Steerforth’s ‘Photographs Found in Books’ series returns with an enchanting record of a 1930s school trip … This is another gem rescued from being thrown into a skip. It’s a project book, compiled by a group of Middlesborough schoolgirls in 1935, describing their day trip to London. The book has no financial … Read More…
History
How Methodism leads to Bedlam… misfortunes, troubles, disappointments, grief…206 family/heredity………………………………………………115 fevers…………………………………………………………….110 religion and methodism………………………………….90 childbed………………………………………………………….79 love………………………………………………………………..74 drink……………………………………………………………….58 fright……………………………………………………………….51 study……………………………………………………………….90 These figures are for ‘Lunacy by Cause’ in a table published by the apothecary of the Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) towards the end of the 18th century. I came across it in The Air Loom Gang, Mike Jay’s fascinating study of the … Read More…
From football to fish and chips, from tabloids to faithlessness – a remarkable number of facets of modern British life can be traced to the ‘Age of Equipoise’, and specifically to the year 1860, argues Henry Jeffreys… In 1860 a Jewish man called Joseph Malin in the East of London had … Read More…
Misti Traya pays tribute to some of America’s finest wits – or alternatively, as Dorothy Parker once said, just ‘a bunch of loudmouths showing off’… In 1919, a group of writers lunched at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan. The purpose of their gathering was to roast their friend, … Read More…
Rita provides a liberal’s guide to surviving this year’s family Thanksgiving get-togethers… Thanksgiving is almost here, and Americans everywhere are dreading the highjacking of dinner table conversation by the grumpy uncles and drunken cousins who think we all want to hear their political rants and favorite conspiracy theories. Remember the year … Read More…
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a trip to the ‘specialist’ bookshops of The Backside of St Clements… All gone now. What you’re looking at above is the Australian High Commission (though didn’t that get knocked down too a year ago or so?). Like Fred and Rose’s lair at … Read More…
Bosie’s unpleasantness didn’t end upon the death of his unfortunate lover Oscar Wilde… Born on 22 October 1870 was that singularly nasty piece of work, Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Bosie’. His appalling treatment of Wilde, both during and after their relationship, is notorious, and Wilde’s tolerance of it must be put … Read More…
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a look at the chequered history of Black Mary’s Hole… We have been to Clerkenwell before and here we are again. I shall forswear Pissing Alley, long bowdlerized as Passing Alley but still redolent of the odours that named it; I shall … Read More…
An encounter with an amateur Icelandic historian leaves Rita pondering the counterfactuals… Sometimes you have to travel far away to learn the history of your own neighborhood. In Iceland this summer we had a chance encounter with a loquacious bus driver who told us a fascinating story from World War II, … Read More…
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into an area just off Bethnal Green Road known as the “worst street in London”… So which was the worst street in London? Marked in the most stygian black (‘lowest class…occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals’) on Charles Booth’s … Read More…