lichtenstein.