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"Aristotle at Afternoon Tea" by Oscar Wilde

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Aristotle Pop Art
Oscar Wilde was an excellent conversationalist, but, like anyone who is brilliant at something, he was also ridiculed for it. The memorable quotes, we know to this day, became memorable to all those around him, through his constant repetition, his telling and retelling. Wilde spoke the way he wrote, and did most of his editing orally.

Today, I share, for your reading pleasure, Oscar Wilde’s “Aristotle at Afternoon Tea,” a review of J.P. Mahaffy’s “Principles of the Art of Conversation,” which Wilde calls “the nearest approach, that we know of, in modern literature to meeting Aristotle at an afternoon tea.” It was first published in the Pall Mall Gazette, 16 December 1887.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) movie
Because Wilde is a character in my book, I find “Aristotle at Afternoon Tea” to be an interesting character study. Through letters and diaries about Wilde, we know that he was very repetitive, and his most oft repeated word was "charming." In “Aristotle at Afternoon Tea,” he can’t wait longer than the second paragraph before criticizing people who do exactly those things.

Aristotle at Afternoon Tea

by Oscar Wilde
In society, says Mr. Mahaffy, every civilised man and woman ought to feel it their duty to say something, even when there is hardly anything to be said, and, in order to encourage this delightful art of brilliant chatter, he has published a social guide without which no débutante or dandy should ever dream of going out to dine. Not that Mr. Mahaffy's book can be said to be, in any sense of the word, popular. In discussing this important subject of conversation, he has not merely followed the scientific method of Aristotle which is, perhaps, excusable, but he has adopted the literary style of Aristotle for which no excuse is possible. There is, also, hardly a single anecdote, hardly a single illustration, and the reader is left to put the professor's abstract rules into practice, without either the examples or the warnings of history to encourage or to dissuade him in his reckless career. Still, the book can be warmly recommended to all who propose to substitute the vice of verbosity for the stupidity of silence. It fascinates in spite of its form and pleases in spite of its pedantry, and is the nearest approach, that we know of, in modern literature to meeting Aristotle at an afternoon tea. 
As regards physical conditions, the only one that is considered by Mr. Mahaffy as being absolutely essential to a good conversationalist, is the possession of a musical voice. Some learned writers have been of opinion that a slight stammer often gives peculiar zest to conversation, but Mr. Mahaffy rejects this view and is extremely severe on every eccentricity from a native brogue to an artificial catchword. With his remarks on the latter point, the meaningless repetition of phrases, we entirely agree. Nothing can be more irritating than the scientific person who is always saying "Exactly so," or the common-place person who ends every sentence with "Don't you know?" or the pseudo-artistic person who murmurs "Charming, charming," on the smallest provocation. It is, however, with the mental and moral qualifications for conversation that Mr. Mahaffy specially deals. Knowledge he, naturally, regards as an absolute essential, for, as he most justly observes, "an ignorant man is seldom agreeable, except as a butt." Upon the other hand, strict accuracy should be avoided. "Even a consummate liar," says Mr. Mahaffy, is a better ingredient in a company than the scrupulously truthful man, who weighs every statement, questions every fact, and corrects every inaccuracy." The liar at any rate recognises that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company. Mr. Mahaffy, however, makes an exception in favour of the eminent specialist and tells us that intelligent questions addressed to an astronomer, or a pure mathematician, will elicit many curious facts which will pleasantly beguile the time. Here, in the interest of Society, we feel bound to enter a formal protest. Nobody, even in the provinces, should ever be allowed to ask an intelligent question about pure mathematics across a dining-table. A question of this kind is quite as bad as enquiring suddenly about the state of a man's soul, a sort of coup which, as Mr. Mahaffy remarks elsewhere, "many pious people have actually thought a decent introduction to a conversation.” 
As for the moral qualifications of a good talker, Mr. Mahaffy, following the example of his great master, warns us against any disproportionate excess of virtue. Modesty, for instance, may easily become a social vice, and to be continually apologising for one's ignorance or stupidity is a grave injury to conversation, for, "what we want to learn from each member is his free opinion on the subject in hand, not his own estimate of the value of that opinion." Simplicity, too, is not without its dangers. The enfant terrible, with his shameless love of truth, the raw country-bred girl who always says what she means, and the plain, blunt man who makes a point of speaking his mind on every possible occasion, without ever considering whether he has a mind at all, are the fatal examples of what simplicity leads to. Shyness may be a form of vanity, and reserve a development of pride, and as for sympathy, what can be more detestable than the man, or woman, who insists on agreeing with everybody, and so makes "a discussion, which implies differences in opinion," absolutely impossible? Even the unselfish listener is apt to become a bore. 
"These silent people," says Mr. Mahaffy, "not only take all they can get in Society for nothing, but they take it without the smallest gratitude, and have the audacity afterwards to censure those who have laboured for their amusement." Tact, which is an exquisite sense of the symmetry of things, is, according to Mr. Mahaffy, the highest and best of all the moral conditions for conversation. The man of tact, he most wisely remarks, "will instinctively avoid jokes about Blue Beard" in the company of a woman who is a man's third wife; he will never be guilty of talking like a book, but will rather avoid too careful an attention to grammar and the rounding of periods; he will cultivate the art of graceful interruption, so as to prevent a subject being worn threadbare by the aged or the inexperienced; and should he be desirous of telling a story, he will look round and consider each member of the party, and if there be a single stranger present will forgo the pleasure of anecdotage rather than make the social mistake of hurting even one of the guests. As for prepared or premeditated art, Mr. Mahaffy has a great contempt for it and tells us of a certain college don (let us hope not at Oxford or Cambridge) who always carried a jest-book in his pocket and had to refer to it when he wished to make a repartee. Great wits, too, are often very cruel, and great humourists often very vulgar, so it will be better to try and "make good conversation without any large help from these brilliant but dangerous gifts.” 
In a tête-à-tête one should talk about persons, and in general Society about things. The state of the weather is always an excusable exordium, but it is convenient to have a paradox or heresy on the subject always ready so as to direct the conversation into other channels. Really domestic people are almost invariably bad talkers as their very virtues in home life have dulled their interest in outer things. The very best mothers will insist on chattering of their babies and prattling about infant education. In fact, most women do not take sufficient interest in politics, just as most men are deficient in general reading. Still, anybody can be made to talk, except the very obstinate, and even a commercial traveller may be drawn out and become quite interesting. As for Society small talk, it is impossible, Mr. Mahaffy tells us, for any sound theory of conversation to depreciate gossip, "which is perhaps the main factor in agreeable talk throughout Society." The retailing of small personal points about great people always gives pleasure, and if one is not fortunate enough to be an Arctic traveller or an escaped Nihilist, the best thing one can do is to relate some anecdote of "Prince Bismarck, or King Victor Emmanuel, or Mr. Gladstone." In the case of meeting a genius and a duke at dinner, the good talker will try to raise himself to the level of the former and to bring the latter down to his own level. To succeed among one's social superiors one must have no hesitation in contradicting them. Indeed, one should make bold criticisms and introduce a bright and free tone into a Society whose grandeur and extreme respectability make it, Mr. Mahaffy remarks, as pathetically as inaccurately, "perhaps somewhat dull." The best conversationalists are those whose ancestors have been bilingual, like the French and Irish, but the art of conversation is really within the reach of almost every one, except those who are morbidly truthful, or whose high moral worth requires to be sustained by a permanent gravity of demeanour and a general dulness of mind. 
These are the broad principles contained in Mr. Mahaffy's clever little book, and many of them will, no doubt, commend themselves to our readers. The maxim, "If you find the company dull, blame yourself," seems to us somewhat optimistic, and we have no sympathy at all with the professional story-teller who is really a great bore at a dinner-table; but Mr. Mahaffy is quite right in insisting that no bright social intercourse is possible without equality, and it is no objection to his book to say that it will not teach people how to talk cleverly. It is not logic that makes men reasonable, nor the science of ethics that makes men good, but it is always useful to analyse, to formularise and to investigate. The only thing to be regretted in the volume is the arid and jejune character of the style. If Mr. Mahaffy would only write as he talks, his book would be much pleasanter reading.
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Flirting Made Easy

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"All girls flirt with soldiers: they can't help it, no more can the soldiers, or they would.
Cornets or Ensigns, Lieutenants, and Captains are flirted with the most. Only very bold girls indeed would try to flirt with a General!"Flirting Made Easy by C.H. Ross
Although "Flirting Made Easy: A Guide for Girls" (1882) is a little before my time period, I just couldn't resist this tongue-in-cheek etiquette guide by a man who is "not prepared to believe that any male thing could possibly be 'disgusted' with the flirtings of a nice girl, unless the nice girl happened to belong to him, and he had to sit out in the cold whilst the flintiness went on with other fellows."

Although the eBook is available for free on Google Play, I haven't been able to find a single review, and it appears few people read it at all nowadays. For those who do, it is a passing fancy, interesting only in the pursuit of one subject or another that it touches on in its pages. I write this blog post hoping to change that.

