Browsing the British Library Labs images corpus for works on the subject of Ireland, I came across this familiar-looking image: This is an ad from the 1892 guidebook Visit Ireland, from Irish Tourist Development (an early Bord Failte?) and compiled by F. W. Crossley. (You can see the other images from this work here.) There’s…
Month: March 2016
Quotation of the Week: A selfish, cold-hearted Sybarite
Miss Alicia Audley is distinctly unimpressed with her cousin Robert’s sudden interest in her enigmatic new step-mother and isn’t afraid to say so: “…pray amuse yourself in your own way; loll in an easy-chair all day, with those two absurd dogs asleep on your knees; spoil my lady’s window-curtains with your cigars and annoy everybody in the house…
Insult of the Week: Not one agreeable quality
After her beloved sister Jane’s romantic disappointment, Lizzy has had enough of pleasant, wealthy bachelors: I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall…
A disappointing lack of Easter eggs
In our novels, relatively little happens at Easter, although it’s mentioned incidentally quite a bit, generally as a marker of the passage of time – things are due to happen before or after Easter but rarely take place on the holiday itself. One of the few mentions of anything actually taking place during Easter is…
London language in 19th century novels
I pricked up my ears (figuratively speaking) at this intriguing post by Roger Pocock of the Windows into History blog, in which he discusses a list of local words from late 18th and early 19th-century London. This fascinating list was first published in 1803, in Samuel Pegge’s book Anecdotes of the English Language: Chiefly Regarding…
Image of the Week: Dublin in 1798
This reproduction of a wonderful map of the city of Dublin, originally created by William Wilson, comes from Observations on Mr. Archer’s Statistical Survey of the County of Dublin, by Hely Dutton. The book was first published in 1801, at which time this was a very up-to-date map. (You’ll also find a map of the…
The Knavish System of Scientific Research
In Chapter 19 of H.G Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), the central character Griffin angrily describes the unscrupulous world of scientific research and speaks of his refusal to share credit with his professor for his discoveries. Instead, he opts to go it alone until his research is ready to take the world by storm… “And…
Insult of the Week: Walk off, ye canting hag
This week’s insult comes courtesy of Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee. The Widow O’Neill attempts to renew the lease on her property, but local rogue agent Nicholas Garraghty (known to the tenants as Old Nick) won’t humour her request. ‘Take those leases off the table; I never will sign them. Walk off; ye canting hag; it’s an…
Caturday
The Land of Temples (India), published 1882, has quite a few images of cats, which I think are actually ads for another book entirely. Here is another cat, from Leaves from My Notebook, by an Ex-Officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary (1879). Enjoy your weekend!
All the toads and serpents
Sir James Brooke, of The Absentee, does not relish the prospect of the return of Lady Dashfort and her daughter to these shores: ‘…one worthless woman, especially one worthless Englishwoman of rank, does incalculable mischief in a country like this, which looks up to the sister country for fashion. For my own part, as a…
A tip for sobering up
In Great Expectations Pip, Joe and Mr Wopsle visit a tavern, where a few drinks are consumed. Joe’s sobering-up methods are somewhat unconventional but perhaps worth a try? Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible. #wotlarx
Image of the Week: #LenaWantsMe
Image taken from Edward Douglas Fawcett’s science fiction novel Hartmann the Anarchist (1893).
The Sea of Books 