Great Gifts for Victorianists, Part III

Herewith the third and final installment of gift ideas for those interested in all things Victorian. In case you missed them, you can read Part I here and Part II here.

Peeper reader Mad Scientist recommends the "For the Home" section of the J. Peterman Company website, which offers, among many other intriguing things, this fantastic pub sign (above).

"As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house," wrote 25-year-old Isabella Beeton in Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861), a guide to cooking and cleaning that paved the way for today's domestic divas, including Martha Stewart and those terrifying women from How Clean is Your House?. It's available in an Oxford World's Classic edition at Amazon. Add a mug or coasters with illustrations inspired by the book (the "jelly" coaster is shown here), the superb biography The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes, and a DVD of the 2007 PBS/Masterpiece Theatre production The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton and you have a present that even the fastidious Mrs B would have approved of.

The always reliable British Library online shop offers the "Great Works" crockery collection, including ceramic mugs, bowls, cups, saucers, and plates with extracts, in the authors' handwriting, of works by Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (the charming teapot shown here features Sonnets from the Portuguese), and Oscar Wilde. The children's range includes adorable pieces illustrated with characters from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Become someone's favorite aunt or uncle instantly by pairing a Queen of Hearts bowl with the Alice's Adventures Underground: Turning the Pages CD-ROM. Kids can flip through the interactive illustrated facsimile of Carroll's manuscript while listening to Miriam Margolyes (Professor Sprout from the Harry Potter films) read the story. Pure magic.

Staying with the domestic theme for a moment longer . . . Historic Royal Palaces offers this 1837 date mug, marking the year in which Victoria became queen, and a lilac loving cup, pill box, square tray, and tankard inspired by the lace on her wedding gown.

From the Florence Nightingale Museum shop comes a replica of the famous Turkish camp lantern carried by the "lady with the lamp" and packets of Brown Windsor Soap, a favorite of the queen, who sent more than 200 pounds of the bergamot- , lavender-, and clove-scented stuff to the Crimea in December 1854.

Benjamin Pollock's Toy Shop offers exquisite toy theatres based on Victorian originals, all of which come with characters, scenery, and script; dioramas; jumping jacks; music boxes; paper dolls; hand puppets; marionettes; optical toys; and nineteenth-century tinsel prints. The tiny store in Covent Garden is one of my favorite places in London; now you can also order online.

Charles Booth's Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889 is available in a four-sheet set from the Museum of London. Framed, it would make a nice gift for anyone interested in the social history of Victorian London. (It would also make original wrapping paper for that first edition of Dickens's Oliver Twist mentioned in my last post.) The Ragged School Museum offers a number of children's books on the history of the East End and efforts to improve the living conditions of the destitute. Barnardo's, a children's charity founded by Thomas Barnardo in 1867, continues to work on behalf of children affected by poverty, abuse, and discrimination. Read more about this Victorian institution here; learn how to support its work and give a holiday gift with a difference here.

The British Library is the source for some of my favorite gifts to give this holiday season: audio CDs.

Among the Victorian personalities captured in rare recordings on Voices of History I are William Ewart Gladstone, Christabel Pankhurst, Andrew Carnegie, Florence Nightingale, and William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Voices of History 2 features Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Henry Irving; Ellen Terry, Arthur Sullivan; Arthur Conan Doyle; and Henry Morton Stanley. On Poets: The Spoken Word, Tennyson reads his "Charge of the Light Brigade," Robert Browning his "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," WB Yeats his "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," and Rudyard Kipling his "France."

Also available on separate CDs are Kipling's Just So Stories (read by the great Geoffrey Palmer); The Jungle Books and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Other Stories (read by the equally great Madhav Sharma); and Bernard Shaw Radio Broadcasts, which will give you an inkling of just how much this brilliant man must have intimidated writers, actors, and composers as one of the most powerful Victorian critics of the arts.

Palmer also reads my favorite Victorian comic novel, George Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody, in a new recording published by silksoundbooks. If you're not already familiar with this book, I highly recommend it as an effective antidote to holiday angst.

On the website of the newly reopened London Transport Museum, you can browse an immense archive of historical posters, then request photographic prints of the ones that strike your fancy. Shown here is a poster from 1902 announcing special late trains to accommodate those celebrating the coronation of Edward VII (later postponed to August because of the king's illness). While you're at the site, be sure to visit the Victorian Transport section and learn about horse trams and steam locomotives.

And last but certainly not least, Liberty (founded in 1875 by Arthur Liberty) has breathed new life into two of its Victorian archival prints by applying them to evening bags, travel accessories, and diaries, notebooks, and telephone/address books: Hera, a peacock-feather print from 1876, and Ianthe, a glorious Arts and Crafts swirl from 1900. Perfect for the Victorianist fashionista in your life.

Happy holidays to all.

Great Gifts for Victorianists, Part II

Here's the second installment of gift ideas for those passionate about the Victorian era. (You can read Part I here and Part III here.)

A beautiful bell pull inspired by William Morris's "Tree of Life" pattern is available from English Heritage, as are cushion covers in "Tree of Life" and "Orange Tree" (shown here). I also love the "Crown" zip purse and pincushion.

The Watts Gallery in Compton offers The Lady of the Rocks, a small, nicely detailed sculpture based on the figure of Eve in George Frederic Watts's oil painting Eve Repentant (1897). The Gallery also carries a wide range of books, prints, and cards relating to Victorian art, architecture, and design.

If Millais is more to your taste, you're in luck. In conjunction with Tate Britain's blockbuster exhibition on the artist, all sorts of things Millaisian are available, from an artist's pen wrapped in an image of the drowned Ophelia to a rather beautiful scarf with a cut-out leaf pattern at the ends. Plus, of course, the requisite fridge magnets, notebooks, shopping pads, books, and CDs.

The life and work of Charles Darwin has inspired a wide array of items that would make excellent gifts. From the Unemployed Philosophers' Guild comes an 11" doll (shown here) and a cute die-cut greeting card. Young naturalists will love the large plush Galapagos tortoise from The Jungle Store and the Bug Box from English Heritage.


