World War One has been jogged back into the UK’s collective consciousness once more with the Third Battle of Ypres,aka Passchendaele getting its own Royal Command Performance on British TV. Two thoughts; one pretty much universal and the other pretty much local. The local first. There is a tiny village in Suffolk named Bildeston. A… Continue reading At the going down of the sun
Tag: women
The piratical eyes of the magnetic healer
Leamington is a quiet little spa town in Warwickshire near Stratford upon Avon. In the late 1880s it is not difficult to envisage how very Jane Austen it still must have been, with its Pump Room and all, though visitor numbers “taking the waters” had declined drastically. Nearby big city newspaper the Birmingham Post really… Continue reading The piratical eyes of the magnetic healer
“She rode to town on her own horse”
Just a further thought on the “scandalous practice of wife selling” from the previous story. This idea of an auction was not any brutalising suttee of a marriage where women were subjugated by gnarly unreconstructed men who had tired of the old model. In case there was any doubt of the amicable and liberated relationship between the… Continue reading “She rode to town on her own horse”
Somebody call the hair police
What did you do if you’re a young (ish) woman in the French region of Brittany in the 1860s and you needed a new dress or a pair of shoes? Why, you had a haircut, that’s what you did. Here’s Bentley’s Miscellany on the subject in 1863:- From 15 to 40 years of age the… Continue reading Somebody call the hair police
Three murders; three verdicts
For those incensed over the waywardness of justice these days, where ‘human rights’ trump human wrongs, it’s worth thinking about the way things were. On one evening in April a visiting judge arrived with a fanfare and civic reception to work his way through the prisoners gathered before him at the Spring Assize. The town was Taunton, Somerset; the year was… Continue reading Three murders; three verdicts
Fame, what you need you have to borrow
“Died last week, at her lodgings, near the Seven Dials, the much-talked of Mrs. Mapps, the bone-setter, so miserably poor, that the parish was obliged to bury her.” London Daily Post, 22nd December 1737. Mrs Sarah Mapp had a brief flirtation with fame in the mid 1730s when her pioneering work in what might now be… Continue reading Fame, what you need you have to borrow
Careful with that axe Eugenia
I recommend this blog from Strange Company about… well, as (s)he says: “For me, one of the innumerable joys of the “Illustrated Police News” is that while they did report on a lot of women who were victims of the domestic abuse, robberies, natural disasters and ‘orrible murders that were a staple of this august… Continue reading Careful with that axe Eugenia