Headline, February 1 2025/ HUMANITY : ''' SCHOOLS* OF SCHOLARS '''

HUMANITY : 

''' SCHOOLS* OF

 SCHOLARS '''

THE YEAR IS 1926. QUEEN ELIZABETH II is christened. Wage cuts and increased working hours for coal miners precipitate a general strike of workers. A.A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh.

The League of Nations accepts Germany as the sixth permanent member on the council deeming it a '' peace loving country. ''

It is also the year that Virginia Woolf published her essay. ' On Being Ill, ' in January's volume of The New Criterion - the literary review headed by T.S. Eliot. The essay had been written from her sickbed, as Woolf lay recovering after fainting at her nephew Quentin's 15th birthday dinner months before.

In the essay, Woolf argues that illness is '' the great confessional '' that is never talked about in literature because of the '' poverty '' of language when it comes to sickness and disease.

Books on influenza, poetry on pneumonia and tomes on toothache and typhoid are '' null, negligible and non-existent '', she declares, reckoning with Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Proust, Donne and Keats.

Recounting a conversation with her husband Leonard Woolf about the essay in her diary a month before its publication, she remarked it was the "article which I, & Leonard too, thought one of my best." However, not everyone was of the same opinion.

Woolf's diaries reveal that a postcard sent by Eliot illustrated that he was '' not enthusiastic '' about the piece, prompting her to write. '' So, reading the proof just now, I just saw wordiness, feebleness & all the voices in it .''

It '' increased '' her '' distaste '' for her own writing and '' dejection at the thought of writing another novel.''

Nevertheless, a revised version of ' On Being Ill ' was published a month later, in 1926, in an American magazine called The Forum.

This time it was under the title ' Illness : An Unexploited Mine. Despite her critics, Woolf persisted with the topic, believing the absence of our ailments in literature called for censure.

In November 1930, a slim quarto of 250 numbered and signed copies of ' On Being Ill ' was hand-printed by Woolf's printing press, The Hogarth Press.

It was printed in an original vellum-backed green cloth with marbled endpapers, woodcut vignette on final leaf and an original dust jacket designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Woolf set the type herself. She spent Sunday June 15 1926, in the full swing of summer doing so, writing in her diary. '' I was so methodically devoting my morning to finishing the last page of type setting : '' On Being ILL. ''

Two years before the writing of 'On Being Ill ', in one of her most quoted lines in literature, Woolf wrote '' on or about December 1910, human character changed '', in her essay. Mr. Bennet and Mrs Brown [ 1924 ] continuing that when '' human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.''

Human character changed in December 2019, when SARS CoV-2 was discovered and the Covid pandemic began in earnest.

Pandemic Pages, the podcast that I founded and co-host with Dr. Catherine Wynne at the University of Hull, charts the tectonic shift in our lives and literature through interviews with authors, creatives and academics and medical professionals.

In the UK's National Year of Reading 2026 a UK-wide campaign designed to inspire more people to make reading a regular part of their lives - Woolf's essay and Knudsen's diary feel particularly poignant to press books into the hands of everyone we can.

To regift ourselves the slowness of suspended pandemic time, the stillness in that season of survival.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Past, Times and Tunes, continues. The World Students Society thanks Lucyl Harrison, a PhD Candidate in the School of Humanities at the University of Hull.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. 

See You all prepare for the great '' Constitutional Democratic Convention '' on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless