Forgotten Books is a website that deserves accolades. Yesterday they despatched the bound volume of Medical Times for 1850. It has copious specific and detailed information covering so much of the small stuff of life and death. By that I mean narratives on operations carried out — successfully or not; anesthesia; public health; water and… Continue reading Indian hemp in a French café
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Murder in Acton; the final act
My search for more information — truth if you will — about a local murder from nearly 200 years ago is ended. I wanted to find out about why a girl who once lived just yards from where I am writing should take it into her head to marry and then to kill her husband… Continue reading Murder in Acton; the final act
More from the Little Cyclopedia of Common Things
More real life from the 1880s as told to readers of the Little Cyclopedia of Common Things, (see a previous post for more about the book), brought to you this time by the letter P. Every one a winner for historical novelists. First up is a listing for Paint. There wasn’t much in paint then… Continue reading More from the Little Cyclopedia of Common Things
Catherine Foster; the trial
The morning the Lent Assizes opened in Bury St Edmunds on Saturday March 27th 1847, 17-year-old Catherine Foster, dressed in deep mourning and ‘evincing little alarm at the awful position she stood in’, replied in a firm voice “not guilty” to the charge of poisoning her husband. By ten past seven that evening, the prosecution… Continue reading Catherine Foster; the trial
Catherine Foster; the inquest
Just to recap (though it may assist you if you read this and the next couple of episodes by starting from the previous blog), the God-fearing young farm worker John Foster, a one-time neighbour o’mine, swallowed poison from his wife during dinner on Tuesday night November 17, 1846. Within minutes he was sick as a… Continue reading Catherine Foster; the inquest
5000 Spirits of a village, or the Layers of The Onion
Not a 100 yards from where I write this, in this sleepiest of sleepy Suffolk villages, a murder has been committed. The local paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, to which I am ever grateful for being a newspaper of the old school, wrote it up over Christmas. It would be churlish not to point… Continue reading 5000 Spirits of a village, or the Layers of The Onion
Wrapped up for Christmas, 1814
Treaty of Ghent, you say? Never heard of it? Probably because it concluded a pointless war that neither side really wished for and was subsequently ignored in European accounts of world history.
‘The air of cities is less pure — more people breathe it’
Glancing through my Little Cyclopædia of Common Things, I have to acknowledge once again it’s the small stuff of history that gets forgotten. The Little Cyclopædia is not so little, by the way, stretching to nearly 700 pages. Mine is the ninth edition, published in 1891, but the information comes from a decade before. Books… Continue reading ‘The air of cities is less pure — more people breathe it’