As I journeyed across France to Marseilles, and made thence a terribly rough voyage to Alexandria, I wrote my allotted number of pages every day. On this occasion more than once I left my paper on the cabin table, rushing away to be sick in the privacy of my state room. It was February, and…
Author: Karen Wade
Dr. Karen Wade is a researcher and lecturer at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin.
Image of the Week: Clongowes College in 1898
In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen Dedalus recalls his schooldays, spent at the boarding school Clongowes Wood College: It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. He wondered from…
Pride and Prejudice and People
Are you one of Jane Austen’s legion of obsessive fans? Have you read Pride and Prejudice once, or occasionally, or until the covers are falling off? Do you know your Sir Lewis de Bourghs from your apothecary shopboys? If so, we need your help! We’ve put together a survey which contains the full list of…
Caturday, vol. II
Further feline frolics from the fin de siècle (mostly). Puss, my apple ‘gainst thy mouse I’ll lay, The game’s mine if thou hast ne’er a trump to play! … Apes and Cats to play at cards are fit, Men and women ought to have more wit. Previous Caturday posts can be found here….
Visual Trope Gallery of the Week: Fisticuffs and skirmishes
The novels that have been indexed by the British Library Labs collection are typically embellished with illustrations featuring attractive scenery, frolicking cherubs, or decorous ladies making polite conversation in parlours. However, a little rummaging turns up a wide variety of images on other themes, some of which are quite bizarre and occur more frequently than…
An injured body: novelists disapproving of novels
In chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen starts off by describing the activities of Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe, but gets sidetracked rather quickly, and spends almost the entire second half in a delightful rant about the hypocrisy of novelists who deride their own genre: I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom…
Insult of the Week: you confounded fools
Middlemarch‘s Fred Vincy momentarily loses the run of himself while intervening in a local territorial skirmish: “What do you confounded fools mean?” shouted Fred, pursuing the divided group in a zigzag, and cutting right and left with his whip. “I’ll swear to every one of you before the magistrate. You’ve knocked the lad down and…
Then and Now: the delights of Lucan
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…
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 Sea of Books 