Flirting Made Easy tells us a lot about late-Victorian slang, and perceptions of gender. A "deuce" is like cool or swell. "Bosh" and "a jolly crammer" are words for lies. And it's not bosh that Ross thought "Bar Young Ladies" were deuce.
The Bar Young Lady is essentially a modern institution, called into life by a general demand. She in a great measure owes her existence to Charles Dickens, who, in his Christmas Number called "Mugby Junction," was possibly the first to print a diatribe on the iniquities of the railway station sandwich. Long before that everyone had suffered, and, it is only right to ass, suffers still; but great reforms in this particular were at the time talked of, and in some particulars actually effected. One or two enterprising firms took possession of the refreshment-rooms, and handsomely decorated them, and the Bar Young Lady was born and flourished. 
Hitherto there had been barmaids and bar-girls, waitresses and female attendants; but these gave place to the Bar Young Lady, and she was a big success. She came and saw and conquered. She not infrequently married money. 
She was no longer of that sisterhood which were only Pollies, and Mollies, and Mary Annes. She was Miss Pamela Andrews, Miss Clarissa Richardson, Miss Barlow, Miss Sandford, and Miss Merton - (mark well the nomenclature) - not Fitz-Talbot, De Vere, or Montmorency. There was and is an intensity of propriety and respectability about the Bar Young Lady that is absolutely crushing.
What is in a name? These forms of address have so much meaning, even surnames connote class. To many of Ross's peers calling a lady by her first name meant you intended to marry her. Victorian London was also an extremely classist society, and the treatment of lower-class women differed from the treatment of "respectable" women. Ross inadvertently identifies this and the changing expectations of how working women should be treated in his discussion of the "Bar Young Lady."


While Ross's work is intended to be humorous, I can not overlook the fact that the book claims to be "A Guide for Girls," but rarely speaks to women. On many occasions, Ross directly addresses his male friends. For the most part, Flirting Made Easy is a collection of anecdotes, through which Ross pretends to instruct women.

By way of example, I will leave you with a short chapter from Flirting Made Easy that is most appropriate for this blog.

AUTHORESSES CONSIDERED AS WOMEN, 
AND ONE PARTICULAR LITERARY LOVE AFFAIR 
THAT CAME TO NOTHING
Shy authors are probably to be found here and there, but they are not plentiful. There are authors who have not much to say for themselves in the society of other authors, but their silence must not always be attributed to excessive modesty. Occasionally and author sits apart and smolders. Take them altogether, they have a pretty good opinion of themselves, and the shyest one out, most likely, harangues his poor suffering wife upon the subject of himself and works until she gasps again - or gapes. 
I do not, however, speak from experience. The lady members of my household have assured me again and again that they are only too happy to listen to me. Some men have a way of imparting information that carries their readers with them. For my part, I know nothing more delightful than to listen to a witty man with a brilliant flow of language, and this opinion is shared by my sisters, my cousins, and my aunts. 
But I do not want to talk about authors. It is rather authoresses I would converse. I have since childhood's hour had a burning desire to make the acquaintance of literary ladies. I should like to have known Miss Martineau. "Is it a man or a woman, or what sort of animal is it?" the good dame said who met her at Ambleside. "There she came, stride, stride - great heavy shoes, stout leather leggings on - and a knapsack on her back, and they say she mows her own grass and digs her own cabbages and potatoes." And poor L.E.L, "a comely girl with a blooming complexion," who, in spite of her sentimental verse, was fond of "a little quiet dance," and with opinions wild as the wind, flying from subject to subject, lighting up each with wit, "fairly talked herself out of breath.""Hey!" cried Ettrick Shepherd when he met her, "but I didna think ye's bin sae bonnie." 
And Maria Edgeworth, whom Byron described as "a nice little unassuming Jeanie Deans-looking body, who one would never have guessed could write her name." And Charlotte Bronte, who, according to a writer in the "Quarterly," was "a person who, with great mental powers, combined a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste and a heathenish doctrine of religion." And Mrs. Hemans, whose "silken hair unbraided flowed around her like a veil." and the Countess of Blessington, whose person, when N.P. Willis saw her, "preserved all in the fineness of admirable shape," and she wore a dress of blue satin "cut low and folded across her bosom in a way to show to advantage the sculpture-like curve and whiteness of a pair of exquisite shoulders." 
I should have been a bit afraid of "Holy Hannah," as Walpole calls Mrs. More, and I fancy Anne Radcliffe might have frightened me, though I can find nothing about her personal appearance, and both ladies were rather before my time. But I would willingly have made a little journey to see the authoress of the "Simple Story," whose own account of herself is here before me. Her age, she says, was then a little over thirty. She was above the middle height - rather tall. Her figure was handsome, but a little too stiff. "Shape, rather too fond of sharp angles. Bosom, none." Her skin, by nature fair, but a little freckled. Her hair, a sandy brown. Her face, beautiful. Her countenance, full of spirit and sweetness, "excessively interesting, and, without indelicacy, voluptuous." And her dress, "always becoming; and very seldom worth so much as eightpence." With the figure she describes she might possibly have had threepence to spare if she bought glazed calico. 
It might be urged by an authoress reading these remarks that I make small mention of the mental qualities of most of the ladies I have alluded to. Well, I plead guilty. So many other fellows have already said such a lot upon the subject, and when I think of authoresses, I chose to think of them as women, which to the best of my belief, most of them are. Why, I have heard of one was married twice. 
There is an enthusiasm about the adorable sex when it goes in for anything out of the beaten track. When it writes books, or paints pictures, or makes speeches, or gets itself appointed drum-major to a "Salvation Army," that is delightful to contemplate; but it has then not time for love-making nonsense. 
Where, I have often asked myself, do lady novelists go for their heroines? The heroine of the lady novelist is, as a rule, the very reverse of her own self, if we may believe the nasty cynical male writing things; but, if this be the case, great heaven! where are the illusions of my youth? Is everything different to what it is said to be? Is nothing properly described? As Truthful James asks: "Do I sleep? do I dream? do I wonder and doubt? Are things what they seem, or are visions about? Is our civilization a failure, or is the Caucasion played out?" I don't go so far as to say that I entirely follow T.J. In these observations, but I ask, Are we being deceived by the women who write of women? Are not any of them taken from real life? Do even authoresses, like the rest of their sex, join issue against the unmarried male creature in one great sham? I feel frightened when I think of it. 
Now there is my good friend Boodler, novels, dramatist, poet, critic, and writer of slashing leaders for a great daily. In a print explosive, in private life of the mildest, wearing spectacles. Well, he is an honored guest at the house of a nobleman with whom I have the honor to be acquainted, and of one of that nobleman's daughters was he deeply enamored. Deceived by the graciousness of the dear girl's manner, an impulsiveness amounting almost to gushingness, poor Boodler fancied that he was not wholly indifferent to her. Gently would she lead him forth and trot him out, and he would prattle a long while at a time - with clasped hands and great grey eye, gazed into his spectacle-glasses and seemed to drink in every utterance. 
One day, the wretched man, thus deceived by appearances, and finding himself alone with her, ventured upon tenderness. Happily for him, he was more than usually vague, and preoccupee. She did not understand him, but when he began offering the devotion of a life, she thought - the artful little thing! - she saw a chance she had long been lying in wait for, and proposed that he should exert his influence with the publishers to sell her first novel. Then, right off and without taking a breath, she told him the whole of the plot, the narration of which occupied more than three quarters of an hour. 
Utterly crushed, poor Boddler had not the presence of mind to dictate terms, which in his place some villain might have done. He took the MS away with him. He did his utmost to move heaven and earth and the planets in Paternoster Row, but her could not get that novel bought. He went so far as to say to old What's-his-name, "My dear sir, if you only knew the young lady personally - the loveliest, the most charming in all the world!""Oh!" said old What's-his-name; he would not buy the novel. Since then she has married - not Boodler. He does not visit at her new home.
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Constance Wilde's Celebrity Crush

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Much is made of Oscar Wilde's affairs of the heart, but his wife also had a bit of a crush. This was by no means an extramarital affair, and was nothing compared to the way that Oscar carried on, but was more akin to the way a married woman today might feel about Brad Pitt. Constance had a celebrity crush, and his name was Pablo de Sarasate.

Pablo de Sarasate by Whistler
Sarasate's portrait by Whistler was one of the last pieces of Constance's estate to be sold off during Oscar's lifetime. It was painted in 1884, a few years before he would be named "Man of the Day" by Vanity Fair, and Constance would start attending all of the functions at which he might be present - usually with her equally obsessed friend, the writer, Marie Corelli.

The familiar figure of Sarasate
caricatured as a "Man of the Day"
Vanity Fair, 1889
At age five, Sarasate began studying the violin with his father in his birthplace, Pamplona, Navarre. Able to demonstrate a natural talent at a young age, he gave his first public concert at age eight, where he attracted his first patron,  who paid for him to study under Manuel Rodríguez Saez in Madrid, where he gained the favor of Queen Isabella II.

With many prizes already under his belt, Sarasate first performed in London as a teenager in 1861. Constance was still a baby, and Sarasate's best-known compositions wouldn't come until much later: Zigeunerweisen (1878), and the Carmen Fantasy (1883).

Suffering from chronic bronchitis, Sarasate died in France in 1908. Bequeathed to the Musée de la Musique, his violin, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1724,  now bears his name as the Sarasate Stradivarius. The Real Conservatorio Superior de Música, Madrid, own his second Stradivari, the Boissier, made in 1713.

