For today’s Then and Now post, we don’t have a pair of images side by side. Instead, we have a textual description of a part of Chapelizod as it was in the early 1800s, from one of Ireland’s great masters of horror, and to compare against it, a set of photographs which I took around…
Category: Image of the Week
Image Gallery of the Week: Kisses
Happy Valentine’s Day to all of our readers! We may have gone quiet for a while, but we’ve not been idle – just busy working on a few new projects. As an apology, please enjoy a selection of our favourite kisses from Flickr Commons! Some of these are quite romantic… others, not so much. (Perhaps…
Images of the Week: “A Hymn to the Moon”
In honour of this week’s supermoon, we have uncovered some beautiful moonscapes from the British library and the Internet Archive. They are reproduced below alongside Lady Wortley Montague’s (1689-1762) fitting poem “A Hymn to the Moon” from the 1805 collection, Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, written during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa. A HYMN TO THE…
Halloween Images Collection: strange and unsettling illustrations
We here on the blog, as you may have noticed, spend a lot of time trawling through the images on Flickr Commons, particularly the massive sets of public-domain book illustrations from the British Library Labs and the Internet Archive. This is a fairly enjoyable pursuit most of the time, but over the past year we’ve…
Image Selection of the Week: The Countess of Munster’s Ghostly Tales
This week’s image selection is taken from Ghostly Tales – an 1896 collection by the Countess of Munster, Wilhelmina Fitzclarence. While the eleven supernatural stories vary in terms of quality, they are accompanied by some wonderfully atmospheric illustrations of ghostly visitation. You can view an edition scanned by the British library here.
Visual Tropes Collection of the Week: Witches and brooms
For our first image collection of this Halloween season, we’re going with a classic and iconic figure: the witch, appropriately accessorised with her (or in some cases, his!) broomstick. Let’s see what’s happening in this scene! “Shall we go to Malkin Tower?” asked Mistress Nutter, shuddering. “No; to the summit of Pendle Hill,” rejoined Mother…
Image Collection of the Week: A Fleet of Sailing Ships
Today’s image collection comes in honour of that most solemn and dignified of annual celebrations: Talk Like A Pirate Day. And what better source of swashbuckling quotes is there than Robert Louis Stevenson’s formative pirate novel Treasure Island? Not only has this work given us such celebrated tropes as “Shiver my timbers!”, “Yo-ho-ho and a…
Image Collection of the Week: The Victorian illustrator whose designs came to life
Born in London in 1846, Kate Greenaway exhibited a prodigious talent for delicate illustration. She attended the School of Art in South Kensington and completed her education in the Slade School of Art at University College London. She is now celebrated for her charming and nostalgic illustrations of childhood in the English countryside. The British library and the…
Image Collection of the Week: Victorian mansplaining
Some visual representations of Victorian mansplaining from the British library corpus for your perusal…
Image of the Week: Back to School
After a successful round of summer events and the official launch of the Nation, Genre, Gender project, it’s almost back to school time. First things first, a new uniform…
Nursing mothers: an image collection
In honour of World Breastfeeding Week 2016 (a day late – but better late than never!), here is a small collection of vintage public-domain images of women nursing their babies, from the British Library Labs and Internet Archive images collections. ix An honourable mention must also go to Gillray’s 1796 “The Fashionable Mamma“, which I…
Image of the Week: A beautiful fiend
This week’s image is inspired by an early scene in M.E Braddon’s huge sensational hit Lady Audley’s Secret 1862. While the duplicitous Lady Audley is out and about, George Talboys and Robert Audley enter her private boudoir to look at the impressive collection of paintings stored there. The lads take a look around the “glittering toilette”…
The Sea of Books 