Seagifts.com offers a 26" wood model ship kit of HMS Beagle; if your manual dexterity leaves something to be desired, you can commission a custom-built replica of the ship instead. Better yet, make a gift in your own or someone else's name to the HMS Beagle Project, which will launch a sailing replica of the ship in 2009 to mark the bicentenary of Darwin's birth. The replica, crewed by scientists and sailors, will retrace the 1831-36 voyage of the original Beagle. You can buy shirts, mugs, tote bags, buttons, and stickers at the Beagle Project's website.

Speaking of ships, the Cutty Sark conservation project continues at Greenwich in the wake of last May's devastating fire (read my post of May 21 describing the fire here). The Cutty Sark was a British merchant sailing vessel built for the lucrative nineteenth-century tea trade with China. The Cutty Sark Trust's online shop offers a number of items that would make brilliant presents, including a captain's mug inspired by the original dinnerware used on board the Cutty Sark; a key fob made with metal from the original Cutty Sark foremast of 1869; bone china mugs, night lights, and pill boxes; glass paperweights and leather coasters; handcrafted Irish leather purses emblazoned with the iconic Tudgay painting of the ship; and pirate shirts for the kids. You can also support efforts to save the ship by making an online donation.

The aforementioned Unemployed Philosophers' Guild offers several 4" finger puppets/refrigerator magnets of interest, including Darwin, Charles Dickens, Sherlock Holmes (shown here), Karl Marx, and Virginia Woolf, as well as Muppet-like dolls of Holmes, Marx, Woolf, and Oscar Wilde.




For Lewis Carroll fans, there's a Cheshire Cat mug (the grinning tabby disappears when you fill the mug with hot coffee or tea); Alice's "Enchantmints," which are packaged in an illustrated tin; a Mad Hatter pill box, and die-cut Alice, Mad Hatter, White Rabbit, and Queen of Hearts greeting cards that come with sheets of stickers (you can also buy all of these together in a set of eight).

Know someone fascinated by Victorian taxidermy? The legendary Paris shop Deyrolle (depuis 1831!) is an Aladdin's cave of goodies. Start with their four-page "Cadeaux de Noël" listing, then poke around the "Animaux Naturalisés" section. For a mere 26000 €, you can have this cheetah, magnificent scourge of British settlers in colonial Africa. (Or perhaps, madame, you would prefer the pair of baboons, which could be even more troublesome, non?) Deyrolle is also your source for beautifully painted ostrich eggs; exquisite notebooks and playing cards decorated with nineteenth-century prints of fish, giraffes, and orchids; bags of exotic shells from around the world; bird-calling instruments; and everything you could possibly need to organize your own (comparatively pathetic, je vous assure) butterfly collection.

In the "dream on!" category, how about autographs, manuscripts, and letters by Prince Albert, Lewis Carroll, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Alfred Douglas, George Eliot, William Holman Hunt, Henry Irving, Edwin Landseer, Samuel Plimsoll, Arthur Rackham, Algernon Swinburne, or Ellen Terry? All are available from the venerable Maggs Rare Books in London. If it's a first edition of Dickens's Oliver Twist you're after, try Ash Rare Books, also in London.

Prefer brooding sociopaths to workhouse waifs? For works by the Brontë sisters, you'll need to keep a keen eye on Sotheby's and Bonhams (not to mention your bank balance); the latter just sold a first edition of Emily's Wuthering Heights for £114,000. The Brontë Parsonage Museum and Brontë Society online shop offers affordable, unusual jewelry based on drawings by Charlotte and on wallpaper used in the Brontë home, as well as a good selection of books, posters, postcards, and CDs. It even has counted thread cross stitch sampler kits based on samplers worked by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne when they were children.

Need a special gift for a steampunk aficionado? Try the "Steampunk Gift Guide" at Make, where you can find mechanical trilobites, cog earrings, leather bib aprons, steam engine kits, and a "make-your-own-Edison phonograph" kit. Very cool stuff.

And over at Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, blogger Stephanie Pina has provided her own list of gift ideas for PRBphiles.

Great Gifts for Victorianists, Part I

I've scoured the web to bring you a few ideas for holiday gifts that will endear you to the Victorianist in your life (or make nice little presents for yourself).

Have you spotted an item that would make a great gift for someone interested in Victorian Britain? Let me know by making a comment to this post.

You can read "Great Gifts for Victorianists, Part II" here and "Part III" here.

First up, this very cool globe from Greaves & Thomas, which superimposes characters from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland onto a map of the constellations. It comes in a 33" hand-colored version or a much less expensive 12" version. The image here doesn't really do it justice, so click on the link and prepare to be amazed.

The V&A Shop carries an unusual selection of house and garden tools dressed up in William Morris prints, including hand trowels, secateurs, and cultivators in "Anemone" and hammers, pliers, and screwdrivers in "Daisy." Not a DIY-er? The shop also carries Morris-print notebooks, coasters, and scarves; books on Victorian design and decorative arts; Voysey tea towels; a limited edition vase based on a design by William De Morgan; a replica of a Leeds creamware mug originally created to commemorate the Great Exhibition in 1851; a silk replica of a handkerchief designed for Queen Victoria's coronation, and much, much more.

Your favorite Victorian novelist may have worn an embroidered smoking cap just like this one, from James Lock & Co., hatters to the Royal Family. Sure to lend a bohemian air to your evenings at home!



The Historic Royal Palaces online shop offers 21 items related to the Victorian period, including doll clothing, books, enamel boxes, jewelry, handkerchiefs, bookmarks, tankards and flasks, and tea paraphernalia.

From the online gift shop of Balmoral Castle, one of Victoria's favorite retreats, comes a fabric Christmas tree ornament, a miniature plate (shown here) inspired by English fine bone china commissioned by the queen for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and cuff links that entwine the initials of Victoria and Albert.

