Victorian Farm |
Edwardian Farm -- 18 hours of BBC experimental archeology/historical documentaries, online. Archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn and historian Ruth Goodman spend two years living the life of rural country farmers.
posted by crunchland
on Jan 15, 2012 -
33 comments
The Elements of Drawing: John Ruskin's Teaching Collection at Oxford digitizes the drawings, engravings, and paintings that
John Ruskin collected (and created) for use in teaching drawing. The objects can be viewed separately or in their teaching order and context, with Ruskin's own catalog annotations. The site also suggests how modern art students can put the collection to use, with instructional video and a variety of drawing exercises. Ruskin also assembled another fine art collection for working-class viewers in Sheffield; you can see that collection at the
Museum of Sheffield, which also helps sponsor a digital reconstruction of the original museum building, the
St. George's Museum.
posted by thomas j wise
on Nov 14, 2011 -
5 comments
BRUCE ROSENBAUM and his wife, Melanie, cook their food on what looks like a cast-iron Victorian stove. But the stove, like many items in the Rosenbaums' kitchen, has been gutted and repurposed. There's a modern appliance inside that antique shell, a theme that repeats itself from the fridge to their water heater.
"We created this romantic Victorian feel to it," Bruce Rosenbaum said. "But everything works."
The Massachusetts couple have
steampunked their kitchen.
[more inside]
posted by fixedgear
on Feb 28, 2011 -
113 comments
Chris Kimball prepares a 12-course meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 cookbook. Using only a coal stove and other authentic Victorian-era kitchen staples, the chef
, who lives in Fannie Farmer's former home, recreated a classic holiday Victorian meal from her iconic 1896 cookbook.
The twelve courses included: "rissoles (filled and fried puff pastry), mock turtle soup with fried brain balls, lobster à l’Américaine, roast goose with chestnut stuffing and jus, wood-grilled salmon, roast saddle of venison, Canton punch, three molded Victorian jellies and a spectacular French-inspired Mandarin cake."
Chris Kimball is the creator of public television's
America's Test Kitchen) and
Cook's Illustrated. Naturally, he chronicled the experience in a book, aptly titled,
Fannie's Last Supper. In it, he offers some moden adaptations of Fannie Farmer's recipes. A film depicting the difficulties of authentically re-creating the meal airs this Fall.
posted by misha
on Oct 6, 2010 -
45 comments
Platt Rogers Spencer was born in 1800 near the Hudson River. His family was too poor to afford paper so Spencer practiced on whatever was handy – leaves, bark, snow and sand – everything was a canvas for handwriting.
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posted by Sara C.
on Jul 20, 2010 -
7 comments
An attempt at a
collaborative translation of Plato’s Protagoras. Every day for a few months, Dhananjay Jagannathan will post roughly a page of the dialogue, side by side in Greek, in his own translation, and in Jowett’s classic 1871 translation. He's invited readers to comment and offer suggestions to improve the translation. Jagannathan's goal is to communicate Plato in English the way readers of his would have interpreted his Greek.
posted by unliteral
on Jun 30, 2010 -
11 comments
The Anachronism "On a sun dappled summer day a science expedition propels two children toward an enigmatic encounter at the edge of their known world. Arriving on an isolated beach, they stumble upon the shipwreck of a robotic squid submarine." A short film,
project site,
via.
posted by dhruva
on Apr 23, 2010 -
17 comments
In the 1880s at a time when most Europeans were denied access to the Japanese interior an Italian photographer managed to capture many images of Old Japan. These were then beautifully and realistically hand painted and serve as a remarkable record of a world long since disappeared. Victorian-era photos of Japan.
posted by shakespeherian
on Feb 22, 2010 -
28 comments
Few things in history are as compelling as the duel. Refined and barbaric at the same time, this practice has had a checkered history.
The rules of dueling were codified by the Irish in 1777 in the Code Duello (
summarized here), which was codified at Clonmel Summer Assizes in 1777. As evidenced by these
documents, dueling was in practice prior to the Irish rules being drafted. The procedure and philosophy behind duels is illustrated in
this article.
Dueling gained some traction in America in the
19th century, culminating in the famous Burr-Hamilton affair. There are many more resources to find out more
here. For a list of famous duels, you can check out
this list.
Lest you think men were the only ones dueling, here are a
few short anecdotes of women dueling.
Reportedly,
dueling is still legal in Paraguay, as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
posted by reenum
on Sep 15, 2009 -
17 comments
Gentlemen, are you searching for that special something to wear to the Paris Court Ball? Ladies, do you long to don a pelisse and kid shoes for your next round of afternoon calls?
Vintage Textile can help.
[more inside]
posted by chihiro
on Oct 22, 2008 -
28 comments
In an intriguing blog entry the mysterious jasminembla muses about the man in the moon, and his relationship with thorns, linking finally to a most remarkable collection of sourced and footnoted Victorian
Moon Lore authored by a Rev. Timothy Harley, 1885. In the "
Man in the Moon" section, we learn that, indeed, the man in the moon has been traditionally linked with thorns, variously being exiled to the moon for stealing a bundle of brambles, strewing brambles on the path to church to hinder the pious, or cutting wood on the Sabbath, among other infractions - and that this folktale has existed since at least 1157, when an English abbot asks, in Latin, "
Do you not know what the people call the rustic in the moon who carries the thorns? Whence one vulgarly speaking says,
"The Rustic in the moon /
Whose burden weighs him down /
This changeless truth reveals /
He profits not who steals."
