Troublesome Umbrellas

The awkwardness of umbrellas lies in their uncomfortable position relative to the human body. Umbrellas are not body parts; on the contrary, nineteenth-century people used them for purposes where they would not normally use their own limbs, such as poking strangers in the ribs to get their attention (or, seemingly, harassing women in public art galleries).Footnote ⁴ The very problem with umbrellas was their uneasy attachment to their owner's person; hats belonged on the head, watches and (to a lesser extent) gloves could be kept in pockets, but where did the furled umbrella belong? In the hand? Under the arm? Over the shoulder? As a result of their problematic placing, umbrellas posed a danger to other people's bodies. Carelessly handled umbrellas could cause innocent bystanders to trip, or punch them ferrule-first in the stomach. Unfurled, their spokes could take out an eye or simply pour water down collars like a spout.Footnote ⁵ Hatton's letter to the Times, describing the “gross and wanton outrage” personified by the ejaculating umbrella, suggests the trouble umbrellas can bring if handled carelessly or maliciously. They pitch people into social calamities or outrages to common decency; they are insecurely attached to one's person and thus easily mislaid; they break at inopportune moments; they turn inside out in strong gusts of wind, leaving their owners exposed to rain and ridicule. In the popular early-nineteenth-century genre of urban “miseries” or “nuisances,” umbrellas feature in line with dustmen, pickpockets, and gawping pedestrians. The anonymous author of Metropolitan Grievances (1812) includes umbrellas as “Grievance no. XXXIII,” and tell his readers that: “Umbrellas, every one knows, are grievances when carried by injudicious, unmannerly, unmanœuvreing passengers, who omit to elevate or lower them as occasion requires.” The writer claims that this carelessness causes no less than “battles of umbrellas in crowded streets” (68-69). There is an obvious parallel to the public debate in the 1850s about women's crinolines, spearheaded by Punch. Like crinolines, umbrellas take up room in public space, thereby encroaching on others and potentially endangering life and limbs. But whereas the crinoline debate was stoked by an anti-fashion discourse, the critique of umbrellas carried no absolute condemnation. Umbrellas were not only a fashion accessory, they were also an inevitable part of urban life.

Umbrellas exhibit a remarkable knack for humiliation. In his Miseries of Human Life from 1807, James Bereford complains that:

Similarly, the satirical verse book The Tour of Doctor Syntax Through London: or the Pleasures and Miseries of the Metropolis (1820) features an illustration of Doctor Syntax being humiliated when the wind turns his umbrella inside out in St Paul's Churchyard (249). Such caricatures of street scenes show urban unfortunates skewered, dragged or abandoned by wantonly difficult umbrellas. Umbrellas became associated with “sod's law.” They are emblems of reversals in fortune, and they seem to have an uncanny knack for timing. As Bereford notes, they choose to be recalcitrant “just in that period” when you need them the most. Sod's law is something more than merely the expectation that what can go wrong will go wrong. Rather, it stems from a human tendency to notice patterns in randomness, and from a suspicion of the material world. The movements of umbrellas make us mistrust coincidence. The comic umbrella is a trope for inexplicable trajectories and arbitrary agency.

Umbrellas are not only unwieldy, they are also disloyal. In fact, they seem to stand outside normal rules of private property. In 1855, G. W. M. Reynolds has a character in The Mysteries of the Courts of London declare: “I never robbed anybody in my life — not so much as an umbrella from a friend: and umbrellas, you know, have ever been considered legitimate plunder” (274). An 1833 article in Chambers's declares: “There is one piece of property, which is nobody's property, or every body's property, or is not property at all — and that is, Umbrellas”(“Umbrellas” Chambers's 65). The collective moral fibre of the nation seems to be suspended in this special case: umbrellas are easily borrowed but less easily returned. In a short piece in Punch from 1869, the writer professes astonishment to see a personal advertisement in the Times announcing: “Found, on the 13th instant, a SILK UMBRELLA.” This, we are told, is irresistibly ridiculous — why would any sane person go to the expense of placing an advert to find the owner of an item which, in practice, is viewed as “public property”? (“Are Umbrellas Public Property?” 213). Similarly, a joking fluff article entitled “Umbrellas” in the Saturday Review in 1872 speculates that:

The “stray” umbrella one “find[s] [one]self” picking up where it has been incautiously left by a too-trusting owner is a kind of urban spoil, a perk of perambulation. There is a curious suspension of guilt, as if it was the umbrella that had deliberately diverted itself from its rightful owner: “It is credited with a volition of its own, and supposed to be in some way itself responsible for its presence in any man's hand but the man who bought it” (628). The umbrella has agency — a will of its own and a mischievous disloyalty to its owner. The 1833 Chambers's piece tells us that umbrellas are “treacherous and ungrateful” (65). The writer takes the betrayal of umbrellas very personally, and he goes on to fudge the distinction between objecthood and personhood even further:

The analogy between woman and umbrella hinges on the phrase “silk and whalebone.” Umbrella ownership is like a doomed marriage:

The worst thing is

The inevitable conclusion is that umbrellas are promiscuous; we had communism in the previous quote, and here we have free love. The comic implication is that umbrellas somehow live lives (emotional, adventurous, even erotic lives) apart from their human users.

This joke — that umbrellas make active choices about their lives — is still funny. Observe how John Bowen recently described Dickens's umbrellas:

Apart from being a superlative summary of the narrative functions of nineteenth-century literary umbrellas, Bowen's passage shows the textual pleasure in switching between a passive and an active umbrella; of fudging the origin of agency in the umbrella's dealings with the world. You may have noted that I myself just wrote the phrase “dealings with the world,” as if that was a natural thing for an umbrella to have. And to fill column inches in the nineteenth-century periodical press, this same joke was repeated again and again. It was funny to recycle the story of umbrellas’ stubbornness, their personalities, and their adverse influence on human plans. What is particularly intriguing about the Saturday Review piece is that umbrellas are still jokingly referred to as a novelty, full seventy years into the century. How can something so ubiquitous be “as yet” not fully settled into “separate property”? Perhaps its uneasy belonging, caused by its awkward physical shape, means that the umbrella maintained a sense of out-of-placeness. In Bill Brown's terms, an object can confront us with its “thingness” when it stops working, or when it arrests the flow of everyday life (4). Umbrellas seem to make a habit of such destabilisation. They continue to be oddities in the cultural imagination.

With the perversity of humour, this alienability became turned on its head: a positive slew of joking articles claimed that one could read people's identities from their umbrellas. From a conceivably correct original premise — silk umbrellas were undoubtedly more expensive than cotton umbrellas, and thus signalled social class — the conceit became comically literalized: humourists repeatedly insisted that they could read moral characters, virtues and vices from the state of a man's (occasionally a woman's) umbrella. C. Watkins in the Penny Satirist in May 1838 claims that “few articles partake more strongly of the peculiarities, condition and temperament of the bearer, than the [umbrella].” He coins a term for this science: “Umbræology” (Watkins 3). In Punch in 1857 the same idea is presented as an “Umbrellometer” (“Umbrellometer”).Footnote ⁶ As Erin O‘Connor has argued, “umbrellas embodied a fantasy of a world in which the massive proliferation of objects worked to solidify subjects, in which the least palpable qualities of being – taste, intelligence, frame of mind – could be materialized within the contours of things” (17). Nineteenth-century print culture was already full of wry pieces about everyday objects — it was a popular genre of observational comedy. In one of Dickens's very first sketches as “Boz” for the Morning Chronicle, he interpreted people's characters from their door knockers. Comic writing in the period encouraged readers to approach the world as a text, to question the habituation they had developed towards familiar items, and to note the affinity between things and people. But the umbrella is, I argue, unique in its double aspect: it is both alienable and inalienable at the same time. On the one hand umbrellas refuse to abide by one owner; on the other hand, they apparently speak volumes about the man that carries them, as O‘Connor notes. Crucially, the qualities that can be read in a person's umbrella are often not those of an irreducible personality (defined by the OED as “the quality or collection of qualities which makes a person a distinctive individual”), but rather a satirical reduction to a single trait. People who are emotionally attached to their umbrellas are ridiculed (Hunt; Robinson). Unlike the personal relics which Deborah Lutz has discussed, or the sentimental objects of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth-century umbrella does not constitute identity in any inalienable way (Lutz). The umbrella seems to exist in an associative field where the fixity and fluidity of identity meet. It is both entirely readable (an “umbrellometer”) and entirely promiscuous (“stray”). As we shall now see, the clue to this double movement lies in the rise of the middle classes in the nineteenth century.