I've been a collector of Pot Belly Historical Miniature Boxes by Harmony Ball for a few years now; several of these small figurines depict Victorian personalities, including Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens (shown here), Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Their little heads pop off so you can store tiny treasures inside.

The best gift of all: Consider becoming a member or making a donation to one of the following organizations that support the preservation of the Victorian past: The National Trust, The William Morris Society, Leighton House Museum, or The Victorian Society.


Shown at top: a Victorian Christmas tableau at Dennis Severs' House, 18 Folgate Street, London.

Christmas Trees at Windsor Castle

From The Times, 27 December 1848:

"A Christmas tree is annually prepared, by Her Majesty's command, for the Royal children.

"The tree employed for this festive purpose is a young fir, about eight feet high, and has six tiers of branches. On each tier or branch are arranged a dozen wax tapers. Pendent from the branches are elegant trays, baskets, bonbonniers, and other receptacles for sweetmeats, of the most varied kind, and of all forms, colours, and degrees of beauty. Fancy cakes, gilt gingerbread, and eggs filled with sweetmeats are also suspended by variously coloured ribands from the branches.

"The tree, which stands upon a table covered with white damask, is supported at the root by piles of sweets of a larger kind, and by toys and dolls of all descriptions, suited to the youthful fancy, and to the several ages, of the scions of Royalty for whose gratification they are displayed.

"The name of each recipient is affixed to the doll, bonbon, or other present intended for it, so that no difference of opinion in the choice of dainties may arise to disturb the equanimity of the illustrious juveniles.

"On the summit of the tree stands the small figure of an angel, with outstretched wings, holding in each hand a wreath. Similar trees are arranged in the various apartments of the Castle for the Duchess of Kent and the Royal household.

"These trees are objects of much interest to all visitors at the Castle, from Christmas-Eve, when they are first set up, until Twelfth-night, when they are finally removed. They are not accessible to the curiosity of the public, but Her Majesty's visitors accompany the Queen from room to room to inspect them when they are illuminated.

"Her Majesty's tree is furnished by his Royal Highness Prince Albert, whilst that of the Prince is furnished according to the taste of Her Majesty. The other trees are jointly provided by Her Majesty and the Prince, who plan and arrange the gifts of the table."

Shown at top: Queen Victoria's Christmas tree at Windsor in 1850 as painted by James Roberts (1824 - 1867). The presents around the tree are from Prince Albert. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Calling All Victorians

An extensive collection of historical British phonebooks, including many published during the Victorian period, is now available (for a price) online.

Included are more than 1,780 British Telecom phonebooks dating to 1880, the year after public telephone service was introduced in the UK.

From The Times, 28 November 2007:

"Little is known of him, and the house in which he lived has been razed to make way for another, more important piece of our heritage. But Mr J. W. Alt, of 14 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4, is assured a place in the footnotes of history as the person whose name appeared first in the first British telephone book.

"Mr Alt’s name is in a rare telephone book from 1880, and his and the 280 million that followed in the first 104 years of British directories have been digitised into a searchable archive.

"After Mr Alt come the names of men and women who distinguished themselves by more than their alphabetical precedence. In 1928 one might have called Edward Elgar, in the twilight of his composing career, on Stratford-on-Avon 30. Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of Emmeline, pacifist and chronicler of the women’s suffrage movement, was available in 1931 on Buckhurst 2436, while she was living at West Dene, 3 Charteris Road, Woodford Green, Essex."

Read the rest of the Times article here.

Despite the fact that (according to BT's own website) "records produced before the date of privatisation are classed as public records under the Public Records Acts, 1958 and 1967" and "BT Archives undertakes the company's statutory responsibilities under these acts to preserve and make available public records to members of the public [italics mine] after 30 years," access to this new collection is restricted to those who fork over a fee to ancestry.co.uk. Annoying, to say the least.

Resources:

BT information sheet: "British phone books from 1880" (PDF)

Watercolours of the Great Exhibition

"Watercolours of the Great Exhibition" is a small but exquisite display at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) running through 14 January.

It features 11 watercolours painted in 1851, each showing a different interior view of the Crystal Palace. The exhibition website offers large-format images of all eleven paintings so viewers can see every minute, fascinating detail. They are part of a larger group of images that were reproduced both as colour and monochrome lithographs in different versions of Recollections of the Great Exhibition, a lavish contemporary souvenir guide.

The Great Exhibition took place in Hyde Park in 1851 and was the first international "trade show" of manufactured products. More than six million people -- a third of the population of Great Britain at the time -- traipsed to the park to view both the familiar and the exotic among 13,000 exhibits.

Shown at top is "Part of the Russian Court" by Henry Clarke Pidgeon (1807-80), executed in watercolour and gouache over pencil on paper. The Russian Court included furniture made of malachite, a bright green mineral, by the St Petersburg firm of Demidoff. The large porcelain vase in the middle of the display is by the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory of St Petersburg. It's decorated with scenes after the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Nicolaes Berchem.

Shown below is "Part of the French Court, No. 2" by John Absolon (1815-95), also executed in watercolour and gouache over pencil on paper. The sideboard of carved walnut on the left is the work of the Paris manufacturer Fourdinois. It was discussed in The Illustrated Exhibitor, 13 September 1851: "the design of the artist is to make the ornamentation entirely subservient to its intended purposes."

St Pancras: Return to Splendor

Historian and presenter Tristam Hunt, author of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (Metropolitan Books, 2005), assesses the new St Pancras station, the soaring, single-span iron-and-glass train shed engineered by William Henry Barlow (1812-1902) and Rowland Mason Ordish (1824-1886), which reopened on Tuesday, 6 November, as the British terminus of the Eurostar train service.

From The Guardian, 6 November 2007:

"'Railway terminuses and hotels are to the 19th century what monasteries and cathedrals were to the 13th century. They are truly the only representative buildings we have," declared the Victorian architects' journal, Building News. And none was more representative than St Pancras. Built in 1867, listed as a Grade I monument in 1967, and officially reopened today as the Eurostar terminal, it embodied all the vulgar brashness of the mid-1800s - wealth, empire, technology, and hubris -- but also the great gift of the Victorians to our cities: civic pride and a public sphere.

