5. Warnings and Advice
Closely aligned to folk belief, we find a wealth of advice on domestic tasks and matters of health and the heart. This ranges from recipes to housekeeping tips and methods of finding a good husband or wife.
For example, Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly Broken Open is ‘recommended to ingenious young men and maids, teaching them, in a natural way, how to get wives and husbands’. These ‘natural ways’ included placing lemon peel under your armpits and sticking your finger in a church lock at midnight.
Should that fail, Mother Bunch adds that 'a seventh way is this, the last time you hear the cuckoo sing look under your left shoe, and you shall find a hair of colour of your wifes or husbands without the help of the devil.’
Please note we are not recommending these methods! Mother Bunch also tells us that mapping the moles on your partner’s body will reveal much about their personality: ‘a mole on the eye brow shews the man incontinent and given to the love of strange women’; ‘a mole on the knee shews a man fortunate in marriage and his wife to be virtuous and healthy’; ‘a mole under the right thigh shows a lofty and aspiring genius, which will make the man happily rich: but if it proves to be black, it is an indication of contention, strife and debate with his wife’.
Love’s True Oracle or a new and curious Fortune Book by Joseph Wardle, Astrologer, also offers ways to predict one’s fate in love, and the bawdy nature of some of the possible outcomes is typical of the period.
These include such promising predictions as: ‘Your life is long and happy but at last you’ll marry a great slut’, ‘You're born to live a slavish life, to work with whores but not a wife’ and ‘The goddess Venus, that sly wench / gives you an English clap in French ’. Note that 'slut' here may mean an untidy and slovenly woman.
Typically for this chapbook material, however, this useful and eclectic volume also contains recipes for tooth-ache cures and information on how to take spots out of linen.
Other frequent topics of advice include the dangers involved when country people move to London, with streetwise guidance on how to avoid the hazards you may encounter there.
One chapbook gives sound financial advice, advising caution. We might wonder whether Scott, who was to lose much of his money in 1825, had read this chapbook!
Other ways of telling the future may seem more familiar to us. Some fortune-telling chapbooks involve rolling dice and others involve diagrams reminiscent of the paper fortune tellers children still make today. If you want to find out how to make one, watch this video.
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