What can an 1848 sea-serpent sighting tell us about the workings of the mid-19th-century newspaper industry? Sixty feet long!Awfully strong!It held its course straight on, for right or for wrong,And many a brave tar on board of the Daedalus,Thought to himself if he comes here he’ll settle us. … Its size and its hues,All who…
Tag: images
Then and Now: The Wall by the Church-Yard
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…
Jane Austen’s Social Networks
On July 18th two hundred years ago, at a house in Winchester, Jane Austen died at the relatively young age of 41. She had laid down her pen twelve chapters into her final novel (The Brothers, later published as Sanditon) in March of 1817, due to her worsening health, and it would remain unfinished. Her…
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…
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…
Forgotten Fiction Friday: Flaxman Low and The Story of the Moor Road
“…I think I may say that I am the first student in this field of inquiry who has had the boldness to break free from the old and conventional methods, and to approach the elucidation of so-called supernatural problems on the lines of natural law.” Psychological detective and supernatural specialist Flaxman Low is the creation…
Insult of the Week: your desultory vivacity makes your presence a fatigue
In chapter 29 of Middlemarch, a letter from Mr. Casaubon’s cousin Will Ladislaw sparks off an argument between the elderly clergyman and his much younger wife, Dorothea: “You can, if you please, read the letter,” said Mr. Casaubon, severely pointing to it with his pen, and not looking at her. “But I may as well…
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…
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…
A Portrait of the Project: our official website is announced!
I’m delighted to announce that the Nation, Genre and Gender Project’s official website is now up and running! We created this site (in association with Vermillion Design) in order to showcase some of what we do here at Nation, Genre and Gender, when we’re not overthinking Jane Austen’s novels or identifying weird gender tropes in…
5 Mega-Bestsellers from the 19th Century (That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of)
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 the project. Back then, I sat down at my desk with the thought of looking into what I naively assumed at…
The Sea of Books 