"In the second half of the 19th century, north London was the ground zero of railway improvement. The tracks that arched into Euston, St Pancras, and King's Cross sliced through the working-class slums of Agar Town, Camden Town, and Somers Town. 'Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood ... ' was how Dickens described it in Dombey and Son.

"St Pancras went further by unearthing the dead as well as the living. The station was named after the local parish church, whose graveyard was dug up with the forced dispersal of 8,000 souls. Overseeing the exhumations was a young architect's assistant by the name of Thomas Hardy. The daily array of coffins and cadavers that Hardy had to deal with saw him swiftly return to Dorset to recover.

"The Victorians were not a sentimental people; on the remains of the dead the Midland Railway built a triumph of technology. The station's route over the Regent's Canal and its multilayered platform system were impressive enough, but the soaring, 105 ft-tall train shed was something else. Modelled on the Crystal Palace system of 'ridge-and-furrow' roofing, WH Barlow's glass and iron canopy was a model of industrial technology -- with its single-span structure and rain resistance -- and corporate bravado. Copied around the world, St Pancras became the model for New York's Grand Central station and Mumbai's Victoria terminus.

"Curiously, this testimony to modern progress terminated in a building reminiscent of a 14th-century cloth hall. St Pancras's great frontispiece, the phantasmagorical Midland Grand Hotel, seemed to muddle the age of steam with the age of chivalry: George Gilbert Scott with Walter Scott. But it had always been the ambition of its architect to take gothic out of the church and country house and into the high street. Scott wanted to prove its modern applicability and, along Marylebone Road, he achieved that to stunning effect. The Midland Grand's steepled roofs, carved brickwork, and castellated features recall the great civic edifices of medieval Bruges and Ghent. Yet he combined this historicism with state-of-the-art infrastructure: steel girders, vast clocks, and ticking telegrams were as much part of St Pancras as ribbed vaults and oak panelling.

"For St Pancras was conceived as a statement. Above and beyond the architecture of Scott and engineering of Barlow, it was a bullish celebration of the wealth, power, and industry of 'the north.' The iron came from Derby, the bricks from Leicestershire, and the money from the railway barons, industrialists, and landowners of the Midlands. The Euston arch, the Midland Grand, and the Great Northern Hotel at King's Cross were cultural testimonies to northern England's confidence. In the capital, the hard-faced men of smoke-filled towns were making their mark with the grandest architecture available.

"Today, with its vast champagne bar and promise of Paris in a little over two hours, the new St Pancras might be dismissed as another component of an overheated capital. But that would be to misread the national achievement of its visionary architect, Alastair Lansley. Not only has he restored the majesty of Barlow's roof and confirmed the malleability of gothic with a 21st-century update that skilfully avoids pastiche. In true Victorian style, Lansley has also revived civic ownership of a commercial space.

"Unlike Birmingham New Street or Manchester Piccadilly, this is a station of places and people. It has benches, statues, open vistas, and public toilets, while its shops and cafes conform to rather than contaminate the design. Advertising is constrained, while the glamour of train travel is revived. The Victorians worshipped profit, but also believed in a public sphere of architecture, design, and recreation. The reopened St Pancras has caught that perfectly. Lansley's next project? Rebuilding Euston arch."

Shown at top: The exterior of St Pancras station in 1874. The station and hotel were declared complete three years later.

Shown at bottom: The "ground zero of railway improvement" during the last half of the nineteenth century. In this 2006 photo St Pancras station is shown during renovation; Euston station is at the left edge of the photo; King's Cross station is at the right edge. The reddish building to the left of St Pancras is the British Library.

Links:

History of St Pancras station (London and Continental Railways)

"Not just a building, but a joy to behold: Ken Livingstone must hate St Pancras," The Guardian, 9 November 2007

"St. Pancras reborn as new Eurostar home," Business Week, 8 November 2007

"St Pancras is restored to international glory and even the French are impressed," The Times, 7 November 2007

"All change for Britain's grandest gateway to Europe," The Guardian, 7 November 2007

"In Pictures: St Pancras opening," BBC News, 6 November 2007

"The miracle of St Pancras," The Guardian, 11 October 2007

"St Pancras back on track: an idea above its station," The Independent, 5 September 2007

Praise for the Peeper

Here's a very nice way to start the week: "The Victorian Peeper" is featured today at Readersandwritersblog.com, a site founded by Sid Leavitt, a retired newspaper editor, that promotes good writing. Read what he has to say about the Peeper's "clarity, interest, and expertise" here. Also be sure to check out Sid's blogroll, which brings together some of the most interesting and best-written blogs on the web. I'm happy to be in the club!

Cannonball Express

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has written a fascinating three-part series for the New York Times on the Crimean War photography of Roger Fenton (shown here -- clearly a man who loved stripes; see my post of 27 April 2007).

The series focuses on two photos taken by Fenton on 23 April 1855, both called "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." In one, cannonballs litter the side of a road leading to Sevastopol (the "OFF" photo); in the other, the cannonballs are on the road itself (the "ON" photo).

Morris takes issue with Susan Sontag's reading of the photos in her last published book, Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). Sontag asserted that Fenton found the road devoid of cannonballs and moved them there from the side of the road to create a sense of drama and danger.

At question in Morris's series: which of the photos was taken first and whether one of them was staged (if so, which one and why). To find an answer, Morris travels to the Crimea and consults various experts, including a "sun and shadow position specialist." His conclusion? Let's just say that a provisional answer is found in that most basic force of nature: gravity.

The series is also an interesting commentary on battleground tourism and an instructive case study for those of us who use photographic evidence to build historical arguments.

Resources:

High-resolution version of Fenton’s OFF photo.

High-resolution version of Fenton’s ON photo.

The Roger Fenton Crimean War Photographs collection (Library of Congress) has historical and biographical information along with 263 images.