I just wonder if Constance ever wished Oscar had a mustache like Sarasate's.

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LGBT Writers in London in the 1890s

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This short descriptive list should serve as a catalogue of LGBT writers, who were active in fin-de-siècle London - that is the London of the 1890s. The term "fin de siècle" here refers to the cultural trends of the 1880s and 1890s, including cynicism, and a rebellion against materialism, bourgeois society, liberal politics, and decadence.

This list does not include writers who were too young to be active - even if they were deeply influenced by the era, like Radcliffe Hall. Also, history has made assumptions about the sexuality of some of these writers because homosexuality - especially male homosexuality - was very taboo, especially post-1895. If there's anyone you think I should add to this list, leave a comment, or send me an email.

E.F. Benson
Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was known professionally as E.F. Benson, but his friends called him Fred. He was 23 at the beginning of the decade, and wrote his first book, Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893), while still a student at King's College. Dodo featured a portrait of the famous suffragette, Ethel Smyth.

Benson was a prolific writer and quickly followed Dodo up with a book per year for the rest of that decade, including: The Rubicon (1894), The Judgement Books (1895), Limitations (1896), The Babe, B.A. (1897), The Money Market (1898), The Vintage (1898), The Capsina (1899), and Mammon and Co. (1899).

Biographers assume that Benson was homosexual because he never married and his work is, at times, homoerotic. In addition to writing, Benson was a star athlete, who represented England at figure skating.

Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) has made important contributions to the literary canon, most notably (in my opinion), his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, which remain in use today. He was in his 50s and 60s, during the 1890s. In 1892, his first significant lover, Charles Pauli, died.

After profiting from the sale of a New Zealand farm in the 1860s, Butler began paying Pauli a regular pension, which he continued to do until Butler had spent all of his savings - even though their romance had ended. Shockingly, for Butler, when Pauli died, he learned that Pauli had similar arrangements with other men, and had died wealthy without leaving anything to Butler in his will.

Butler kept another lover on a salary as his literary assistant and travelling companion, but their relationship was not exclusive.

Butler's sentimental poem, "In Memoriam H.R.F," was written in 1895 for Hans Rudolf Faesch, a Swiss exchange student, who had stayed with him in London for two years. Butler had his aforementioned literary assistant, Henry Festing Jones, submit the poem for publication at several important English magazines, but withdrew the poem from publication when the Oscar Wilde trial began in the spring of that year, out of fear of similar persecution.

Butler believed the author of the Odyssey was a woman, and offered his evidence for this theory in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). His translation of the Iliad first appeared in 1898, and he published Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered in 1899, in which he proposes that, if Shakespeare's sonnets are rearranged properly, they tell the story of a homosexual affair.

Edward Carpenter (right)
& George Merrill (left).
Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was actually an early LGBT activist, as might be evidenced simply by reading a list of his 1890s writings.
From Adam's Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (1892)
A Visit to Ghani: From Adam's Peak to Elephanta (1892)
Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894)
Sex Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894)
Marriage in Free Society (1894)
Love's Coming of Age (1896)
Angels' Wings: A Series of Essays on Art and its Relation to Life (1898)
Carpenter was close friends with Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore. He was in his 40s and 50s during the 1890s, and travelled to Ceylon and India in 1890 to spend time with a Hindu teacher, Gnani, described in Adam's Peak to Elephanta (1892). Carpenter felt transformed by the experience, and converted to the belief that Socialism could produce a profoundly good shift in human consciousness, in which mankind would rediscover a primordial state of joy.
The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon. - Edward Carpenter Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889) 
Through his brand of socialism, Carpenter was inspired to campaign against air pollution, while promoting vegetarianism and opposing vivisection.

Carpenter met his life partner when he returned to London from India in 1891. Carpenter's partner, George Merrill was a working class man from Sheffield. In 1898, they moved in together defying contemporary sexual mores, as well as the British class system. Their relationship reflected Carpenter's convictions about same-sex love and his belief that gay culture would radically change their society.

Carpenter's writing is anti-capitalist. He supported Fred Charles of the Walsall Anarchists in 1892, before becoming a founder member of the Independent Labour Party in 1893.

Marie Corelli
Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was famous, like Oprah; I've mentioned her before. She was the "Idol of Suburbia," and, like many writers from the 1890s, her biographers only guess at her sexuality based on the circumstances of her life, such as her companion, Bertha Vyver.

"Vyver and Corekki may be understood as devoted companions, sexual lovers, or romantic friends, sisters, mother and daughter, or even guardian angel and inspired genius. There are so many kinds of relationships, after all," writes biographer, Annette Fredrico, "Certainly Corelli's relationship with Vyver strengthened her faith in women's self-sufficiency and limitless capabilities for achievement."

Corelli favoured spiritual themes in her writing, such as astral projection, and her work is seen as groundbreaking for contemporary New Age religion. She had four novels under her belt by the 1890s, and kept on going with: Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890), The Soul of Lilith (1892), Barabbas, A Dream of the World's Tragedy (1893), The Sorrows of Satan (1895), The Mighty Atom (1896), The Murder of Delicia (1896), Ziska (1897), and two short story collections.

Nine film adaptations were made from her books between 1915 and 1926.

The Young Diana (1922)
A Marie Corelli inspired film.
The Sorrows of Satan (1926) Another Marie Corelli inspired film.
Lord Alfred Douglas
Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945) a.k.a. "Bosie" or the bloke who ruined Oscar Wilde's life; I don't like him one little bit, but he was an active gay writer in the 1890s, so I feel I ought to mention him.

Douglas and Wilde met in 1891. Robert Hichens' novel, The Green Carnation (1894), was said to be based on Wilde and Douglas's relationship; it was one of the texts used against Wilde in court.

Douglas was editor of the Oxford magazine, The Spirit Lamp, which he used to covertly gain acceptance for homosexuality. Wilde wrote Salomé originally in French, and commissioned Douglas to translate it in 1893. Douglas's French was bad, so his translation was met with scrutiny. Douglas didn't take criticism well, and claimed the errors were in the original play, which lead to one of many temporary breakdowns in their ever turbulent romance.

One story goes, Douglas got sick with the flu and needed Wilde to nurse him. When he got better, Wilde had got the same flu. Instead of taking care of Wilde as Wilde took care of him, Dougas checked into a hotel and sent Wilde the bill.

Douglas also had a careless habit of leaving Wilde's incriminating letters in old clothes that he gave to male prostitutes, leading to blackmail. Of course, Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, soon discovered the relationship, leading to Wilde's infamous trials and eventual imprisonment.

Signed copy of Douglas's autobiography.
Still, Douglas managed to be the chief mourner at Wilde's funeral at the end of the decade. Soon after, he would meet and marry a rich poet, decide that homosexuality was evil, and persecute more gay men in court. I do not like him, not one little bit.

E.M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) is best known for his novel, A Passage to India (1924). I'm still not sure I should include him in this list because he was so young and still at school, but he was attending King's College. While at school, he joined a society called the Apostles (formally the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Its former members went on to establish the Bloomsbury Group, an influential group of associated writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, including Forster and Virginia Woolf (who is only three years younger than Forster, but I have to cut off who I'm including in this list somewhere).

Forster was open about his sexuality to his friends, and closed to the public. The love of his life was a married police officer.

A.E. Housman at age 35.
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was already one of the foremost classicists in the 1890s, and just in his 30s. He has also been ranked one of the greatest scholars who ever lived. He was a classicist and poet, best known for his cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896).

In the 1890s, Housman was recovering from unrequited love: his college roommate Moses jackson, who married without telling him in 1889, and died in 1892. By that time, Housman's professional reputation had grown such that he was offered professorship of Latin at University College, London, which he accepted.

He liked going to France to read books that were banned in Britain.

Mostly while living in Highgate, London, Housman worked on A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems. After being rejected by publishers, he self-published in 1896. After a slow start, it became a lasting success, and has been in print continuously since May 1896.

W. Somerset Maugham as a medical student.
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was young in the 1890s (teens and twenties), playing doctor, until his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out, and he decided to be a writer instead.

As a medical student, Maugham was very self-sufficient and productive, he kept his own place, loved decorating it, though it was cluttered with notebooks full of ideas, and wrote nightly while going to school. What he loved most about being in London was that he got to meet people of a different class that he wouldn't have got to meet otherwise. This was carried forward into his first novel, which is about the consequences of working-class adultery.

When Liza of Lambeth sold out in just a few weeks, he dropped medicine, and devoted his working life to writing.

Walter Pater (1890s)
Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) was already a literary celebrity in the 1890s, teaching at Oxford and living with his sisters in Kensington between terms. His 1893 piece on Mona Lisa is considered the most famous piece of writing about any picture in the world: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave..."

Pater was one of the founding thinkers of the Aesthetic Movement. Oscar paid tribute to him in The Critic as Artist (1891). Though, Pater wrote a negative review of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891):
A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man's entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing so speedily, as completely as they can, is ... to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development.
To be fair, the character, Lord Henry Wonton, willfully and incessantly misquoted Pater throughout the book.

