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…
Category: Miscellaneous
Discerning drinkers?
While the Temperance Movement gained ground in the nineteenth century, authors writing about Ireland were sure to include references to drinking. In The Nun’s Curse, however, one of Charlotte Riddell’s characters is disappointed with her Guinness, while the locals are disappointed with her disappointment. Great effects spring, we know, from little causes; and had Miss Dickson, mourning…
Coxcombs and Foppish Haircuts
In chapter 25 of Jane Austen’s Emma, the titular character is somewhat perplexed by Frank Churchill’s “foppish” decision to travel sixteen miles for some nineteenth-century “manscaping”. “Emma’s very good opinion of Frank Churchill was a little shaken the following day, by hearing that he was gone off to London, merely to have his hair cut. A sudden freak seemed…
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….
Never underestimate the power wielded by the lady’s maid
“Among all privileged spies, a lady’s-maid has the highest privileges; it is she who bathes Lady Theresa’s eyes with eau-de-cologne after her ladyship’s quarrel with the colonel; it is she who administers sal-volatile to Miss Fanny when Count Beaudesert, of the Blues, has jilted her. She has a hundred methods for the finding out of her mistress’ secrets….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Sea of Books 