1890s

Bram Stoker – Dracula

It’s been over twenty years since I last read ‘Dracula’ and I was a little surprised to find that my opinion about it this time was essentially the same. It’s 50% utterly wonderful, a wildly evocative mystery story with enough half-spoken to lead to a century of derivative works, none of which can quite capture …

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S.A. Andrée and the 1897 North Pole Balloon Mission

People live only 500 miles from the North Pole, so why didn’t anyone reach it until 1908? Well, it turns out there are many reasons, and a number of innovative solutions to the problems, including freezing a huge ship in the ice and letting the currents pull you across the arctic over a couple of …

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Elsewhere in 1897

Firsts The first Boston Marathon, the discovery of the electron, Kyoto University, Juventus F.C., The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, The play Cyrano de Bergerac, Aspirin, The Kinetoscope, The Tremont Street Subway in Boston – the first underground metro in North America. It began in Africa Benin is put to the torch by the British Army’s …

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1896 in Film

Aside from The Kiss, this year we have some genuinely amazing work from Georges Méliès – real one-minute horror and fantasy films, a huge leap forward for the artform. The Haunted Castle (Le Manoir du diable) The Kiss Le Cauchemar (A Nightmare) Snowball Fight McKinley at Home, Canton, Ohio   Blackfriars Bridge Lion, London Zoological …

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1896 in Art

Lovis Corinth — Self-portrait with Skeleton Edvard Munch – The Sick Child Viktor Vasnetsov – Birds of Joy and Sorrow Jean-Léon Gérôme – Truth Coming Out of Her Well, Armed with Her Martinet to Chastise Mankind Paul Gauguin – Self-portrait ‘près du Golgotha’ Arturo Michelena — Miranda en la Carraca Hugo Simberg — The Garden …

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A. E. Housman – A Shropshire Lad

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. Raised in Worcestershire and finding myself eventually settled in …

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H. G. Wells — The Island of Doctor Moreau

Probably the least well-remembered of Wells’s three groundbreaking science fiction works of the late 1890s, The Island of Doctor Moreau has suffered even more then The Time Machine from a series of poor quality adaptations, and an odd sort of uncertainty of what the point of the story is. Whether you view the book as …

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Elsewhere in 1896

Firsts The first modern Olympic Games takes place, Blackpool Pleasure Beach opens, X-rays are discovered, La bohème premiers, Henry Ford builds The Ford Quadricycle, his first vehicle, there is the world’s first motoring fatality, the first speeding fine and the first study of the sensitivity of global climate to atmospheric carbon dioxide. American Politics William …

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