In 1893, he moved his sisters to Oxford, where he was in high demand as a lecturer. He died in that home of heart failure due to rheumatic fever at the age of 54.

Henry James (left), Edith Wharton (middle),
Howard Sturrgis (right).
Howard Overing Sturgis (1855-1920) was the kind of guy who waited until his mom died before moving in with his boyfriend, and it's safe to say that the 1890s were his glory days.

Sturgis was raised in an upper middle class family, attended Eton and Cambridge, and his brother, Julian, also became a novelist. When his mother died in 1888, he moved into a lovely country house with William Haynes-Smith, his lover. I get the sense that Sturgis finally felt free of his family's expectations of him, and he wrote his first novel, Time: A Story of School Life (1891), dedicated to "love that surpasses the love of women." Of course, it's set at a boys boarding school.

Sturgis was friends with Henry James and Edith Wharton. His first two novels sold successfully, but his third petered off. Although Wharton praised it, James called it "unsatisfactory," leading Sturgis's enthusiasm for writing to wane at the beginning of the next century.

Algernon Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a poet, playwright, novelist, and critic; he even contributed to the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909. According to Oscar Wilde, Swinburne was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer."

By the 1890s, Swinburne was a mature writer, who spent very little time in London, unlike Wilde. Swinburne had already faced an early death by alcoholism, and overcame it with the help of his mother, sister, and close friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton.

It's said that his poetry suffered after he settled down, but that has also been attributed to his age.

Renée Vivien & Natalie
Clifford Barney
Renée Vivien was born Pauline Mary Tarn (1877-1909), and although she was British, she wrote in French, adopting the mannerisms of Symbolism, as one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school.

Pauline's father died when she was 9, leaving her everything. Consequently, he mother tried to have her declared insane, so that she could claim the money for herself, but the courts saw through her mother's scheme, and place Vivien in protective care until she reached the age of 21.

In 1898, she inherited her father's fortune, and emigrated to Paris, where it was much easier for women to be involved in the Bohemian arts movement.

It would seem that any time Vivien spent in London before inheriting her independence, was about biding her time until she could become who she truly was. In Paris, Vivien lived lavishly, as an open lesbian, and had a public affair with American heiress and writer Natalie Clifford Barney. She travelled extensively, wintering in Egypt, and exploring China and the Middle East, as well as Europe and America. Contemporaries called her beautiful and elegant, with blonde hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a soft-spoken androgynous presence. She wore expensive clothes and particularly loved Lalique jewelry.

Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) appears at the end of this list, not because I am saving the best for last, but because I've tried to write this list alphabetically. Wilde is certainly the most famous homosexual in London in the 1890s, a decade which would encompass the best and worst years of his life.

By the time the decade started, Wilde was living in "House Beautiful" on Tite Street with his wife and two young sons. The marriage had problems, most specifically that Wilde wasn't sexually attracted to his wife, after she bore his children, so he started seeing men.

Wilde published his first and only novel in 1890, then began his theatrical career, which produced some of the most witty and quotable plays of all time.

As I mentioned before, Wilde had an affair with the reckless and spoiled Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father found out about the affair, leading to Wilde's imprisonment. The affect of this trial on the gay community and the world cannot be understated. Not only did it drive some homosexuals into hiding,  like Samuel Butler, who withdrew a homoerotic poem that he had submitted for publication, but Wilde's association with homosexuality would code homosexual culture for many years to come.

Wilde had a very identifiable personality, which ever after became associated with homosexual behaviour. Wilde was flamboyant, witty, obsessed with the most minute detail of decorating "House Beautiful," obsessed with his own clothes, as well as the clothes of women. It might be said that the more a homosexual man assimilates his behaviour to Wilde's the more likely it is that he will be identified as "flaming," even today.

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Images of London in 1896

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1896 is the first year that I've been able to find a video of. It just depicts London traffic, but it's still interesting to get a sense of what that was like. This other video from the same year shows the traffic over Blackfriars Bridge. I love the face on the guy who walks by looking at the camera. Birt Acres showed London its first moving picture on 14 January 1896. Other demonstrations of the film projector soon followed.

That summer at the Crystal Palace, Bridget Driscoll became the first person in the world to be killed in a car accident. The coroner said he hoped "such a thing would never happen again." That same year, Britain opened their first car factory.

In the fall, Queen Victoria was recognized as the longest reigning monarch in the history of England.

Piccadilly Circus 1896
Regent Street 1896
Hammersmith Bridge 1896
Clapham Rd 1896
Burlington House 1896
The words on the lamppost lead me to the next picture.
The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly Circus 1896
David Devant started showing moving pictures there that year.
Another view of the Egyptian Hall in London in 1896
Georges Méliès performs "The Vanishing Lady"
(at the Egyptian Hall?) 1896
Street view of the Egyptian Hall 1896
Natural History Museum 1896
Clock Tower Houses of Parliament 1896
London Bridge 1896
Euston Station 1896
Chancery Lane 1896
UAOD (United Ancient Order of Druids) Lodges
Old Kent Road 1896
Six-day Race at the London Aquarium by Samuel Begg 1896
Inventor Guglielmo Marconi amazes a London
assemblage in 1896 with a demonstration
of wireless communication across a room.
Swami Vivekananda in London in December 1896.
Want more? Go further back to Images of London in 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, and 1895.

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Mark Twain Loved Belly Dancers

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I am a distractible writer. I go on tangents while writing and carrying out my research, but I also get drawn back into my research and writing, while engaging in every other aspect of my life. Looking through Facebook today, I came across an article from last March, called: "Why I can't stand white belly dancers." Of course, I thought about the question of how white belly dancers could be engaging in cultural appropriation, but what stuck in my head was a little comment Randa Jarrar put in parentheses in the second paragraph.
As early as the 1890s in the U.S., white “side-show sheikhs” managed dance troupes of white women, who performed belly dance at world’s fairs (fun trivia: Mark Twain made a short film of a belly dancer at the 1893 fair).
Mark Twain 1895
"Mark Twain made a belly dancing movie!" I thought. I had to check this out. Eventually, I found a book called: Looking for Little Egypt.
The World's Columbian Exposition, commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the New World, was the frist international exposition to feature a separate area for amusements.
Basically, the setting is a celebration of colonizing the Americas.
Along this strip, known as the Midway Plaisance, "dancing girls" in colorful native costumes of the Middle East performed regularly for the curious crowds who poured in. "Little Egypt," according to many different reference and history books, is supposed to have been a popular performer on the Midway Plaisance. In fact, according to some accounts, she was a dance star who caused a sensation and saved the financially-troubled exposition from ruin by drawing people from all over the country to her exotic performances. She is said to have shocked and scandalized audiences in Chicago, and popularized the newly-invented zipper by using it to help her wriggle out of costumes. she supposedly caused Mark Twain to suffer a coronary and starred in one of the first motion pictures, filmed at the fairgrounds by Mark Twain himself.
So, who was Little Egypt? The author of Looking for Little Egypt thinks she was mostly a legend.
I looked through months of various newspapers on microfiml and through numerous sourvenir volumes for a mention of Little Egypt at the 1893 fair. Although I found many other personalities of the Midway Plaisance described, I could not locate a contemporary reference to the infamous dancer there. This led me to the conclusion that even if Little Egypt was actually there, she was not famous at this point in her career and certainly not the star performer on the Midway Plaisance. In fact, the name "Little Egypt" probably did not become notorious until a few years after the fair. If this is true, how did the Little Egypt legends originate? And what made them so popular? 
It turns out that Little Egypt was a little like the Dread Pirate Roberts; Little Egypt was the stage name used interchangeably between three popular belly dancers, and many imitators. Basically, the symbol was important - not the actual dancer.

The popular dancers, who used the name, Little Egypt, were:

(1) Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos (1871-1937), who was born in Syria, and also used the stage name Fatima, the name she used  at the "Street in Cairo" exhibition on the Midway at the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. She's the one who supposedly caused Twain's near fatal heart attack (he really fetishized belly dancing).

Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos
(2) Catherine Devine a.k.a. Ashea Wabe (1871-1908), a Canadian. I couldn't find any record of her dancing in Chicago in 1893, but she danced at the Seeley banquet in New York in 1896, enjoying a fleeting succès de scandale.

Ashea Wabe
(3) Fatima Djemille (?-1921) appeared at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Fatima was the subject of two early films, Edison's Coochee Coochee Dance (1896) and Fatima (1897).

Fatima Djemille, New York 1896
I don't know much about these women, but like the Dread Pirate Roberts, they weren't using a name interchangeably to develop the reputation of a respectable citizen; they were using Little Egypt as a notorious and exotic sex symbol. And BANG! I started to understand Jarrar's points about cultural appropriation a little better.
When I have argued, online and in person, with white women belly dancers, they have assured me that they learned to dance from Arab women and brown women. This is supposed to make the transaction OK. Instead, I point out that all this means is that it is perfectly all right with these teachers that their financial well-being is based on self-exploitation. As a follow-up, white belly dancers then focus on the sisterly and community aspect of belly dance. They claim that the true exploiter of belly dancing is Hollywood, and the Egyptian film industry, which helped take belly dancing out of women’s homes and placed it directly under the male gaze. Here, the argument white belly dancers try to make ignores the long history of white women’s appropriation of Eastern dancing and becomes that this, the learning and performance of belly dance, is not about race and appropriation, but about gender and resisting the patriarchy and how all of us belly dancing together is a giant middle finger to men and their male gaze-y ways.
Cultural appropriation is not an act that is exclusive to white women in this case. It's the removal and perversion of a dance from its original culture into a culture that fetishizes and objectifies the concept (not the reality) of an Arab woman.