Democratic Umbrellas

Whenever nineteenth-century writers discussed the history of the umbrella (either with serious or humorous intent), they wrote it into the story of democracy. Writers tended to rehearse the two great historical shifts which the umbrella had gone through.Footnote ⁷ First, the transformation of an Oriental or Roman sun-shade (often with ceremonial significance and guarded by sumptuary laws, something writers rarely fail to mention) into an object more suited to the wet British climate (“Umbrellas and Parasols” 100); second, the even more significant juncture when umbrellas were first adopted by British men after having been a female accessory for a century. In 1709, the Female Tatler had ridiculed a young clerk who borrowed an umbrella from a coffee house:

It would be well over half a century before umbrellas became acceptable for men to use. The Penny Magazine tells us in 1834 that:

Here and elsewhere, writers are keen to determine the exact time when men made this brave step — and if possible to name the pioneers. An Edinburgh doctor, a gentleman in Bristol, and a London gentleman named Jonas Hanway, are all anecdotally credited with being instigators of the new fashion between 1750 and 1780.Footnote ⁸ These two shifts — from the Far East (over the Classical world) to Britain and from female to unisex use — mark, only half-jokingly, something like the birth of the modern male subject.Footnote ⁹ As Roger B. Henkle notes, the comedy of the Victorian era was primarily focused on middle-class anxieties of position and aspiration (6). The umbrella was wrested from its exclusive use by the two Others: woman and Orientals. The idea of sumptuary laws for umbrellas in the Far East or in the Catholic Church — the fact that umbrellas might have been “enclaved objects” — exerted a powerful charm over writers keen to assert the superiority of the British way of life.Footnote ¹⁰ According to the aforementioned 1872 article in the Saturday Review,

Such humorous hyperbole — the umbrella as a human right — mirrors the very real sense in which the spread of the umbrella was a revolution; not against absolutist institutions, but a local, ground-level extension of middle-class mobility without the need for expensive aristocratic carriages or sedan chairs. By virtue of its relative cheapness (from the point of view of the middle classes, at least), the umbrella acted as an urban democratiser; an engine of change. Being sheltered from the rain was no longer the remit of wealth and power, but was within the reach of the intrepid English (male) individual.Footnote ¹¹ Crucially, umbrellas remained too expensive for most working-class people throughout the nineteenth century, making them seem like a particularly middle-class prerogative. Women continued to use them and carry them, but for bourgeois men, umbrellas came to have special significance.

It does not require a giant leap of comic imagination to see the spread of the umbrella in the hands of the male middle classes as a mirror of the near-simultaneous spread of the Franchise. That leap is made elegantly by Robert Louis Stevenson in “The Philosophy of Umbrellas,” a joking article in the short-lived Reference Stevenson1871 Edinburgh University Magazine. Stevenson's umbrella philosopher asserts confidently that: “It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the acknowledged index of social position” (46). Middle-class virtues of frugality, forethought, and practicality over style are all symbolised by an umbrella under the arm. With flawless logic Stevenson's “umbrella philosopher” proceeds to argue that the umbrella marks the democratically competent individual:

Four years after the passing of the Second Reform Act, which enfranchised urban males according to their yearly expenses on property or lodgings, the umbrella philosopher proposes an alternative property qualification: an umbrella. Permanent possession of an umbrella is proof that the object world trusts you. And although the article acknowledges the existence of “mendacious” umbrellas — “hypocrisy naturally shelters itself below a silk” (47) — in point of fact there is no need to introduce sumptuary laws to prevent the unworthy (or the great unwashed) from fraudulently possessing themselves of an umbrella and the privileges that go with it. For,

The suggestion is that unworthy individuals, no matter their financial solvency, can yet be perpetual umbrella insolvents. The democratic subject himself is given voice, vote, and identity by his innate affinity for umbrella-handling. Although Stevenson's narrator speculatively rejects the idea that there can be “any moral selection in a mere dead piece of furniture,” of course that is exactly what he is implying (48). Umbrellas mark you as their own. Again, we see the double movement of the umbrella — its innate readability as a social sign, yoked together with its tendency to disappear — made into humorous commentary about the democratic male subject. His status remains unstable, we understand, because of his tendency to lose the markers of his social standing. The association of the umbrella with the democratically puissant individual was often stretched to absurdity like this. In an 1882 report from (of all things) an agricultural show, the writer insists that the umbrella is

While many accounts tie the umbrella to the responsible democratic subject, passages like this demonstrates the umbrella's anarchic potential. In this instance, the umbrella represents the mutual incompatibility of individual interests. Like the French Revolution in 1783, Jonas Hanway's umbrella revolution in Fleet Street opened up the troubling potential that personal liberty would dissolve the commonwealth.