"All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860" is an overview of the National Gallery of Art’s 2004 exhibition of the same name. The catalogue is available on Amazon.

Roger Fenton's Letters from the Crimea (De Montfort University)

Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Routledge, 2001)

Engineering the Industrial Revolution

The current issue of American Scientist features an article on the 100th anniversary of the death of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), one of the founders of the science of thermodynamics and inventor of the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement.

"One afternoon in 1842, in the town of Walsall in the heart of England's industrial midlands, two young men stood by a canal, watching a lock fill with water. The rising water lifted a barge crammed with valuable trade goods, one small step up on its climb to some unknown industrial destination. The two men mused upon this ingenious use of power, this impressive demonstration of the simple technology underpinning Victorian Britain's industrial dominance.

"The two men were brothers. One was James Thomson, a shipbuilder's apprentice later to become Professor of Engineering at Glasgow University. The other was James's brother William, destined for an even grander career. William's sojourn as Professor of Natural Philosophy—also at Glasgow—would span half a century and include fundamental contributions to an astonishing range of sciences and technologies, from the transport of fluids to the design of ultrasensitive telecommunications."

The article provides a straightforward primer on Victorian physics, showing how the work of Kelvin and others made the Industrial Revolution possible.

Shown here: Kelvin in a University of Glasgow classroom.

All the Queen's Men

Not to be outdone by Martin Scorsese, whose film "Young Victoria" -- which focuses on the queen's courtship and marriage to Prince Albert -- hits screens in 2008, Channel 4 (UK) has reportedly commissioned a drama-documentary about the queen's love life to air next year.

Of the Scorsese film, screenwriter Julian Fellowes says: "Everyone thinks they know [Queen Victoria] but 99 per cent of the public don’t know anything about the story we are telling and will be surprised. People think of a fat widow in black. They’ve forgotten the exciting young woman trying to find her own way. Some girls like to have fun and she was certainly one of them.”

[For photos from the filming, see my 13 October post.]

"Victoria’s Men" (the working title of the 90-minute Channel 4 program), will take a closer look at the queen's relationships with, er, men. Producers are basing it on her diary and testimony from historians.

Editorial director Fiona Stourton explains: "The program aims to reverse the commonly held image of Queen Victoria as a rather dour, serious character and to reveal that she was a very passionate woman who was capable of great warmth -- as is revealed in her relationships with a series of men during her life."

By this time next year, everyone should be thoroughly disabused of the notion that the queen was an ice-princess.

Mad Dog!

A remedy used to treat dog-bite victims on the streets of Manchester in the Victorian era has been rediscovered by historians.

The city streets were once teeming with stray dogs -- and one bite from a rabid animal could end in fatal illness. A number of homespun remedies were in widespread use throughout Britain before an effective vaccine was created by French scientist Louis Pasteur.

Science historians at the University of Manchester have now uncovered the recipe for one such treatment -- known as the Ormskirk Medicine after the town where it originated -- and believe it shows surprising sophistication.

Although the mixture of clay and aniseed would not treat the deadly virus, scientists found it would have been effective at fighting further infection.

Around a fifth of all rabies deaths during the nineteenth century were recorded in Lancashire.

"The active ingredients in the medicine were aniseed, which is a mild antiseptic, and a herb called horseheal, which is still used by vets today, as well as alum, which helps blood clot," says Dr. Emm Barnes of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

The mixture would be mixed with vinegar, which is also an antiseptic, and soaked on bandages that would be applied to the skin.

"Pasteur's new treatment was controversial because it was only the second vaccine ever invented," Barnes notes. "People still used the Ormskirk Medicine for quite a few years afterwards until it became clear that the vaccine was preventing rabies."

Scientists at the centre, who found the medicine's recipe in the archives, provided demonstrations of the old-fashioned treatment during the Manchester Science Festival. They also showed what dog bites would have looked like with the help of a makeup artist.

The disease causes fatal brain damage to humans and animals. Pasteur and Emile Roux developed a vaccine in 1885 that helped eradicate the illness in the UK by the early twentieth century.

[Via The Manchester Evening News, 1 November 07]

Shown here: Mary Langley Bruce with Cupid, her Griffon Bruxellois. (Check out that hat ... apparently made from a whole swan.) Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-B2-620-8 [P&P].

Resources:

Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000 (Palgrave, 2007)

"William Hill and the Ormskirk Medicine," Medical History, July 1968, 12(3): 294–297.

Hospital Puts Records of Victorian Patients Online

Via The Guardian, 1 November 2007:

"Great Ormond Street children's hospital today opened up more than half a century of its patient records, in a move it hopes will revolutionise historical research.

"The London hospital has digitised the details of more than 84,000 child patients treated between the day it first opened its doors in 1852 and 1914.

"The records, with details including names, addresses, ages, symptoms, and outcomes of sick children, are freely available on the Small and Special website, and are expected to vastly help medical historians and amateur family genealogists alike.

"The records have taken more than four years to transcribe with the help of volunteers from Kingston University's local history centre in south London.

"'We realised that the hospital had such a rich resource but it was difficult to access,' said Sue Hawkins, the project manager. 'You had to book an appointment at the hospital's archive office and go through all the records until you found what you're looking for. Now it's all available from anywhere in the world and catalogued accordingly. It's a unique resource.'

"Great Ormond Street was the first hospital to open for children requiring in-patient care and was established at a time when youngsters under 10 years old accounted for half of all deaths in the capital. Its success led to the foundation of similar children's hospitals around the country.

By far the most common disease affecting Victorian children admitted to Great Ormond Street was tuberculosis, Ms Hawkins said. The disease affected not just the lungs but also the bones, particularly those of children who had drunk infected milk, as was not uncommon among poor families.

"Although Great Ormond Street doctors were not supposed to admit people carrying infectious diseases, many patients suffered from measles and scarlet fever, Ms Hawkins said. The records have also led researchers to believe that the hospital built up an expertise in operating on conditions such as cleft palate.

"Most patients were local, coming from nearby boroughs such as St Pancras, Islington, and Shoreditch, but 20% of patients were from outside London.