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What happened to Oscar's stuff?

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Scholarly article pay little attention to the role my protagonists played in history, one example being Kevin O'Brien's essay: "Lilly Wilde and Oscar's Fur Coat." If you click on that last link, you should be able to download the article automatically, which I'm basically going to summarize here.

It begins with a letter that Wilde wrote after he had been to prison and had started to track down his things, which had been pawned by Oscar's brother, Willie. The letter mentions "those people," specifically "the man," and "the woman." Those people were Willie and his wife, Lily Wilde. O'Brien says:
The story from their perspective is worth examining, for their relationship with Oscar was a difficult one, and they themselves had a hard, impoverished life together for the five years of their marriage.
Lily was Willie's second wife, who he brought to live at his mother's house, when he more or less gave up on life and let his mother take care of him. Lily had been in love with him, since before he married Mrs. Frank Leslie. As reported in the papers, and as evidenced by the lifestyle provided to her and Willie's daughter Dolly, Lily was an heiress. She was cut off from her fortune for the duration of her marriage to Willie.

Lady Jane Francesca Agnes Wilde
a.k.a. "Speranza"
As O'Brien uncovered, the small traces of history that Lily Wilde left behind depict her as an emotional woman of poor judgement, but still, a devoted friend, or maybe just a fan, of Oscar.

Willie made life difficult for his mother, by being unable to earn an income, and constantly demanding money. He was dying of alcoholism, and most likely suffered from delirium tremens. He had been brought down a peg or two, since his marriage to the richest woman in America failed, so when Oscar showed up at his doorstep in trouble, he likely saw a chance to redeem himself - maybe even look like a bit of hero for helping his brother out.
When Oscar arrived at the doorstep at 146 Oakley Street and pleaded, "Willie, give me shelter or I shall die in the streets," Willie let him in, but without much charity.  Willie later described the scene: "He came tapping with his beak against the windowpane, and fell down on my threshold like a wounded stag."
Though he tried to make it look like he was helping his brother, when he spoke to other people, he was really doing nothing of the sort. Lily and Oscar got along fine. While Willie blackmailed his brother and generally tried to control his life before he went to prison, Lily tried to reassure Oscar that she could manage Willie and take care of his things while he was gone.

Trying to control a raging alcoholic is like trying to teach a cat to clean up after itself.
Another disadvantage of Oscar's stay at 146 Oakley Street is the one quoted at the beginning of this article -- the betrayal by Willie and Lily in the loss of his precious fur coat and, in fact, two trunkloads of clothing.  Lily had quite a different version of the disposal of Oscar's belongings: rather than pawning his clothes without his knowledge, Willie was merely disposing of what had been given him.  According to Lily, before Oscar left for his third and last trial, he said one morning to Willie, "You can have all my things to do what you like with."
Rather than convincing Oscar to leave all his things in her charge, as Oscar claimed, Lily says that when she heard Oscar make the offer to Willie, she took Oscar aside and told him confidentially that "considering Willy's ordinary ways, if the clothes and trunks were left they [will] be sold or pawned."   According to Lily, Oscar answered, "he may have them all, only keep me my shirts." Hard up for money, Willie sold Oscar's fur coat and the two trunks of clothing to a jobber for only £12 or £13.  Lily was vigilant enough to keep her side of the bargain and saved all Oscar's shirts.
When Speranza died, there was no one left to pay rent at 146 Oakley Street. Willie and Lily had to move to a few small rooms at 9 Cheltenham Terrace. During the move, Lily packed up Oscar's shirts, his manuscripts, and a few treasured possessions, which she sent on to More Adey of his for safe keeping, never realizing that all of the possessions he had saved and brought with him to 146 Oakley Street were in fact treasured possessions.

Willie Wilde
It hurt Lily that Oscar was so angry at her for not being able to protect all of his precious things, and her usual protective nature over Willie changed in the face of that anger, she must have realized by this point that Willie sold Oscar's things without his permission because he wished to fuel his own sad addiction.

As Willie continued to drink himself to death, he blamed most of his own problems on his brother, and the two never spoke again. Oscar did not even attend his brother's funeral, or send a kind note.

Constance Wilde used Lily to track Oscar's movements, when he left prison, which Lily did through their mutual friend More Adey. There's evidence to suggest that Willie was jealous of his wife's friendship with his brother.

When Willie died, Oscar did reach out to his brother's widow by offering a small amount of financial support. Oscar and Lily kept in touch, until Oscar died in 1900, at which time he was aware of her second marriage and offered happy approval.

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Images of London in 1897

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In May, Oscar Wilde was released from Reading Gaol. In June, Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. In July, the Tate Gallery opened. In August, London got its first horseless taxicabs, and taxi driver, George Smith became the first Londoner charged with drunk driving that September. W. Somerset Maugham discovered that he was destined to be a writer, not a doctor, that year, when he published Liza of Lambeth.

This is the year in pictures.

Outside the Bank of England 1897
Horseless carriages would be a good thing
because people were really starting to worry
about horse poop. You can see why!
A Bersey Cab in London 1897
The Royal Gun Factory in Woolwich 1897
Regent Street and Waterloo Place, London, 1897
Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Parade moving
down Whitehall in the City of Westminster London, 1897
Diamond Jubilee procession, London, England, 1897
New Palace Yard, Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) 1897
Leadenhall Market 1897
Newgate Prison and the Viaduct Tavern 1897
Exhibition at Earl's Court
Illustrated London News 1897
Coventry Street, Piccadilly 1897
London City Council 1897
Tower Bridge Hotel, Bermondsey, London 1897
Robert Koch in the London Illustrated News 1897
Oxford Street 1897
Fire on Oxford Street 1897
The workshop of Charles H. Fox,
Theatrical, Historical & Private Wig Maker and Costumier,
25 Russell Street, Covent Garden, London 1897
Old woman on roller-skates 1897
Guy's Hospital 1897
Upper Richmond Rd. 1897
Colonial troops in London for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee 1897
The Jubilee celebrations 1897. The Scotch Stores Trades Wagon.
London United Tramways horse tram 1897
Construction of the Central Telegraph Office 1897

Want more? Go further back to Images of London in 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893,18941895, and 1896.

If you really want to see more of London in 1897, this other site has a cool collection that compares 19 pictures of 1897 London to the present day.

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Music Halls and the Star with a Top Hat and Cane

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Walter Lambert's ‘Popularity’ - A vast painting depicting the Music Hall Stars of the early 1900s
When a Mail representative found a respectable looking, rather portly gentleman with an eyeglass, a frock coat, a tall hat, and a walking stick, occupied in the dingy daylight of a mid-day rehearsal, and tra-la-la-ing a tune over to the leader of the orchestra, the figure turned out to be no other than that of the composer of a hundred comic songs which have been whistled, sung, played on barrel organs, yelled at free-and-easies, and otherwise tuned to the world. - The Era (July 1890)
Arthur Lloyd, as depicted
by Walter Lambert
That portly gentleman is none other than Arthur Lloyd, a Scottish-born music hall singer, songwriter, comedian and stage producer. The first major star of London's music hall scene, Lloyd wrote more than 185 songs, all of which have since been forgotten, except "Married to a Mermaid," which, I must confess, I never heard of before. He was even, on occasion, called to do command performances for the Queen.

In the Era, Lloyd professes that his father was a comedian. Before his own career in musical comedy got under way, Lloyd made money selling his songs directly to the publishers, and it was as if the trend of the late-19th century was tailored for him. Music halls were constructed, like great palaces, all over the city, but especially where land was cheaper in the East End.

In doing so, the music hall took institutionalized music out of the hands of the wealthy and created commercial music for the masses, helped along by the Copyright Act of 1842, which protected the reproduction and performance of music and created economic stimulus for writers, performers, and publishers. In the years that followed, the tavern concert room increased in size, until these purpose-built halls arose.

Arthur Lloyd performed in music halls all over London. A full program from the Royal Trocadero Music Hall, dated 24 June 1890 in available online, and includes other acts of the evening, including: a troupe of acrobats!

Lloyd's music to have appealed to the general public. Titles include: "The Postman,""Three Acres and Cow,""The Brewer's Daughter,""Ill Used Organ Man,""Mounseer Frenchy," and many more!

I will leave you with the lyrics to "Drink And Let's Have Another" (1891).

Drink And Let's Have Another

Billy Tomkins, McNab with Montgomery and Brown, 
And myself t'other night at our club all sat down; 
And every one swore he would spend his last "brown"
In treating his pals all around. 
And after we'd had a few drinks in the place, 
Billy Tomkins arose with his jolly red face, 
And said, "I will not be outdone in the race,
For I shall stand glasses round!"

Chorus: 

Drink up boys and let us have another,
That last round's made me feel fine; 
Drink up boys and all your troubles smother,
You've stood your round and I'll stand mine!

