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…
Tag: british library labs images
Insult of the Week: Fops
From one gendered insult to another: this week we’re looking at literary fops, or gentlemen that are – in some way or another – a bit too concerned with manners of dress, elegance and fashion. Our featured image (by the wonderful C. E. Brock) comes from John Galt’s 1821 novel The Annals of the Parish…
Image Collection of the Week: Victorian mansplaining
Some visual representations of Victorian mansplaining from the British library corpus for your perusal…
The Art of Beauty: To rouge or not to rouge
Throughout our corpus of nineteenth-century novels, there are numerous references to the transformative power of cosmetics. As well as striving to survive the noxious levels of lead and arsenic in your potions and pastes, you are also tasked with achieving socially acceptable levels of rouging. According to Madam Lola Montez’s 1858 book The Art of Beauty or…
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…
Insult of the Week: “the big slobbering washing-pot head of him”
In chapter two of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Cranly and Stephen discuss the latter’s plans for the future. During their exchange, Cranly recalls Stephen’s wrangling with a school acquaintance about the shortest way from the Sallygap to Larras. A voice spoke softly to Stephen’s lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him that…
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…
5 Mega-Bestsellers from the 19th Century (That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of)
Pssst: If you’re here because you’re interested in nineteenth-century bestsellers, you may like our more recent post series on the subject! I started putting together the figures for this post more than two years ago, when we were in the early stages of compiling our list of works that we wanted to look at on…
Insult of the Week: inferior poets are absolutely fascinating
Ah, poetry. One of the great literary forms, with a history stretching back as far as the earliest written word! Beloved genre of such giants as Sappho, Homer, Chaucer, and the anonymous author of The Poetic Works of a Weird (1827). Being writers themselves, surely our novelists must have a healthy respect for the poetical…
A Net of Influence: interreference between 18th and 19th-century novels
As a taster of the content that’s going up on our shiny new website, here’s an image that I put together earlier: This, as you can probably tell, is a draft version, but what it shows is a map of interreference between novels and novelists in our corpus. Writers, unsurprisingly, are generally people who enjoy…
Visual Tropes Gallery of the Week: Men falling off of things
Men. Now, I don’t want to come across as sexist or anything, but it’s time someone came out and said it: the problem with men is, that they are always – and I mean, CONSTANTLY – falling off of things. You literally can’t take them anywhere. Especially not anywhere that involves a moderately elevanted surface,…
Image of the Week: A Plunge into Space
Born in County Down, Robert Cromie (1855-1907) published his science fiction novel A Plunge into Space in 1890 at the age of 35. The text does pretty much what it says on the tin and follows an expedition to Mars and while it doesn’t feature in our project’s corpus, it is perhaps a good example of Irish fin…
The Sea of Books 