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…
Tag: images
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…
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…
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…
Quotation of the Week: A selfish, cold-hearted Sybarite
Miss Alicia Audley is distinctly unimpressed with her cousin Robert’s sudden interest in her enigmatic new step-mother and isn’t afraid to say so: “…pray amuse yourself in your own way; loll in an easy-chair all day, with those two absurd dogs asleep on your knees; spoil my lady’s window-curtains with your cigars and annoy everybody in the house…
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…
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…
Image of the Week: #LenaWantsMe
Image taken from Edward Douglas Fawcett’s science fiction novel Hartmann the Anarchist (1893).
The Sea of Books 