We drank that round quickly to keep out the cold, 
And a precious good story Montgomery told; 
But e'er we broke up poor Montgomery rolled,
And helplessly lay on the ground. 
Then Brown, undertaker ,who ne'er makes a noise, 
But in miserable fashion his liquor enjoys, 
Said, "Now then I hope you'll allow me my boys,
This time to stand glasses round!"

Chorus:

I told you Montgomery was down on the floor, 
But whenever he heard orders given for more, 
Said he'd have another, which made us all roar,
As he struggled and rose from the ground. 
And when he'd drank that, he said, "Now it's my shout!" 
We laughed but he said, "I know what I'm about!" 
Though to-morrow I'll have a good fit of the gout,
We will have another round!

Chorus:

Although every one there was more or less boozed, 
When I looked at McNab I was vastly amused, 
To see that he wasn't the least bit confused,
Though he'd had fifteen drinks I'll be bound. 
He scouted me when I suggested that then 
We should go home to bed like respectable men, 
And said we maun hae doch and doris ye ken, 
And this will be the last round!

Chorus: Drink up chaps and let us hae anither ,
That last round's made me feel fine; 
Drink up chaps and a yer troubles smother, 
You've stood your round and I'll stand mine!


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How to Dress Like a Gentleman: Coat, Jacket, or Blazer

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The 1890s gentleman in London was different than his predecessors. He was tired of being repressed, and ready to look a little dangerous. He cut his hair short, and pointed the beard beneath his full mustache. The look was long, and lean, and athletic. But we want particulars...

Frock Coat
Lounge Coat
In the 1880s, men wore frock coats for most occasions. 1890s gentlemen replaces these with lounge coats (called sack coats in the US). As you can see by the examples (left and right), the lounge coat is shorter than the old-fashioned frock coat.

Three-piece suits, called "ditto suits,""lounge suits," or "sack suits" in the US. consisted of a lounge coat, with matching waistcoat and trousers. One might make the ensemble a little more edgy by sporting a contrasting single-breasted waistcoat instead.

Sports blazers followed the same style, but were made of more interesting colours, or patterned flannel, with patch pockets and brass buttons. In the 1890s, calling a blazer a "sports blazer" meant that you actually wore it while taking part in sports, like sailing.

Another popular sporting option was the Benjamin Norfolk jacket, for shooting and rugged outdoor affairs. It had a youthful, adventurous air about it. One often sees pictures of Victorian boys wearing this belted jacket of sturdy tweed with pleats over the chest and back. It became the "Norfolk suit," when worn with breeches, knee-high stockings and low shoes. It was also suitable for bicycling or golf, if you couldn't find a safari, or a gun, which, in London, you couldn't.

Norfolk jacket worn with long pants.
Cutaway Morning Coat
Of course, the cutaway morning coat will always be fashionable in the city. The only thing this coat has to do with morning though, is that it's not generally worn "out" at night. Morning dress is formal wear, but it's the daytime equivalent of evening formal dress.

Tuxedo
Dinner Jacket
At night, of course, a gentleman wears tails with either a light or a dark or a light waistcoat, a white bow tie, and a shirt with a winged collar. That being said, no one will turn away a man in a dinner jacket or a tuxedo.

Tuxedos jackets had, and still do have, a shawl collar with either silk or satin facings, and usually just one button.

Dinner jackets are what a gentleman wears when an invitation says "dress for dinner." Dinner jackets were basically tuxedo jackets that you could stretch out in. No tails, looser fit.

The topcoat literally topped it all off. These were knee-length. Oscar Wilde nailed it with the fur trim when he got his jacket in the 1870s because this was still the fashion in the 1890s, and he was right to miss it when his brother sold it.


Want more tips on how to dress like a Victorian gentleman? Read my post on the waistcoat. 

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Thornley Stoker: Creepy and Caring

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Bram Stoker's mother told him horror stories, when he was a little boy and too sick to get out of bed. His oldest brother, Sir Thornley Stoker, 1st Baronet, became the Inspector of Vivesection for all of Ireland. Vivisection comes from the latin words: "vivus" and "sectio," which mean "alive" and "cutting," it's a term used to refer to experimental surgery on living organisms, typically animals. Human vivisection has been perpetrated as a form of torture.

Suddenly, the Stokers seem more like the Addams Family.


Now, now, now... Surely, Thornley couldn't have been as bad as all that!

Sir Thornley Stoker
1st Baronet
Bram and Thornley's stories are both a little rags to riches. Not actual rags, but their dad was an under appreciated civil servant, who only got one promotion in the course of his whole career, which he had to ask for. Any spare money the family had went to educating its boys: Thomas, Thornley, George, Richard, and Bram. Their sisters, Margaret and Matilda, got a little education too, as Abraham Stoker Sr. deeply wished his children would aspire to greater social heights than he had.

Medicine and military exploration of India were top choices on the list of careers, Papa Stoker wanted for his boys, and Thornley chose medicine, eventually becoming an eminent Irish medical writer, anatomist, and surgeon.

After a few years in medicine, Thornley became a surgeon at the Royal City of Dublin Hospital. In 1873, he transferred to the Richmond Hospital, and soon became chair of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, a position he held for many years. Thornley really liked titles and power. He governed over both Swift's Hospital (founded by Jonathan Swift), and the Richmond Hospital.

So, what about vivisection? Thornley succeeded his brother-in-law, Richard Thomson, as Inspector of Vivisection for Ireland in 1879. But they weren't just family, they were colleagues. They cofounded the school of nursing at Richmond Hospital, and oversaw the construction of surgical facilities there in 1899. All the while, Thornley was writing volumes about his work, and the work of other doctors in Ireland.
Taxidermy Shop

Victorians don't have the best reputation for being kind to animals, and most certainly were experimenting on live animals. The French physiologist, François Magendie (1783-1855), and the Scottish anatomist, Charles Bell (1744-1842), founded the field of neuroscience through their experiments on live rabbits, and puppies. Magendie got further than Bell did because he was more ruthless with the puppies. Bell wrote:
I was deterred from repeating the experiment by the protracted cruelty of the dissection. I therefore struck a rabbit behind the ear, so as to deprive it of sensitivity by the concussion, and then exposed the spinal marrow.
And this essay argues that Bell would have been more successful had he not worried about the rabbit's suffering.

Thornley was most interested in the work of Magendie and Bell, in the Dublin Journal of Medical Science, he frequently expresses his special interest in surgery of the spino-cerebral cavity. However, the position of Inspector of Vivisection was in accordance with Ireland's 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. Thornley's fascination with the medical breakthroughs being made with vivisection were tempered by his awareness of the ethically murky waters that surrounded such experiments, and kept Bell from forging ahead.

Meddling in morally murky waters does not a monster make. Sometimes, the creepiest people are the most actively caring because they are able to look straight on at the horrors of this world, then take action to end those horrors. Thornley campaigned against the use of vivisection in the training of surgeons, as well as many other cruelties of vivisection during his tenure as Inspector. He recorded the number of animals experimented on in Ireland every year, ensuring that nothing was done without the proper licenses and permits.


Today, we attach a lot of meaning to the way that people treat animals; we believe that people, who are cruel to animals, will likely be cruel to people in need, whereas we believe that people, who are kind to animals, are just lovely human beings. I think, we believe this, in part, because of people, like Thornley, who worked to protect animals from medical experimentation, and campaigned against the Workhouse System. He also blended a love of art with his love of science, becoming Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland.

Thornley resigned from many of his medical duties in 1910, due to fatigue. The following year he was created a baronet, of Hatch Street in the City of Dublin. That part still confuses me a bit because I imagine being made a baroness of say... the street where I grew up, but when I imagine it that way, all of the children I grew up with would make fun of me for having an essentially meaningless title. Maybe Thornley was too close to the end of his life to care what other people might say, and just appreciated the gesture. After all, he did collect many titles throughout his lifetime. Thornley only outlived Bram by a few months, and died in June 1912, aged 67, when the baronetcy became extinct.

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Where did your favourite 1890s writer go to school?

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What did it take to be a successful writer in 1890s London? Did Education have anything to do with it? While managing the Lyceum, Bram Stoker used to receive manuscripts from aspiring playwrights of all walks of life. Though Stoker seemed skeptical about some of the aspiring writers he came across, a study into the educational backgrounds of some of 1890s London's most successful writers demonstrates that they did indeed come from all walks of life.

Of course, access to education was influenced by gender and social class. Women's education was topical in the 1890s, and formed the basis of some of these writers' works.

J.M. Barrie was educated in his native Scotland before moving to London, and becoming a writer. Barrie started school at the Glasgow Academy at age 8. At 10, he continued at the Forfar Academy, before moving on to the Dumfries Academy at age 14. He had a lifelong love of reading, and devoured Penny Dreadfuls as a kid. Barrie knew he wanted to be a writer, even though his family wanted him to go into the church. Determined to study literature, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he eventually earned his M.A. in Literature in 1882.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, like most Victorian women, was privately educated. It helped that she married a publisher.

Hall Caine grew up in the Isle of Man, but attended the Hope Street British Schools until age 14.  After school, he articled with John Murray, as an architect and surveyor. During this time, he still loved reading, and spent a lot of time at Liverpool's Free Library, leading him to insist that he was mainly self-taught.