Stevenson's umbrella philosopher speaks symbolical truth. Forty years later, E. M. Forster's impoverished clerk Leonard Bast cannot abandon his shabby umbrella in upper-class Helen's hallway. We learn that Leonard's umbrella is “an appalling umbrella,” “all gone along the seams” (Forster 41). In an echo of Stevenson's joke, the narrator of Howard's End tells us what the “angel of Democracy” has proclaimed: “All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas” (43). On one level, of course, the umbrella is deeply symbolic of Leonard's identity: to the reader of Howard's End, the tattered umbrella represents Leonard's shaky social status and aspirations – and yes, there is also a possible Freudian reading to be made. Within the world where Leonard lives, however, this is not a question about identity per se. He cannot afford to lose his umbrella even if it is useless; the qualities of the umbrella — or the qualities of the man — are immaterial. The umbrella operates as a binary of presence or absence: A man is either an umbrella-possessor, in which case the umbrella marks his democratic personhood, or he is umbrella-less, in which case he is as good as no one. What is at stake is not masculinity. This kind of umbrella comedy is not concerned with distinguishing men from not-men. In Helen's hands, the umbrella has no democratic significance. Women are exempt from this particular logic since they have no democratic personhood to lose. Leonard is not afraid of losing his identity – he would probably happily substitute his shabby umbrella for a better one if he dared. On the contrary, individual identity is entirely separate from the perambulations of the umbrella – umbrellas make all men equal, i.e. indistinguishable. As I said above, the umbrella in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination does not constitute identity (which is irreducible, and tends to distinguish one person from another), but personhood, if personhood is taken to mean simply the state of being a person or subject in the democratic system. Umbrella owners are mere placeholders, taking up the umbrella as a baton before it disappears out of their hands. Umbrella comedy is precisely about men who are indistinguishable — indeed, interchangeable. Just as married men for much of the nineteenth century provided the entirety of their wives’ legal existence as persons, so umbrellas provide roving “couverture” (I do apologise for the pun) for their hapless holders.

* * *

The Comic Flip

Why is the umbrella funny, though? When James Bereford's umbrella is ripped to shreds by an adverse wind, we laugh — but why? When an umbrella flips, absconds, or disappears at inopportune moments, it could be argued that we laugh because the owner experiences a fall in status, or a reversal of fortune. The blithe self-reliance of a middle-class male umbrella owner is brutally disrupted — his personhood momentarily revoked — and the material world reasserts its arbitrariness. We laugh because the smooth flow of habituation (the belief that we control the objects around us) is suddenly suspended. In her book on comedy theory, The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič begins with a very similar situation, of a baron who slips in a puddle on the pavement. In Henri Bergson's terms, Zupančič explains, comedy arises because there is “something mechanical encrusted upon the living. . . . On the one hand automatism, rigidity, inertia, uniformity, repetition; on the other vitality, live energy, elasticity, changeability (a smooth passage of one state into another)” (Zupančič 111). Bergson argued that the comic occurs when two opposing, mutually exclusive entities like a living human and an inert object world come into contact with each other. But Zupančič turns the reading on its head. In her terms, the puddle (the material world) is not concrete reality itself, but the “prop” through which the concrete solidity of the man's self-importance shows itself to be ridiculous. The man is “mechanical” in his daily habits, whereas the puddle, normally inert, becomes charged with “elasticity” and “changeability.” Both humans and the object world can stand in either position. Zupančič argues that:

When the smooth, mechanical running of the everyday is interrupted, the living and the lifeless are shown to have changed places — to have always occupied both positions at once. Inelasticity is not something external to life; “is not the comic,” asks Zupančič, “precisely the reversal in which we come upon something rigid at the very core of life, and upon something vivid at the very core of inelasticity?” (115). Impersonations and mimicry are funny because they reveal the automatism and repetition already inherent in the mannerisms of living bodies (117). Verbal comedy often relies on the puns and misdirections which reveal the arbitrariness of the systems of representation:

