Maybe Not as Interesting an Interpretation as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Would’ve Come Up With, But So It Goes

Nah, it’s gotta be a mouse trap. Glad to set people straight.

“It’s a little thing they make—make better, it appears, than other people can, or than other people, at any rate, do,” says Strether. When prompted to explain further, he again equivocates, describing the business as “a manufacture that, if it’s only properly looked after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly.”

The Ambassadors, Henry James

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Adapted version of the above by Sarah Yule. The mousetrap has been added, supposedly from Emerson’s oral versionof the saying.

The mousetrap we know was invented in 1899 and patented in 1903 (No. 744,379) by John Mast of Lititz, Pennsylvania. The world’s largest moustrap manufacturer is in Lititz.

“You should see some of the proposals that come in from mousetrap inventors,” says Joseph H. Bumsted, former vice president of the Woodstream Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of mousetraps, in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “They’re handwritten. They’re garbled. And their traps are almost always impractical, or unsellable. … But all of them remember that supposed quotation from Emerson. They feel it was written just for them, and they recite it as if that in itself were reason for Woodstream to buy their ideas!”

Dunkett found that all of his traps failed one after another, and was in such despair at the way the corn got eaten that he resolved to invent a rat-trap. He began by putting himself as nearly as possible in the rat’s place.

Then he saw his way. To suspect a common drain-pipe would be to cease to be a rat”.

Samuel Butler, Journals

That is to say:

Dunkett found that all of his traps failed one after another, and was in such despair at the way the corn got eaten that he resolved to invent a rat-trap. He began by putting himself as nearly as possible in the rat’s place.

‘Is there anything’, he asked himself, ‘in which, if I were a rat, I would have such complete confidence that I could not suspect it without suspecting everything in the world and being unable henceforth to move fearlessly in any direction?’

He pondered for awhile and had no answer, till one night the room seemed to become full of light, and he heard a voice from Heaven saying ‘Drain-pipes’.

Then he saw his way. To suspect a common drain-pipe would be to cease to be a rat”.

Samuel Butler, Journals

well, I’ve identified the original Humbert Hunbert (besides gathering all that important info on mousetraps, I mean).

It doesn’t really matter – that’s the whole point.

Widgets.

The common term for generic, manufactured items, be they hammers, hairpins or hounds tooth washcloths.

And the only reason this mystery has persisted is because there is no shortage of insignificant, every day things that Victorians found vulgar.

Maybe that could be Petroski’s next book; an encyclopedia (in no fewer than six volumes) of the things Victorians found vulgar and why. It’d be the most thorough catalog of items in existence.

Maybe I do mean barracks, it’s been 20 years since I read Pale Fire, I shouldn’t have tried to show off.

Michael, I have no theory about the ghosts — though I assume you’re mocking the ham-fistedness of my detective work. (It’s true.) I was going to reveal what the Figure in the Carpet really is to Crooked Timber readers, but now my feelings are hurt.

For post-publication sleuthing of fictional works it is hard to beat Thurber’s “The Macbeth Murder Mystery”. One of his best in my opinion. Conveniently available online here.

An excerpt:

“Oh Macduff did it, all right,” said the murder specialist. Hercule Poirot would have got him easily.” “How did you figure it out?” I demanded. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t right away. At first I suspected Banquo. And then, of course, he was the second person killed. That was good right in there, that part. The person you suspect of the first murder should always be the second victim.” “Is that so?” I murmured. “Oh, yes,” said my informant. “They have to keep surprising you.”