MP3 download | Apple | Spotify | Castbox | Stitcher | Radiopublic | RSS “This time James and Sean take a trip back to the 80s — the 1880s that is. Aside from the original music we have celebrity appearances from Arthur Sullivan, Johannes Brahms, William Ewart Gladstone and Queen Victoria herself (possibly) — plus …
“This time James and Sean take a trip back to the 80s – the 1880s that is. Aside from the original music we have celebrity appearances from Arthur Sullivan, Johannes Brahms, William Ewart Gladstone and Queen Victoria herself (possibly) – plus some very drunk old Englishmen (not us)”
Centuries of Sound’s debut radio show on London’s Resonance FM was this Thursday night, repeated this Friday morning. The show goes through the first four mixes, spanning the years 1860 to 1889, and features my actual real-life voice, which I’m not quite ready to actually listen to myself . The whole hour is here on …
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 …
In the 1888 US presidential election, Democratic Party incumbent Grover Cleveland wins the popular vote, but loses the Electoral College vote to Republican challenger Benjamin Harrison. Elsewhere in the USA, Anne Sullivan begins teaching Helen Keller, Susan B. Anthony organizes a Congress for Women’s Rights in Washington, D.C., George Eastman registers the trademark Kodak, and …