The umbrella, with its awkward functionality and uneasy position of belonging, is liable to these comic points of failure. In Bruno Latour's term, the umbrella has not settled into “habituation,” which normally plunges everyday materiality into silence. That silence can be broken, Latour says, by an “irruption into the normal course of action of strange, exotic, archaic, or mysterious implements” (79-80). The umbrella seems to achieve this daily, as a matter of course.

Is the umbrella such a foreigner in the midst of nineteenth-century society, ready to reveal the cracks in the fabric of reality? The bizarre shape of the umbrella, its lack of actual attachment to the travelling body, its out-of-placeness — are these the origins of this tendency to joke about umbrellas, to mock their owners and read their secrets? Seen dispassionately, umbrellas are very sophisticated quotidian machines: feats of engineering, full of moving parts and fragile interlocking mechanisms. There is something slightly improbable about umbrellas; perhaps they function, and keep functioning, contrary to our expectations? But umbrella comedy is also about the rise of the middle classes, and about the recognisable semiotics of class and power in a newly enfranchised urban environment. The umbrella incident in Howard's End is a tragic satire on social orthodoxy. The umbrella symbolises the visual spread of democracy, but it also encapsulates the arbitrariness of democracy and contains, in a safe space, a hint of the possible anarchy that awaits if the citizens of Britain were ever to question the inevitability of the political system they are developing. The umbrella is an object which levels all people, since all people are sooner or later betrayed by umbrellas. At its heart, then, umbrella comedy is about the absurd situation when personhood becomes lodged in the presence or absence of just one thing. The comedy of umbrellas circles around the arbitrariness of identity if identity is marked by an umbrella.

Fortuitous Umbrellas: The Engines of Chance

The comic stories told about umbrellas, then, reveal an uncertainty about what constitutes free will, personhood, and agency. When, like Karl Marx's famous table, the umbrella “evolves out of its. . .brain grotesque ideas,” those ideas point to man's powerlessness in the face of a seemingly arbitrary over-determination of the object world (Marx 435). Sod's law, as I said before, suggests that someone — the umbrella itself, maybe — is making obscure choices behind our backs. Umbrella comedy tends to find patterns in this randomness or, to be more specific, find a perverse logic in what is illogical. If umbrellas are the arbiters of democratic personhood, what happens when they actually shape fates in nineteenth-century fiction? In other words: are umbrellas merely accident-prone — or are we the playthings of small umbrella gods?

Umbrellas are signs for a kind of accidental inevitability — a contradiction in terms, but one that is reworked countless times in comic writing. The promiscuously disappearing umbrella is often reversed into a stubbornly persistent umbrella, as if to emphasise that the stories we tell about umbrellas will never, ever, be able to accurately predict their motives. An 1862 article in the Times likens the income tax to an unloved umbrella:

Unwanted umbrellas and unwanted taxes defy our attempts to get rid of them. In nineteenth-century fiction, the perpetually wandering umbrella sometimes turns into an eternally returning umbrella, haunting its frazzled owner. In John Oxenford's “His Umbrella” in the 1862 Christmas number of All the Year Round, the protagonist is actually pursued by a ghost umbrella, a “sturdy gingham” with a richly carved “Oriental” handle. The ghost umbrella moves around independently and resists all attempts at abandonment. Receivers of stolen goods become suddenly honest in its presence, and umbrella menders inexplicably refuse to buy it (Oxenford 14, 15). Oxenford's uncanny umbrella taps into repressed uncertainties about the deadness of dead matter. It is also a good example of the umbrella as plot device.Footnote ¹²

And of course, one way in which the umbrella interferes in human lives is by facilitating romance. As a romantic plot device, it is unbeatable. A forgotten umbrella leads to romance in Stephen Leigh Hunt's Reference Hunt1852 story entitled “The Bachelor's Umbrella.” In the cheap weekly periodical the London Reader, umbrella courtship was the conceit of no less than two pieces of short fiction, in 1879 and 1883. The latter was a melodrama entitled “The Lost Umbrella,” but the earlier story, “An Umbrella for Two,” is more light-hearted. It starts splendidly in medias res and very much to the point:

This very promising start eventually turns into an umbrella-themed proposal:

Fittingly, the very last words in the story also turn on that generously sized umbrella when the hero's sister, sensing the happy development, whispers in Madge's ear: “Is Frank's umbrella large enough for two?” (598). (It seems we cannot get away from unfortunately suggestive umbrellas.) Umbrellas facilitate modern chivalry — the opportunity for kindnesses bestowed by interested parties. As a romantic device, the umbrella's connection to chance is narratively productive.

