On the Controversy Surrounding the Naming of the Lye Planet

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At the request of the Lye Planet Research Unit I reproduce (in an adapted form) a section from my book, Phalanstère at Stumpstone Hall, to cast light on the likely origin of the name 'Lye Planet':

The ‘Lye Planet’ was undoubtedly named by the 3rd Lord Stumpstone of Stumpstone Hall. This, however, is all that one can say for certain about the name, which was adopted officially after his death. The record of this naming is preserved only in the hand of Lord Stumpstone’s secretary. To abridge his Lordship’s biography to only those details necessary for the elucidation of the name ‘Lye’, let me note that Lord Stumpstone was an enthusiastic and idiosyncratic figure of the Enlightenment, his lack of recognition deriving from his estrangement from Europe and his significant reinterpretation of many positivist doctrines. Lord Stumpstone’s most progressive and prescient contribution has only been uncovered by my extensive archival work into his excerpts and diaries of reading. Not only did his Lordship independently identify the Lye Planet but he also conjectured about the possibility of setting up a colony on the planet. Diagrams and research that he undertook and repeatedly quailed from resolving into a proposal or presentation cannot clarify beyond doubt whether his Lordship viewed space travel as a possibility or only as a kind of fantasy.

1. In his detailed marginal notes to Fourier’s Le nouveau monde amoureux, his Lordship particularly dwelt upon the symbolic significance of soap.
   
   
   ‘Soap! This sinuous half-liquid must be the form and substance of our future! It touches gently but in the spirit of thorough re-birth all worthy tools and appliances. Just the same way as a china plate begrimed and repulsive is washed clean and without trace, human good (the plate) and its inessential detritus of frustration (gross viands) can be separated and a new society begun'.
   
   Lye is a constituent element in soap manufacture, the chemical sodium hydroxide. Assuming that Lord Stumpstone came across this information, we might easily suppose that a barren and ashy planet, representing (as we have seen) the promise of new life and society, should be named Lye in a gesture of hope.
   
   
2. Lye, West Midlands is a town remaining to this day. The honourable Lady Stumpstone passed through on one occasion and discovered that the town was composed of many buildings entirely assembled within twenty-four hours to defeat the Enclosures Act. ‘Dear son’, she wrote, ‘how upsetting I find it to observe that there are landowners here who, rather than birthright, rely for their claims upon the nimbleness of their laying, thatching, daubing, and wattling’. Lord Stumpstone, however, was thrilled at the peasants’ nocturnal dis-enclosure of private land and replied: 'I have read recently that all the most ancient and primitive of societies used such building techniques', and later in the same letter, 'perhaps when we colonise planets beyond the fiery concave of the stars we too will require the genius of the serfs'. Hence, Lord Stumpstone began to consider the awkwardness of extra-terrestrial settlement and conjectured that pioneers on the Lye Planet would in the future require similar alacrity in housebuilding as they faced the challenges of re-creating civilisation.


3. -ly is a place-name suffix denoting a clearing inside a forest enlarged for agricultural purposes. The place name Ashley, for instance, denotes a spot formerly planted with ash trees. Lord Stumpstone’s modest and occasionally overawed nature would have prevented him from the conjecture of what exactly had covered the planet in its history, and so, presented with an image of blankness, may have cast about for a name suggesting a clearing of unknown provenance.


4. 'Lyc' is the standard abbreviation for John Milton’s memorialising poem, 'Lycidas'. It contains the lines which clearly capture the sense of a barren waste:
   
   
   The willows and the hazel copses green
   Shall now no more be seen
   Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.
   
   Note that these lines refer to the tragic drowned youth. Lord Stumpstone was well known for a time as an enthusiast of wolves and nocturnal cantates. Whether he associated the ashen skin of the Lye Planet with the decline of wild singers in the English paysage is impossible to ascertain but approaches the edge of plausible coincidence. His Lordship’s childhood diaries also attest to a fear of drowning that might have drawn him to Milton’s elegy. His own verse—
   
   
   Will Stumpy bob upon a wat’ry bier
   unmourned, revolving under castor’s fangs?
   
   —also points to his persistent fear of bark-stripping animals.

Adjudicating between these plausible alternatives is difficult and there can be no certainty or finality in the decision we make. For my own part, I recognise in each of the explanations a facet of Lord Stumpstone’s character as a scholar and his Faustian approach to research and true understanding. Is it possible that this naming was a conscious combination of many hopes, desires and dreads? I can no more say no to anyone of the aforementioned conjectures. Therefore shall I leave off.