Some artists grow in stature after their death, and some others go the other way. George Gissing is one of the heavyweight names of late Victorian literature, and I have to confess that I’d never heard of him before I began this project. The Nether World is a grim look at the slums of London. …
The middle Victorian era saw a surge in popularity for romantic tales of chivalry, and pseudo-historical romances of the Sir Walter Scott variety were almost universally read. Mark Twain had no time for this nostalgia for a time that never was – in fact he held it partially responsible for the civil war; It was …
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1889 was a year of new stuff. Among other debuts we have; * The Coca-Cola Company (incorporated as the Pemberton Medicine Company) * Columbia Phonograph (though we will have to wait to get some of their discs) * The Eiffel Tower (much to the dissaproval of Parisians) * The first long distance electric power transmission …
MP3 download | Patreon | Apple | Mixcloud | Spotify | Castbox | Stitcher | RSS 1889 is by no stretch of the imagination a golden year for recorded music. A blip on the otherwise upwards trajectory in terms of both sound quality and things being recorded, it is, frankly, the worst possible starting point …
It wasn’t a nice life working as a matchgirl at the Bryant & May factory in Bow – work-days were fourteen-hours long, pay was poor, infractions resulted in fines and there were severe health complications of working with white phosphorus, such as phossy jaw. But all that was to change after social reformer, socialist and …
An even larger figure in British crime lore comes out of 1887 – Sherlock Holmes, who made his debut in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first novel, ‘A Study In Scarlet’. As far as Victorian popular novels go, it stands up very well indeed, even more so as it manages to act as an introduction to …
The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are a sordid, unpleasant business, and the books, tours and new museum which attempt to romanticise and spin money out of the violence perpetrated on young women are nothing short of disgusting. ‘From Hell’, on the other hand, might be the only great piece of art to be inspired …
In 1887 23-year-old Nelly Bly talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and talked the editor into letting her feign insanity in order to write an undercover report into the conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Her investigation was a success in many ways – not only …
The late 19th Century was an astonishing time for invention – aside from recorded sound we have radio, electric lights, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, electric motors and of course motion pictures. In Roundhay, Leeds, on 14th October 1888, French inventor Louis Le Prince made the first ever film. It’s less than three seconds …