Marie Corelli was the love child of the Scottish poet and songwriter Dr. Charles Mackay, and his servant Elizabeth Mills. Consequently, she was educated by a series of governesses, who, according to biographer Annette Fredrico, "fled from her intellectual exhibitionism and her intimidating sense of her own brilliance." Without a governess to look after her, Corelli was sent to a convent, most likely in Paris, where, according to Fredrico, "she concocted private theatricals about love and murder." Corelli left the convent at age 15. She published her first novel 16 years later, after a career as a musician.

Arthur Conan Doyle came from a broken home. His family actually had to split up because of his father's alcoholism, and lived in squalid tenement flats. With the financial support of his uncles, Doyle went to a Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school at age 9, then Stonyhurst College, until he was 16. Next, he spent a year at Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria (also a Jesuit school). He left that place agnostic, and went to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where writing became a hobby for him. He finished school at 28 with an advanced medical degree, and tried to be a doctor, until he got really good at his hobby, and the world became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes.

Richard Bernard Heldmann a.k.a. Richard Marsh used his pseudonym to practically assume a new identity, which included a claim to having graduated from Eton and Oxford. These claims have recently been proven false. Marsh adopted the new name, and life, to recover from the scandal of serving eighteen months’ hard labour, during April 1884, for forging cheques in Britain and France in 1883. He started using the name "Marsh" upon release from jail. Stories by ‘Richard Marsh’ begin to appear in literary journals in 1888, followed by two novels in 1893. Marsh wrote prolifically during the 1890s, and the early years of the 20th century. However, we're still not sure where he really went to school.

Ellen Buckingham Mathews a.k.a. Helen Mathers attended a boarding school in Chantry, near Frome in Somerset, which made it into her first novel,"Comin' thro' the Rye." In that book, she explores her experiences at school. "Mr Russell" in the novel was Rev Fussell in real life, who was the Lord of the manor and founder of the school. In the novel she calls the village Charteris.

W. Somerset Maugham studied medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth, London. He was still studying there in the 1890s (I mostly include him in this site because he is one of my husband's favourites). During this time, Maugham felt he got the education he needed for writing from the streets, by hanging out with the "low" sorts of people that he didn't otherwise get a chance to be around. He saw them on the streets, and in the hospital: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief ..." As a medical student, he wrote at night, and published Liza of Lambeth in 1897, which was a big success.


Sometimes, more is made of Bram Stoker's education before he went to school than during. An unknown illness kept him in bed, listening to his mom's horror stories, until he inexplicably recovered and went school at age 7. Of being a sickly kid, Stoker wrote, "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years." His private school was run by Rev. William Woods. Stoker's early illness left him with no further major health issues; he even excelled as an athlete at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated with honours as a B.A. in Mathematics. Stoker actively participated in the College Historical Society, 'the Hist', and became president of the University Philosophical Society, writing his first paper on "Sensationalism in Fiction and Society".


One might say education was a habit in the home of Mary Augusta Ward a.k.a. Mrs. Humphry Ward.  She was born into a prominent intellectual family of writers and educationalists in Tasmania, Australia. Ward was the daughter of a literature professor, the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, and she was Aldous Huxley's aunt. She attended boarding schools, including Shifnal in Shropshire from ages 11-15. Her schooldays inspired one of her novels, Marcella (1894). When she wasn't at school, she was at home with her family at Oxford University. She eventually married a writer and Oxford educator, and continued to live at Oxford, at 17 Bradmore Road, where she is commemorated by a blue plaque.


Oscar Wilde was educated at home until age 9, focussing on languages with a French bonne and a German governess. Then he was off to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He developed a prominent role for himself in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. By the time he was finished school, Wilde was basically the poster boy for aestheticism.

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The Dictionary of Victorian Insults & Niceties

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The Dictionary of Victorian Insults & Niceties is a resource for historical fiction author, and lovers of Victorian culture.


This dictionary will differ from other resources that are available by only including words that entered the language during the ninetieth century. In order to be more accessible to authors, it will also be organized by category (adjectives, insults, expressions, niceties, etc.) to make finding the right term easier for the reader.

Writing about a specific period? The year that the word first entered the language will be included with the definition.
chattermag (1844) an overly-talkative woman.
It’s a resource that I would like to be able to offer for free, as a beautifully designed eBook. To make the ebook beautiful and free, I would like to included beautiful and relevant Dickensian-style adverts.

Not only did he teach us how to celebrate Christmas, Charles Dickens helped define the Victorian Era. His novels were first published in instalments, filled with adverts for the products of his day. Victorianists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, even celebrate Dickens’ advertising with an online image gallery.


I would like to mimic those styles in the Dictionary with one magical difference. Because the first edition of the Dictionary will be an ebook, the ads can be electronic, which means that I can link them to my sponsors’ web sites.

For more information, or to be part of this exciting project, contact tinyapplepress@publicist.com

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H.G. Wells and the OED

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In honor of my side project, the Dictionary of Victorian Insults & Niceties, this post explores H.G. Wells contributions to the English language.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Wells is responsible for adding 53 words to the language, and he is sited excessively for demonstrating new or inventive uses of existing words. The most notable are as follows, in alphabetical order (of course!):

atomic bomb "Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them." - The World Set Free (1914)

Wells learned physics by reading William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy; who uncovered the disintegration of uranium. Soddy, himself, was impressed after reading Wells' novel, which might have even influenced the development of nuclear weapons. Wells's "atomic bombs" are no stronger than high explosives that existed at the time, and are crude devices in comparison.

eggless "Nor can we tell here at any length how these mournful spinsters, the two surviving hens, made a wonder of and a show, spent their remaining years in eggless celebrity." - The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)

This novel is mostly remembered through its 1976 film adaptation.

gong (the verb) "He has just gonged, no doubt to order another buttered tea~cake!" - The Strand (1903)

inacta "Edward Albert attempted an ironical whistle, but Mrs Butter held her position, intacta." - You Can't Be Too Careful (1941)

This word is a short form of the Latin virgo intacta,  meaning a woman of tremendous chastity, but used as an adjective to mean she was unaffected.

leftish "At first they served only for amiable exchanges between the writers of the same and different countries, but the violent persecution of Jewish and leftish writers in Germany, and an attempt to seize and use the Berlin Pen Club for Nazi propaganda, raised new and grave issues for the organization." - An Experiment in Autobiography (1934)

Monkeys on parade (1950s?).
monkey parade "These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the great suburban growths—unkindly critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades—the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends." - New Machiavelli (1910)

The New Machiavelli (1911) was serialized in The English Review in 1910. Because was about Wells's love affair with Amber Reeves, and satirized popular personalities, it was "the literary scandal of its day."

pre-atomic "The atomic bombs had taken him by surprise and he had still to recover completely from his pre-atomic opinions." - The World Set Free (1914)

Well, if he was going to invent the literary atomic bomb...

teetotally "I lived through my Bohemian days as sober as Shaw if not nearly so teetotally." - An Experiment in Autobiography (1934)

'Teetotatally' sounds like something the class of Clueless would have said, if they were set in the 1890s.

time traveller "‘There,’ said the Time Traveller, ‘I am unable to give you an explanation. All I know is that the climate was very much warmer than it is now.’" - National Observer (18 April 1894)

And of course...

time travelling "Time travelling: possibility or paradox." - National Observer (17 March 1894)

utopographer "The Utopographer in the Garden." - Meanwhile (1927)

This means someone who describes a utopia.

The Dictionary of Victorian Insults & Niceties has its own blog now, and will only include words invented before 1900, but I thought these words were worth looking at anyway!

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Jack the Ripper Found At Last!

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The signature on a letter dated 29 October 1888
written by a person claiming to be Jack the Ripper
that was sent to Doctor Thomas Openshaw of
the London Hospital Whitechapel.
Don't clap all at once...

As I write this, there's still some speculation, but it seems pretty clear that, using DNA evidence, Russel Edwards and Dr. Jari Louhelainen have identified the Polish hairdresser Aaron Kosminski as Jack the Ripper. The Jack the Ripper killings had a strong influence on 1890s London. Learning who the killer is brought up two main issues for me.

My first thought, reading the head line that a friend forwarded to me, was that I hoped it was the suspect that I'd recently written about for a print publication. It wasn't. Maybe it was selfish for me to think that way. But with all of the fun and mystery of speculation around the Jack the Ripper case, did we really want to know who the actual killer was? If not, why not?

Clearly some people wanted to know. Edwards and Louhelainen wanted to know badly enough that they actually found out. But I will venture to guess that there are a lot of Ripperologists out there who groaned when they found out that it was the hairdresser.

Maybe, like me, they weren't thinking about or writing about the hairdresser, and most of us don't like to be proven wrong. But the second issue this brought up for me is: what does all of this say about our mistakes!

Francis Tumblety
For over a hundred years, history has identified these people as possible serial killers. Francis Tumblety actually fled to England, while under suspicion. Sure, the list of suspects is a list of some really messed up Victorians, but it sucks to find out that you've been pointing your finger at the wrong man. It sucks even more to see how finger pointing adversely affected their lives.