"The Small and Special project carries the full biographical records of patients up until 1907, after which date – due to patient confidentiality laws that protect the details for 100 years – the records are anonymous. The project workers are hoping similar projects will soon be set up at two more London children's hospitals and two hospitals for children in Scotland. After that, they will look at expanding the research to general hospitals admitting adult patients.

"The £70,000 project was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, and Friends of the Children of Great Ormond Street."

Shown at top: The hospital in the late nineteenth century.

Shown below: A ward in 1875.

Related link:
History of the Great Ormond Street Hospital

British Library Puts Victorian Newspapers Online

One million pages of text from nineteenth-century newspapers went online last night [22 October] as part of a British Library project to increase public access to important historical resources.


The Newspapers Digitisation Project: British Newspapers 1800-1900, launched in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), will enable scholars and others to search the text of 46 regional newspapers from around the UK, dating back to 1800.

The online digital archive offers free access to lecturers and students in higher and further education institutions and to British Library visitors with reader passes, who can access it from the library's reading rooms in London's Kings Cross.

Users are able to search across the different newspaper titles to draw together materials relating to a wide range of research and learning topics. Researchers can discover, for example, how the Whitechapel murders were covered in the Birmingham Daily Post, how the Battle of Trafalgar was captured in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post, and how the Belfast News Letter reported the scramble for west Africa.

The website, developed over the past three years by Gale/Cengage Learning, the world's largest publisher of reference databases and digital collections, will allow users to search through material previously available only in hard-copy form or through microform or CD-ROMs in the library's newspaper archive in Colindale, north London.

The journals available online have been chosen by a team of experts and academics, and include regional publications from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and specialist titles covering, for example, Victorian radicalism and Chartism.

Launching the archive last night, Sir Colin Lucas, chairman of the British Library, said: "Traditionally, access to these newspapers has meant you get a newspaper on to a desk and turn each page, which can be laborious and has the risk you may miss something. If you are an old historian like me, that's the great pleasure in it. But nowadays, people need the kind of search engine that will throw up 150,000 references to steam ships."

He added that a major reason for digitising the archive was to find a long-term way of preserving journals.

"Research by UK communities relies on access to the very best publications and information sources for its survival. The creation of this new website . . . has created a vital online research tool providing the very best resources for the UK's higher and further education communities."

The initial one million pages, funded by £1m from the JISC, is the first phase of the library's digital archive project. More pages from the nineteenth-century journals will be added over the coming months. The library also has plans to digitise seventeenth- and eighteenth-century publications, and has secured an additional £1m from JISC to help cover costs.

By the end of 2008, the British Library hopes to digitise 3,000,000 pages of British newspapers and to offer worldwide access to that collection via a sophisticated searching and browsing interface on the web.

(via EducationGuardian.co.uk, 23 October 2007)

Victorian Paper Photography on View

"Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860," which runs through 30 December at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is the first exhibition to explore the opening decades of paper photography in the country of its birth, focusing exclusively on photographs printed from negatives of fine writing paper.

This early process—replaced almost entirely by glass negatives by 1860—was favored especially by men of learning and leisure who not only accepted but appreciated the medium’s tendency to soften details and mass light and shadow in a self-consciously artistic way. At home, their most frequent subjects—ancient oaks, rocky landscapes, ruined castles and abbeys, gatherings of friends and family—provided an antidote to the ills of modern, industrialized society; abroad, they were drawn to the glories of past civilizations manifest in Roman ruins, medieval churches, or Indian temples. Nearly 120 works by 40 artists have been assembled from 27 private and public collections; most are being exhibited in the United States for the first time.

Above: Robert Henry Cheney (British, 1800–1866); Guyscliffe, 1850s; albumen silver print; 7 x 8 3/4 in. (17.7 x 22.3 cm); Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

Here are a few of the images included in the exhibition; for more, visit the MMA website. Read the informative New York Times review here.

Above: John Murray (English, 1809–1898); The Taj Mahal from the Banks of the Yamuna River, 1858–62; albumen silver print; 15 3/4 x 17 3/8 in. (39.9 x 44 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen Gift, 2005.

Above: John McCosh (Scottish, 1805–1885), Englishman at the Entrance to a Pagoda, 1848–50; salted paper print; 6 1/4 x 5 in. (15.8 x 12.6 cm); Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Above: John Muir Wood (British, 1805–1892); Family Group, Leith, 1847–52; salted paper print; 4 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (11.3 x 14 cm); Scottish National Photography Collection, National Galleries of Scotland.

Above: Thomas Keith (Scottish, 1827–1895); Cardinal Beaton's House, Edinburgh, 1854–57; salted paper print; 11 x 9 3/4 in. (27.9 x 24.8 cm); Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.

Glimpses of "Young Victoria"

Hot off the set, here are a few still photos from the upcoming film Young Victoria, produced by Martin Scorcese and starring Emily Blunt as the queen and Rupert Friend as Prince Albert. For more information, read my previous posts of February 11, February 16, February 23, and March 4; you can read a hilarious account of being an extra in the movie at Dan's Media Digest.

Above: Emily Blunt as Queen Victoria.

Julian Fellowes, the screenwriter, says: "Everyone thinks they know [Queen Victoria] but 99 per cent of the public don’t know anything about the story we are telling and will be surprised. People think of a fat widow in black. They’ve forgotten the exciting young woman trying to find her own way. Some girls like to have fun and she was certainly one of them.”

Above: Blunt.

Above: Blunt with Rupert Friend as Prince Albert.

Above: Friend with greyhounds.

Above: Two unidentified actors try to keep the rain off their wigs while waiting to shoot their scenes.

Above: Princess Beatrice has a non-speaking role as a lady-in-waiting; her mother, the Duchess of York, is one of the film's executive producers.

Above: Screenwriter Julian Fellowes chats with the actors.

Above: Fellowes.

