LMD Async Tutoring

[Elliot]

@LMD

First thing I notice is the word “aits”. I hadn’t heard that before. According to my dictionary, an ait is a small island in a river. This makes sense with the text. A green ait I think is one covered in grass or foliage.

The river in question I believe is the river Thames which flows through London. The Thames flows from west to east into the north sea. Upriver means toward the source of the stream, and downriver away. The green aits and meadows are to the west. The “tiers of shipping” I believe may refer to the locks and weirs along the Thames enabling freight ships to travel up and downstream. They allow boats to be raised and lowered to different levels of a river.

The “waterside pollutions” may refer to industrial activity happening in London and along the river to the east. The river was used in industry (and domestically) to dispose of waste and to help supply water for factories.

sounds right to me (I didn’t look stuff up)

@LMD

My guess was that they are geographically contrasting to emphasise that there really was fog everywhere, from coastal lowlands to higher lands?

yeah height contrast was my first guess (along with location contrast: fog in various different places).

@LMD

I saw someone asked a question about this on reddit that got no replies, their theory was that the essex marshes and kentish heights were socioeconomically contrasting.

that would be unsurprising. wealthy ppl living up on a hill is a common concept.

@LMD

I didn’t know what the term caboose meant, and I didn’t know what a collier-brig was. A collier is a cargo ship for transporting coal. A brig means a two masted ship. So a collier-brig is a two masted coal transport. This connects with the references to shipping, pollution, and industry earlier in the paragraph. The caboose is the kitchen of the ship.

The “yards” I believe are shipping yards, not e.g yards of a house. This fits with the ship theme of the sentence. which are places for loading/unloading cargo and that service ships etc.

I looked up gunwale, its the upper edge of a ship.

sounds right. “yards” is used for stuff besides house yards in modern contexts, e.g. train yards or storage yards.

@LMD

Also, I think that it is “cruelly” pinching the toes and fingers of the boy, is related to the “wrathful” skipper; the skipper is angry and perhaps cruelly disciplining his apprentice by making him stay up on deck in the cold, or otherwise giving him cruel tasks up on deck.

I’m doubtful about this. I think you did well when looking things up and figuring out what the terms meant. But I think being cold is just normal, not a punishment; I thought the boy was too poor to afford shoes and that’s why his toes were cold.

Being wrathful is normal (then, less so now but still some) for people in authority like the skipper and doesn’t suggest to me that he’s punishing the boy right now. I assume they are out in the cold to do productive work. I’m not sure what kind of punishments were normal then besides I think whipping or various forms of beatings were way more common. The idea of making someone endure cold as a punishment sounds kind of modern to me like something that might be a challenge on a TV show; I think it might make more sense to us now in a world where we have a lot more ability to stay warm. Back then when people were frequently involuntarily cold I’m not sure they’d use cold as a punishment much but I’m no historian just guessing.