[Vwoolf] Slater's pins

[William Bain]

Very interesting questions. All I can offer is a
tiny bit of quick research on the www. The link
below gives some information on products made
by Herbert M. Slater. Apparently all far from blunt,
though of course the text is a kind of advertisment
from the company itself, I believe. Best wishes, WB (link >>>

http://ukmade.wordpress.com/tag/herbert-m-slater-1853-ltd/





On Monday, November 18, 2013 9:14 AM, Jeremy Hawthorn <jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no> wrote:
 
I have long wondered whether Slater's pins really were blunter than the average. We know that Woolf used a comment made about (the real) Barker's pins by Clara Pater. If one browses critical comments on the story all move straight into symbol and metaphor and sexual politics; I have not found one that asks whether it is possible that Clara Pater really did mean that Barker's pins had no point, or whether she was right. It's not that the symbolic /metaphorical extensions are wrong (they are I think right), but I wonder whether they are based upon some truth in the non-literary world. In contrast, when readers and critics come across this passage in Conrad, no-one asks what it symbolises: the nails are nails:

"At the bottom the nails lay in a layer several inches thick. It was
    ghastly. Every nail in the world, not driven in firmly somewhere,
    seemed to have found its way into that carpenter’s shop. There they
    were, of all kinds, the remnants of stores from seven voyages.
    Tin-tacks, copper tacks (sharp as needles), pump nails, with big
    heads, like tiny iron mushrooms; nails without any heads (horrible);
    French nails polished and slim. They lay in a solid mass more
    inabordable than a hedgehog. We hesitated yearning for a shovel,
    while Jimmy below us yelled as though he had been flayed. Groaning,
    we dug our fingers in, and very much hurt, shook our hands,
    scattering nails and drops of blood. We passed up our hats full of
    assorted nails to the boatswain, who, as if performing a mysterious
    and appeasing rite, cast them wide upon a raging sea."

Part of this is reader expectation. We expect descriptions of
    physical objects aboard ship in a Conrad fiction to evoke the
    physical; we expect descriptions of physical objects in a Woolf
    fiction to lead on to matters social and experiential.

Thinking about this, I recalled that I had once had a very pleasant
    visit to a museum of needles and pins in the English midlands, so I
    wrote and asked them if they had any information about Barker's
    pins. Alas, they did not. A Google search for Barker's pins threw up
    hardly any hits, but one did suggest that Barker's supplied the
    medical profession with pins - which does not suggest that they
    produced low-quality goods.

So: has anyone ever found out anything about Barker's pins that
    might confirm that they did actually have no point? And do we assume
    that it is Clara Pater who was talking in code to Virginia, or that
    while she had no hidden meaning it is Woolf herself who takes the comment and gives it a double meaning in the story?

Incidentally, for anyone with a taste for odd museums (I speak as
    one who has visited the sadly now-closed Liberace museum in Las
    Vegas), here is the web address for the needle and pin museum. 

http://www.forgemill.org.uk/

Jeremy H

-- 
Jeremy Hawthorn
Emeritus professor
Department of Language and Literature
NTNU
7491 Trondheim
Norway (00 47) 73596787 (NTNU)
(00 47) 72887602 (home
(00 47) 90181427 (cellphone) See details of my forthcoming book at: https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20Pages/Hawthorn%20Reader.html 
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