Shared umbrellas lead to happy endings, we might conclude. However, even “An Umbrella for Two” acknowledges the suspicion that coquettish young ladies might deliberately place themselves in umbrella-less situations for the better entrapment of eligible young men. At a picnic Madge recognises that getting caught a second time under Frank's capacious cover might seem contrived, however innocently arrived at, and she walks herself to an ankle injury to avoid it (as a result of which, of course, Frank has to carry her). As an instrument of romantic fate, the umbrella carries that taint of contrivance, sometimes very problematically. This comes to the fore in an 1860 four-part story in Once a Week entitled “Sam Bentley's Christmas.” The pivotal event in the second instalment is when the Bradbury factory girl Susan is caught in the rain and is pressed into accepting the company of an umbrella-wielding young man who turns out to be her employer's nephew. The pressure he puts on her is not strictly romantic (to modern eyes), but near-predatory:

Susan's reluctant acceptance of Henry Bentley's company and umbrella represents a dangerous cross-class liaison. The spectre of prostitution rests heavily on the instalment. Susan has told her aunt earlier that “there's too little and too much work in London for girls like me” (713). Susan's fellow factory girls are “deficient in all the purer feelings of womanhood,” all openly on the hunt for a wealthy benefactor, and accuse the chaste Susan of being “more cunning than they, perhaps looking higher, but. . . at heart like themselves” (715). This sets marriage on a troubling par with prostitution. The potentially tragic consequences of Henry's earnest if misguided pursuit of the pretty factory girl are linked to the space under the umbrella — a space for fates to intertwine with narratively inevitable consequences. It is only the genre — a Christmas story — that determines which inevitability becomes the final result.

Nineteenth-century umbrellas are signs for fate. Their covers allow pairs of people to converge in narrative certainties like marriage; their chance perambulations produce patterns of inevitability. Their actual movements are, like those of the ghost umbrella in Oxenford's story, always off-stage: hidden and mysterious paths that exert influence and agency over characters’ lives. In fact, the umbrella in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination is systematically arbitrary; or, which amounts to the same thing, accidentally inevitable. This is unsettling, given that the agency of an umbrella grants its (male) owner democratic personhood. The final twist in the tale depends exactly on this comic flip between arbitrariness and inevitability, and it becomes contained in the most unlikely image of all: the umbrella as a bizarre body. The dichotomy of animate and inanimate becomes smudged, and the “grotesque ideas” of the umbrella's overworked brain lead to its own impossible animation.

Arbitrary Anatomies and the Logic of Illogic

In Oxenford's “His Umbrella,” the hapless protagonist is not only haunted by the troublesome ghost umbrella in all his waking hours — it also invades his dreams:

The umbrella, which was already clearly designated as “Oriental” in appearance, now becomes an “Indian deity”: the fear of a vengeful quotidian object is displaced onto an oriental intruder. But there is something else at work here as well: the skeletal shape suggests a visible anatomy. The analogy between bat and umbrella actually makes sense. Both bats and umbrellas are strange, seemingly improbable animals: fragile-looking, stick-thin and impossibly agile. I want to end this article with the somewhat rare, but telling, tendency to liken the umbrella to a body. The very unlikeliness of the simile reveals a central aspect of umbrella comedy.

We already saw that the 1833 article in Chambers's compared the gradual decay of the promiscuously travelling umbrella to that a runaway wife. The ravages visited upon its delicate frame by “time, and handling” — in other words, by a life of sin — conjures up an unexpected anatomy (“Umbrellas” Chambers's 65). Oxenford plays with the idea of the skeletal many-clawed goddess: object, animal and woman at once. Repeatedly throughout the period, the umbrella becomes animate. A writer in 1841, also in Chambers's, asserts that:

The writer goes on to describe the “chief accidents to which umbrellas are liable.” These include “abrasion and tearing of the skin, fracture of the ribs” and “decapitation.” This is a body in constant danger, its thin bones liable to snap, its skin perilously exposed.