Furthermore, no less a personage than Shakespeare has mentioned the thorny situation of the poor man in the moon... and most interesting, perhaps, the rather convincing theory that the bramble-burdened man in the moon may very well be an older "Jack" of Jack and Jill fame, who did not steal, but was stolen by the moon, along with his sister.
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Jun 26, 2008 -
19 comments
NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT -- The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and moderate allowance from her late husband's friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent's care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds. This kindly nineteenth-century advertisement had a hidden meaning. If a woman paid her adoption fee to a
baby farmer and handed over her infant, no one ever had to worry about that baby, ever again.
[more inside]
posted by Countess Elena
on Jun 7, 2008 -
38 comments
Packed full of galleries of beautiful illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, Aubrey Beardsley, William Morris, Gustave Doré, Arthur Rackham and others with prints one can buy of any illustration,
Artsy Craftsy includes a sumptuous collection of Victorian Fairies illustrations. The site also has the illustrated
Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, illustrations of cats in fairy tales,
Magic Cats, and a selection of
beautiful free
ecards as well.
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Dec 19, 2007 -
17 comments
The bearer of this letter is an old friend of mine not quite the right side of the blanket as they say in fact he is the son of a first rate butcher but his mother was a decent family called Hyssopps of the Glen so you see he is not so bad and is desireus of being the correct article.
The Young Visitors, or, Mister Salteena's Plan (written 1890, published 1919) is a remarkable little novel that offers an atypical perspective on the recreations of the late Victorian upper classes and boasts some of literature's most comprehensive descriptions of clothing. Its author was
Daisy Ashford, a
nine-year-old girl.
posted by Iridic
on Nov 4, 2007 -
14 comments
Louis Wain became one of the most famous British illustrators of the late Victorian and Edwardian era after trying to cheer up his wife Emily by drawing portraits of their pet cat,
Peter. In addition to publishing a popular
children's book about kittens, he was a
founder of the U.K's
National Cat Club who was instrumental in promoting the
Cat Fancy movement, which encouraged Britons of all classes to view cats as lovable pets instead of household pests. Unfortunately, after Wain's wife Emily died of breast cancer, Wain gradually went mad due to
psychosis and
late onset schizophrenia, ending up in London's notorious
Bethlehem Hospital (the etymological origin for the word
bedlam). While at Bedlam, Wain continued to draw, but his cat portraits transformed into pure
geometric abstraction and
psychedelic fractals, but some see harbingers of madness in cryptically titled works, such as
Early Indian Irish and
The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere. For more insight on Wain, check out this
1896 interview and this
short film dramatizing the progression of Wain's schizophrenia through his art.
posted by jonp72
on Aug 12, 2007 -
25 comments
The Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-engraved Illustration (Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University) hosts well over eight hundred images from Victorian texts; you can browse the site by iconographic themes and features (tools, religion, etc.) or conduct more specific searches by author, publisher, and the like. For more overviews of Victorian book illustration, visit Bob Speel's
nineteenth-century art website, which features a number of pages devoted to various topics in book illustration, and the
Victorian Web.
Illuminated Books features a small collection of digitized illustrated works, many of them Victorian; there's a larger collection at
Children's Books Online. The Victorian novelist we most closely associate with book illustration is Charles Dickens, and
David Perdue has brief biographical sketches of his various illustrators, with examples of their work. Famous illustrators with their own websites include
Sir John Tenniel,
Arthur Rackham, and
Randolph Caldecott. (Main link via VICTORIA.)
posted by thomas j wise
on Jun 29, 2007 -
14 comments
A very brief history of conservatories,
and another.
And little more on
orangeries.
More than just a place to keep plants warm, conservatories peaked in popularity (and size) in the second half of the 19th century. They popped up all
over Europe, wherever
elites wanted to show off their 'exotic' plunders.
Made from more than a million feet of glass, the
Crystal Palace may have been the awesomest of them all: it was initially built to showcase the wonders of Victorian England, and its exhibits included the latest technological innovations, the largest organ in the world, a circus, objects from Australia, India, and other colonial lands, along with the many tropical plant species we usually associate with big glass buildings. The whole thing was later moved to South London and eventually housed a television station and became associated with
a well-known football club. Finally, it burned to the ground in 1936. Coincidentally, Munich's copycat, the
Glaspalast was destroyed by arson as well. (But each year's
catalog of exhibits has been digitized!)
Conservatories flourish in
North America as well.
San Francisco's Conservatory of Flowers was assembled from a kit, survived the '06 earthquake, but had to be rebuilt after successive explosions, fires, rotten wood, and a massive wind-storm. (Don't miss their
cooking tips, but watch out – their site may be
NSFW.)
And although they certainly aren't as popular as they used to be, contemporary conservatories
can be found.
Before you leave the world of glass houses, take a quick look at some
photos of Detroit's hidden treasure.
posted by serazin
on Mar 12, 2007 -
14 comments
Victorian Workhouses
I sometimes look up at the bit of blue sky
High over my head, with a tear in my eye.
Surrounded by walls that are too high to climb,
Confined like a felon without any crime...
posted by Miko
on Sep 18, 2006 -
14 comments
