Why shave?, or, Beards v. barbery / by H.M.

  • H. M.
Date:
[between 1880 and 1889?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Why shave?, or, Beards v. barbery / by H.M. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    as the latter would have learnt on referring to the voyages of the illustrious Captain Cook. In one of the islands visited by Cook and his party, it was found that the art of barbery was practised in a remarkable manner. On entering a hut they found a woman shaving a child’s head with a shark’s tooth! The tooth was fixed in the end of a stick. The barberess first wetted the child’s hair with rag dipped in water, and then applied this original instrument, which shaved the head as closely as the finest razor could have done. Cook himself afterwards tried one of these ingenious contrivances and found it answer admirably. The natives had, however, quite a different way of shaving their beards, which operation they performed with two shells, one of which was placed under a part of the beard, whilst the other was applied above. In this manner a clean shave was obtained, though the process was rather tedious. Proceeding upon Southey’s calculation of nine minutes as the average number consumed by an average shaver, we get the sum of fifty-four hours and thirty-six minutes per year, or, in fifty years, a grand total of 2,730 hours consumed in the act of shaving. The time thus expended would, according to another poet, suffice for learning at least seven languages, allowing for each of them 390 lessons, each of an hour’s duration. On the other hand, it is only fair to admit, on the principle of sermons in stones and good in everything, that the act of shaving may tend to bring the shaver, or the shaven, into a frame of mind favourable to his moral improvement. “ He must be quiet and composed when under the operator’s hands, and not less so if under his own. In whatever temper or state of feeling he may take his seat in the barber’s chair or his stand at the looking-glass, he must at once become calm. There must be no haste, no impatience, no irritability; so surely as he gives way to either he will smart for it, and however prone to wander his thoughts may be at other and, perhaps, more serious times, he must be as attentive to what he is about in the act of shaving, as if he were working a problem in mathematics. As a lion’s heart and a lady’s hand are among the requisites for a surgeon, so are they for the Zebedeean shaver. He must have a steady hand, and a mind steadied for the occasion; a hand confident in its skill, and a mind assured that the hand is competent to the service upon which it is ordered. Fear brings with it its immediate punishment, as surely as in a field of battle. If he but think of cutting himself, cut himself he will.'’ The hero of Southey’s quaint romance, wTho delighted in discovering that anything good could be educed from evil, argued that more good than evil resulted from shaving, preposterous as ho knew the practice to be, irrational as he admitted it wras, and troublesome as, to his cost, he felt it. He did not extenuate the greatness of the evil, which was aggravated by its daily recurrence, but he held that it was, in truth, so great that, had it been necessary for physical reasons, that is to say, were it a law of
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