On the face of it, nothing looks less like a body than an umbrella — and yet it seems curiously right. In the 1860s, the French proto-surrealist Lautréamont (a pseudonym for Isidore-Lucien Ducasse) wrote his Chants de Maldoror, a prose poem containing the phrase for which he is most famous: “as beautiful. . . as the fortuitous encounter upon a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!”Footnote ¹³ The image, which was reworked repeatedly by the surrealists, conjures up the arbitrary and violent aesthetics of a modern life rendered in absurd extremity. Whereas the sewing-machine remains in the imagination stout, squat, and mechanical, the hapless umbrella provokes amused pity. This particular umbrella is stranded in a situation — on the dissecting-table — which up-ends the dichotomy between animate and inanimate. Rather than something mechanical encrusted upon the living, as Bergson had it, this is life encrusted on something mechanical. The umbrella's secret and hidden life has become literalised; its form becomes a body, an order of being that can be violently taken apart and taxonomised. Lautréamont's phrase ties in with a larger paradigm of lost or abandoned things, such as the sentimental objects of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ The agency of the umbrella cuts both ways. When something has agency it can also be rendered powerless — a hostage to fate, a slave to its nature, a prisoner in its own body. On the dissecting-table, where living matter is reduced to a mere thing, a mere thing (the umbrella) becomes paradoxically, fearfully alive.

This paradoxical position is at the heart of the umbrella's life in comedy. As I have said before, the umbrella is systematically arbitrary. Umbrellas are among the least anthropomorphic objects, and therefore paradoxically likely to be invoked as a shorthand for unlikeliness itself. This is precisely what happens in a lecture by the mathematician W. K. Clifford. Clifford employs the umbrella in an example of the mistaken conclusions one might draw if one becomes too fixated on a particular theory:

It seems fitting that Clifford suggests the alien anatomy of an umbrella as the most unlikely biological phenomenon he can think of. The cultural trope of the umbrella hinges exactly on that point of reversal: the most unlikely explanation (that the umbrella moves of its own volition; that the umbrella has a skeleton or a nervous system) is in comic terms exactly the right explanation. Comedy is about the likely unlikely; as Zupančič has shown, it centres on fortuitous encounters that reveal the arbitrary workings of our everyday lives.

Is this what has become of the persistent novelty of the umbrella in the nineteenth century: that it becomes a by-law for the most impossible thing we can possibly imagine? Is the umbrella simply so resistant to habituation that it continually stands up for itself, and troubles us? Or do we mirror ourselves in its impossible anatomy? The umbrella is a specimen of the human body, caught in the machinery of modernity; maybe we sometimes feel metaphorically forgotten on commuter trains or picked up at random from hallways. Or maybe, when the nineteenth-century middle-class man is left by his umbrella — his personhood gone in a flash — all that remains is a body, bereft of a democratic function, but with an excess of life. The umbrella itself is a melancholy little body, created not by God but by man, and abandoned in a big, unreadable world in its absurd, awkward form.

The umbrella not only lends itself to the comic flip (one minute it shelters you, the next minute it humiliates you), but also represents, itself, the point of comic reversibility. Promiscuous objects turn abruptly to extreme fidelity, and unreadability becomes, itself, the primary message to be decoded. The ejaculating umbrella opening this article asks more questions than it answers: Is Mr Hatton actually using the loathsome umbrella as a euphemism? Would he, or anyone, have been aware of the anatomical analogy that so easily suggests itself to post-Freudian readers? My article has been at pains to suggest a number of possible readings: the umbrella as an invader of private space; as a sign of both democracy and anarchy; as a romantic (or in this case predatory) device for leading strangers along the same trajectory; and as an object with a life and will of its own. The ejaculating umbrella is not here to be decoded, but to illustrate that the umbrella has a long history of being both immediately readable and paradoxically unreadable. It is a fragile vessel on which to pin your social hopes and personal aspirations. It is liable to collapses and subversions. At the heart of umbrella comedy is the umbrella as a symbol of unstable symbols.