On the Other Hand

From The New York Times, 18 September 2007:

"Scientists look for data anywhere they can find it. Researchers from University College London studying handedness, for example, found data in a group of early 20th-century films of everyday English life.

"More than 800 short films made from 1900 to 1906 by Mitchell & Kenyon, a company in Blackburn, were found in 1994 and preserved by the British Film Institute. The researchers, Chris McManus and Alex Hartigan, wanted to see what the films showed about rates of left-handedness. More than 10 percent of people are left-handed, but studies have shown that the percentage was lower a century ago.

"The researchers found 391 arm-waving examples in the films, 61 involving the left arm. Other studies have shown a correlation between arm waving and handedness.

"In a control sample of 391 modern images of arm waving, 95 involved the left arm. The findings were published in Current Biology.

"The researchers estimated the ages of arm wavers and found that the frequency of left-arm use increased with age. It was higher, for example, among people estimated to have been born in the 1860s than those born in the 1870s.

"The researchers concluded left-handedness declined in Victorian England because of social and school pressures and the rise of industrial tools, among other factors, reaching bottom around the turn of the 20th century."

Shown here: Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood, c. 1901

Related links:
Mitchell & Kenyon Collection at the British Film Institute

Victorian Lives

I usually confine reviews to the sidebar, but one new book, Great Victorian Lives: An Era in Obituary (Times Books, 2007) -- available via amazon.co.uk -- deserves special mention. It brings together more than 70 obituaries of eminent Victorians from The Times and shows how some of the leading personalities of the nineteenth century were viewed by a newspaper that was itself one of the defining institutions of the age.

The Times recorded notable deaths from its beginning as The Daily Universal Register in 1785 and by the middle of the next century obituaries were established as one of the glories of the paper. There was no attempt at comprehensive coverage, and nothing like the daily obituary page of modern times, but under the 36-year editorship of John Thadeus Delane (1841-77) the paper began to respond to the deaths of significant national and international figures in a style – and on a scale – that none of its rivals could match.

The following excerpts provide a flavour of the full obituaries collected in the book.

William Wordsworth (1850)
"There is so much in the character, as well as in the works of William Wordsworth, to deserve hearty admiration, that we may indulge in the language most grateful to our feelings without overstepping the decent limits of propriety and plain sincerity. We point out, in the first place, one of the great excellencies of the departed worthy. His life was as pure and spotless as his song. It is rendering a great service to humanity when a man exalted by intellectual capacities above his fellow-men holds out to them his own person the example of a blameless life."

John Stuart Mill (1873)
"We need hardly add that many of his opinions on society and government have been generally and justly condemned; and that, in his more appropriate domain of mental and moral philosophy, he was engaged in unceasing feuds. He was, however, the most candid of controversialists, and too amiable to indulge in scorching sarcasm or inflict unnecessary pain. He was often a wrongheaded, but always a kind-hearted man."

Benjamin Disraeli (1881)
"We have remarked that, like a man of spirit and shrewdness, in his writings as in his speeches, Disraeli boldly prided himself on his Jewish descent and the glories of his race. Jews rich in gifts as in gold are the mythical heroes of the Utopias in his fictions. But this most eloquent defence of his people against the prejudices of Christendom is to be found in that chapter of the 'Political Biography' which precedes the explanation of Lord George Bentinck’s conduct with respect to the Jewish disabilities."

Charles Darwin (1882)
"In 1859 was published what may be regarded as the most momentous of all his works, 'The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.' No one who had not reached manhood at the time can have any idea of the consternation caused by the publication of this work. We need not repeat the anathemas that were hurled at the head of the simple-minded observer, and the prophecies of ruin to religion and morality if Mr. Darwin’s doctrines were accepted. No one, we are sure, would be more surprised than the author himself at the result which followed. But all this has long passed."

Climb Every Mountain ...

Three days before Christmas, 1857, a group of British mountaineers met at Ashley's Hotel in London and formed the Alpine Club, the world's first association of climbers, which is still going strong [shown above: climbers on Mont Blanc].

To mark the club's 150th anniversary, Christie's (King's Street, London) is holding a landmark sale called "Exploration and Travel: The Alps to Everest," which features, among many other things, a fascinating collection of items from the Victorian period.

Among the lots on offer: letters by David Livingstone, including one calling Richard Burton "an awful ruffian"; Henry Morton Stanley's pedometer [shown here] and gold watch; an album containing 91 photographs of Stanley's lecture tour of the United States in 1890-91; a Doulton brown-ground glazed pottery jug commemorating the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1887-89 [shown below]; the manuscript journal of a sailor who took part in an arctic expedition under Captain George Strong Nares in 1875-76; letters by Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Henry Shackleton, and General Charles George Gordon; books, paintings, prints, and maps galore, plus telescopes, skis, binoculars, and other equipment used by those who braved the antipodes.

The sale includes several albums of views of India and its people by renowned photographers Bourne, Shepherd, Paar, and Herzog & Higgins. One of these contains 112 photographs of the Coronation Durbar of 1903 [shown below]; another commemorates the visit of the Prince of Wales to Gwalior in 1906.

The historical importance of many of these items is staggering and I hope they will find their way into archives that can preserve them properly.

Resources:

"Early Victorian Mountaineering and the Search for Scientific Knowledge" at Victorian History (Bruce Rosen)

Mountaineering and Polar Collections, National Library of Scotland

Elizabeth Kolbert and Francis Spufford, eds., The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic (2007)

Ronald W. Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers (1953) and An Eccentric in the Alps: The Story of W. A. B. Coolidge, the Great Victorian Mountaineer (1959)

Edward Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871); The Ascent of the Matterhorn (1880); Travels Amongst the Great Andes of the Equator (1892)

Carlyle Letters Go Digital

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 September 2007:

"It was good of God, a catty observer wrote more than a century ago, to marry Thomas and Jane Carlyle together, 'and so make only two people miserable instead of four.'

"That’s a famously unkind cut at two of the central figures of the Victorian era, prolific writers who captured the spirit of this time of burgeoning industrialism and empire in their many letters. But readers can now decide for themselves whether the Carlyles were shallow creeps or keen observers (or both) because Duke University Press has just published Carlyle Letters Online.

