Ink and Incapability - Historical and Cultural References

Historical and Cultural References

• Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge appear in this episode, hanging around Mrs. Miggins's coffee shop and lamenting their drug addiction, tuberculosis and other woes. They are billed in the credits as "romantic junkie poets". Later in the episode they are seen hanging around Samuel Johnson. However, most Romantic poets such as Coleridge would have been opposed to Johnson's views on poetry and literature.
• While explaining his pseudonym to Baldrick, Blackadder claims that Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth are men (especially Jane Austen, who is actually "a huge Yorkshireman with a beard like a rhododendron bush"), and the only female writer in England is James Boswell. These untruths are comical references to female authors of that time who published under male names as women were discouraged to pursue such "manly professions".
• Baldrick's destruction of Blackadder's novel and Dr. Johnson's dictionary by mistakenly tossing them in the fire is the manner in which the manuscript of Thomas Carlyle's 1837 history The French Revolution was destroyed by John Stuart Mill's maid.
• While exaggerated for comic effect in this episode, there was a trend of Royal philistinism during this era. Either George III or his younger brother Prince William is believed to have said, when presented with a complimentary copy of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "Another damn, great, thick book! Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon, heh?"
• While writing the dictionary, the word "a" is described by Blackadder as an impersonal pronoun. It is in fact an indefinite article, which is then defined by Prince George as "doesn't really mean anything".
• Johnson's dictionary is indeed missing a definition for the Afrikaans word "aardvark", as the Afrikaans language did not exist during his lifetime. It does, however, contain "sausage", albeit in the wrong spot for alphabetical order, so it is entirely possible for someone to assume that it is missing.