Perhaps she’s on the Railway

For those of us who watch American politics from afar – even with all of the acuity that is the hallmark of Chetham’s Library staff – it’s sad to say the only thing any of us know about the Republican challenger Mitt Romney is that he is filthy rich and that he is a Mormon.

Whilst being rich has seldom been seen as a crime in itself – at least until relatively recently – being a member of the Mormon faith has often earned the subject considerable opprobrium and hostility. Why should this should be the case?

Not because the Mormons inflicted the Osmond family, with all their clean living and perfect white teeth, on an unsuspecting public used to a diet of pies, sugar and flat beer, resulting in many people in the North West having their ‘mouths cleared’ by the age of twenty-one (ie removing all teeth and replacing them with dentures). No, as a ballad from the Library’s Holt collection demonstrates, hostility to Mormons is not down to their clean living, but quite the opposite: that they all have more sex than the rest of us. Having said that, one would have to be pretty badly starved of sexual congress to wish the following on one’s ex-wife (click to enlarge and see text below):