"The archive features thousands of letters written by the Carlyles to more than 600 recipients: politicians, poets, scientists, and others. Each letter in the collection is indexed with multiple terms and can be searched by date, subject, and recipient. Similar letters are linked to each other through a network that designers hope will encourage discovery and facilitate research. Thanks to an interface developed by HighWire Press, part of the Stanford University Library system, users can save searches to personal folders and get alerts whenever the collection is updated."

Shown here: Thomas Carlyle (top); Jane Welsh Carlyle (bottom)

Florence Nightingale's Disputed Legacy: Angel of Mercy or Power-Hungry Meddler?

From The Guardian, 3 September 2007:

"She is known to generations of children as the saintly, iron-willed Lady With the Lamp who battled to improve the conditions of wounded British soldiers and founded modern nursing, but a strikingly different picture of Florence Nightingale [shown here] has emerged from the unpublished letters of one of her bitterest enemies.

"'Miss Nightingale shows an ambitious struggling after power inimical to the true interests of the medical department,' Sir John Hall [1795-1866], the chief British army medical officer in the Crimea, wrote to his superior in London.

"When she went over his head to order supplies from his stores, observers, Sir John wrote, were astounded at the 'petticoat imperieuse! in the medical imperio!'

"When Nightingale arrived in Scutari in November 1854 with 38 women volunteers, sent by her close friend, the war secretary Sydney Herbert, she was about to carve out her place in history and destroy Sir John's. Her determination to reform the army hospitals in which thousands of wounded and ill soldiers were treated in closely packed beds by overworked doctors and male medical orderlies, and untrained women whom she dismissed as drunken and slatternly, brought her into instant collision with Sir John -- and she also became a media star in the first British war reported in detail by the press.

"'It was absolutely as night follows day that her upper-class Victorian female morality would clash head on with his traditional closed male army world,' said Richard Aspin, head of the archive and manuscripts at the Wellcome Trust, which recently [26 June] bought Sir John's letters [read a description of the letter book prepared by Bonham's]. 'She simply ignored his authority. She would no more have dreamed of consulting him about her nurses than she would have sought the opinion of a husband, if she ever had one, about hiring a parlour maid.'

"Sir John's letters [shown here] denounced her as a publicity seeking meddler. Her ambitions, which launched the modern career of nursing, 'if not resisted,' he wrote, 'will, with the influence she has at present at home, throw us completely into the shade in future, as we are at present overlooked in all that is good and beneficial regarding our hospital arrangements, which are ascribed utterly to her presiding genius by great part of the press and her own itinerant eulogistic orators.'

"He accused her of squandering resources by sacking good nurses and orderlies and trying to take over control of others -- 'but in that she was disappointed, for they declined to serve under her orders.'

"It might be some consolation to poor Sir John that the scruffy marbled notebook containing his transcripts of the letters he considered most important cost the Wellcome Trust £4,000, while Nightingale's letters were bought for only £200. One letter from Nightingale, advising on how to find a reliable medical officer for a post in Egypt, warns against employing ex-army doctors: 'The fact is, nearly all the half-pay list are blackguards.'

"Henry Wellcome, who founded the trust, shared the general reverence for the Lady with the Lamp. Hers was the only woman's name he included in the frieze of his library, and he bought the scuffed moccasins she wore at Scutari - now on view in the new museum galleries which opened in London this summer. The collection also owns, but has lent to the British Library, the only known recording of Nightingale's voice, on a wax cylinder.

"Hall battled on, writing in February 1856: 'The army is in splendid health, only seven deaths in a week and one of them a fit of apoplexy from drunkeness.'

"However, his view of history's treatment of Nightingale and himself was prophetic. He wrote sadly: 'We shall to the end of time be made the victims of public odium in the way we were last winter ... the poor suffering sick soldier is a fine theme to ride off on.'

"When his long military service was rewarded with a knighthood (a KCB), Nightingale commented to Sydney Herbert that the honour could only mean 'knight of the Crimean burial grounds.'"


A disputed legacy: What the historians say

"Most biographies of Florence Nightingale attest that she became a national hero after dramatically reducing the mortality rate at the Scutari hospital during the Crimean war. But new research casts doubt on her role in transforming the hospital after her arrival in 1854.

"Official records show that by February 1855, the mortality rate had fallen from 60% to 42.7% and then, once a fresh water supply was introduced, it dropped further to 2.2%.

"Recently historians have suggested the death rate among soldiers did not fall immediately but rose, and was higher than any other hospital in the region. During Nightingale's first winter there, 4,077 soldiers died, mostly of typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery. Ten times more died of these illnesses than from battle wounds.

"The death rate began to fall six months after she took charge -- only after a sanitary commission was sent out by Lord Palmerston to improve ventilation and clean out the sewers.

Nightingale had believed the mortality rates were due to poor nutrition and overworking of soldiers. But Hugh Small, author of Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel, claims an unpublished letter shows it was not until 1857 that she realised the conditions within the hospitals themselves had caused such a huge number of deaths."

Related links:

"Hall, Sir John (1795–1866), military surgeon," Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required)

"Wellcome, Sir Henry Solomon (1853–1936), pharmacist and benefactor," Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required)

"Letter book of military surgeon depicts Nightingale as no heroine," Wellcome Library, London, 3 September 2007

"Letters reveal nurse Florence Nightingale was maybe more of a sinner than a saint," The Mail on Sunday, 4 September 2007

"Florence Nightingale: Just a publicity-seeker?" The Telegraph, 4 September 2007

Florence Nightingale: A Guide to Sources in the Wellcome Institute Library [PDF]

The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (University of Guelph)

Florence Nightingale’s personal papers are located in the British Library (Add. MSS. 43393–43403, 45750–45849, 46835, 47714–47767)

Recording of Florence Nightingale's voice (1890) in the British Library Sound Archive

Florence Nightingale Museum