A chance reading about a little boy abandoned at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair gets Douglas thinking... According to Erik Larsen in The Devil in the White City, visitors to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair [above] were able to drop their children at an official daycare and retrieve them by claim ... Read More...
Oddities
Jousting may have gone out of fashion in the Old World some time in the seventeenth century, but here in Maryland it is still going strong, in fact it is the official State Sport... I discovered this unlikely fact in a serendipitous way. Browsing a neighborhood flea market one day I ... Read More...
From Bugs Bunny to a zombie apocalypse version, producers have been resurrecting and then murdering Dickens' Christmas ghosts for many years... I had suspected there were a lot but it was not until researching an article on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for sofa.com that I discovered just how many adaptations ... Read More...
Erudite 'bun nating' Nige introduces the inventive pidgin language of Tok Pisin... Tok Pisin is a form of Pidgin English and is widely spoken in Papua New Guinea. It developed as a result of Pacific Islanders intermixing, when people speaking numerous different languages were sent to work on plantations in Queensland and ... Read More...
In the final part of our serialisation of The Whartons of Winchendon... Jonathan Law revisits Winchendon - a place both 'perfectly mysterious and rather dull' and considers the historical legacy of the remarkable Wharton family... I’m climbing the ridge road to Winchendon for the first time in months, the first since ... Read More...
In the penultimate part of our serialisation of The Whartons of Winchendon, Jonathan Law addresses the question: 'Just how mad was Goodwin Wharton?' ... Although the Glorious Revolution made the Wharton family one of the great powers in the land, the new regime was at first slow to recognize the merits of Goodwin – ... Read More...
Frank is handing over responsibility for his correspondence to an 18th century chap called Patridge (or possibly Partridge - there's a fair chance he misspelled his own name)... I regularly receive letters from readers, both of The Dabbler and of my own Hooting Yard blog, imploring me to offer advice on ... Read More...
Bookseller Steerforth handles a great many old books in his line of work. Often he'll find old photos and albums amongst the piles of mildewed tomes: snapshots of lost worlds and forgotten lives. Continuing the series in which he shares some of the more interesting discoveries, here are more of the incredible ... Read More...
Continuing our 10-part weekly serialisation of Jonathan Law's The Whartons of Winchendon... As we saw last week, Goodwin Wharton was able to communicate with the fairies. But that was merely a warm-up, as before long he was receiving messages direct from God, with bizarre consequences... It was in the October of 1684 ... Read More...
It has long been believed that Ernest Shackleton's glimpses of an 'extra man' on his Antarctic expedition were exhausted hallucinations. But Frank has discovered important new evidence showing that he may have been right all along... Who is the third who always walks beside you? When I count, there are only you ... Read More...