As we wait for confirmation that Edwards and Louhelainen's tests were correct, what are we really hoping the answer will be?

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Images of London in 1898

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William Ewart Gladstone died in May 1898. As one of the icons of the Victorian Era, his passing brought the period nearer to its end. He had only been out of office for three years. Yet, the city moved on, post was delivered, the Earl's Court Exhibition featured big. Londoners were interested in all things Egypt.

Midland Railway goods offices at Poplar Dock, London, 1898.
The Mad Hatter's Tea Party from 'Alice in Wonderland'
with Rosa Hersee as Alice and Arthur Elliot as the Hatter
at the Opera Comique Theatre in London, 1898
The Mad Hatter in action (I think Johnny Depp got it right), 1898.
Gladstone's coffin entering Westminster Abbey, London 1898. 
Broad Street Station, 1898.
The Great Wheel, Earl's Court, 1898.
Robert Bosch's first shop outside of Germany. (Circa 1898)
The Great Northern Railway Station in 1898 (later renamed King's Cross).
Changing of the Guard at Tower London, 1898.
First foreign branch of the Swiss Bank opened in London in 1898.
Construction work on the Central Line of the London Underground, 1898.
Aubrey Beardsley 1898.
Acoustic location experiment in London, 1898.
A surgery at University College Hospital Medical School, London, 1898.
A horse hauling a railway wagon at the Midland Wharf at Victoria dock,
London, 1898. Coal was unloaded here onto barges waiting below.
An early recording studio set up in rooms of the Cockburn Hotel, 1898
Poster for the Earl's Court Exhibition, 1898.
The Midway at the Earl's Court Exhibition, 1898.
A zebra-drawn carriage, London, 1898.
London postmen, 1898.
Ella Skyes, photographed in London,
as "a Persian Lady," 1898.
Want more? Go further back to Images of London in 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892,1893,1894, 18951896, and 1897.

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Riches to Rags: the Wilde Stories

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Oscar Wilde, Constance Wilde, and one of their sons.
If you've ever been broke, you are probably familiar with the way that it makes you feel, like there's something wrong with you, and the world despises you. Academically, we know this isn't true. Not having money isn't a character fault in and of itself. As the saying goes: "You can't control what happens to, but you can control how you deal with what happens to you."

The Wilde Family make an interesting case study in this phenomena when we look at the lives and misfortunes of Speranza and her two sons, Willie and Oscar Wilde. Each lost a fortune, and each dealt with it differently, with different consequences.

Speranza
Speranza was Dublin's most popular socialite. Her husband was knighted. She lived in the best house. She had the most interesting guests, and the best parties. She loved culture, history, art, and Ireland. Her fortune dried up when she and her husband got caught up in a scandal, the details of which are still controversial. Her husband soon died, leaving her with little money.

In response, she packed up her house, and moved to smaller quarters in London, where she could continue to pursue her art. She did what she could to continue to support her family. She got a little support from her sons for a while, but their lives weren't going well either. She kept trying, until she was too old to try anymore. She continued to host her famous salons, and the most interesting people continued to attend.

Her son, Willie, was an alcoholic though, and alcoholics tend to drag their loved ones down with them, which Willie did. Speranza died in a room full of empty gin bottles, and Willie blamed his brother.

Willie Wilde
Willie also made a noble effort to prevent himself from descending into rags. A few years after he went bankrupt, he married the richest woman in America. That didn't go so well because of his drinking, and he wound up living with his mother, and claiming to take care of her. As you know, from Speranza's story, he didn't do a very good job of that.

After his mother died, he had to find a new place to live. He sold off most of his brother's belongings. He sold his wife's wedding ring. Eventually he died from alcoholism, and few of the wonderfully successful people he once called friends ever mentioned him in their memoirs. The newspaper he was a lead reporter for, at one time, barely mentioned his passing.


Oscar, on the other hand, continually tried to make everyone happy. In a way, that's how he got his money. He became a celebrity before he did anything, just because people liked him so much. His wife had money, which was helpful, and he was good at earning his own money, which he promptly spent on his friends and lovers.

Oscar Wilde's downfall was very public. He went from being a darling to being a demon, and he definitely felt terrible about the impact that this had on all the people he cared about. Oscar realized that we never suffer in isolation, but our suffering impacts everybody around us. His imprisonment, and the backlash against him, hurt his family, his friends, and his business associates. For this, he expressed his remorse.

When Oscar was released from prison, he was broke, worse off than his brother or mother had ever been, but the love that he gave to other people came back to him. His good friends did what they could to help support him, and, though he never really recovered from the losses he sustained at that time in his life, he is remembered with fondness because of the love he spread.

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Bram Stoker's Rules for Cursing

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I must tell you beforehand that Mr. Morris doesn’t always speak slang—that is to say, he never does so to strangers or before them, for he is really well educated and has exquisite manners—but he found out that it amused me to hear him talk American slang, and whenever I was present, and there was no one to be shocked, he said such funny things. I am afraid, my dear, he has to invent it all, for it fits exactly into whatever else he has to say. But this is a way slang has. I do not know myself if I shall ever speak slang; I do not know if Arthur likes it, as I have never heard him use any as yet. - Bram Stoker, Dracula
In that passage from Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lucy is writing to Mina. In it, she provides a wonderful peak into late-Victorian usage of colloquial language, from an upper-class woman's perspective. Her description reminds me of when I first had to describe to my daughter the appropriateness of swearing:
"Certain words have the power to hurt people, some of those words also seem to amuse other people, and some of them are appropriate to use some of the time, but you have to be careful when using them. Pay attention to who you are speaking with, and never say anything like that in front of grandma, a teacher, or someone younger than you."
That's why Mr. Morris never speaks slang to strangers. He knows Lucy finds it funny, so he does it to make her laugh. As of yet, Lucy is not sure she will ever find an appropriate situation to use slang.

As a guide to late-Victorian use of slang, this passage is informed by gender and class.


In Dracula, Stoker makes the old seaman speak in a phonetically-spelled Whitby accent, littered with colloquialisms.
“An’ when you said you’d report me for usin’ of obscene language that was ’ittin’ me over the ’ead; but the ’arf-quid made that all right. I weren’t a-goin’ to fight, so I waited for the food, and did with my ’owl as the wolves, and lions, and tigers does. But, Lor’ love yer ’art, now that the old ’ooman has stuck a chunk of her tea-cake in me, an’ rinsed me out with her bloomin’ old teapot, and I’ve lit hup, you may scratch my ears for all you’re worth, and won’t git even a growl out of me. Drive along with your questions. I know what yer a-comin’ at, that ’ere escaped wolf.” - Bram Stoker, Dracula
I've never enjoyed reading phonetically spelled dialects, but this passage adds to what Lucy has to say about colloquial language by offering a working-class male perspective. Even as a working-class man, he recognizes that some words are obscene, though he appears to have developed such a habit of using obscene words that he doesn't always remember to think about his audience when speaking.

Though this is just one late-Victorian writer's perspective on the use of Victorian language, it's something to consider when deciding whether a character you've set in the era would use the word 'fuck.'

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The Murder of Mrs and Baby Hogg

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Arthur Conan Doyle once speculated that Jack the Ripper may have been a woman, who could have posed as a midwife and get away with wearing bloody clothes out of doors. It was then suggested that Jill the Ripper could have been Mary Pearcey, the killer of Phoebe Hogg, and her infant daughter, Phoebe Hogg.

Pearcey was convicted of killing her lover's wife and child on 24 October 1890, and executed for the crime two days before Christmas the same year.

Pearcey was born Mary Eleanor Wheeler in 1866. She assumed the name Pearcey after living with a man of that name, who left her because of infidelity. Later, she moved in with the furniture mover, Frank Hogg, who also had a habit of being unfaithful.

Mrs. Phoebe Hogg
When his other lover, Phoebe Styles, became pregnant, he married her. Pearcey insisted upon it. Their little polyamorous family lived in Kentish Town, London, where little Phoebe Hogg was born.

Some eighteen months later, a neighbour heard screaming, and violent fighting in the house. Several hours later, Mrs. Hogg's body was found on a rubbish pile in Hampstead. Her skull was crushed, and her head nearly severed from her body. About a mile away, baby Phoebe's black perambulator was found, its cushions soaked with blood.
Baby Phoebe's perambulator.

Baby Phoebe was found dead in Finchley, suffocated.

That night, witnesses had seen Pearcey pushing the perambulator around London.

Upon searching her house, the police found blood spattered on the walls, ceiling, a skirt, an apron, everywhere... blood stains on a poker and a carving knife.

When the police asked her about it, Pearcey said she "had a problem with mice and was trying to kill them." Sir Melville Macnaghten wrote that Ms. Pearcey would later chant, "Killing mice, killing mice, killing mice," in answer to their questions.

Wax figure of Mary Pearcey. The writing on the wall:
"In a fit of jealousy Mrs. Pearcy killed Mrs. Hogg and
and her baby in the back kitchen. She put the bodies
into a pram and wheeled them to Haverstock Hill.
With her chant, and blood filled perambulator, Pearcey became one of the scariest things in London in 1890. A media sensation, Madame Tussauds wax museum made a wax figure of Pearcey and placed it in their Chamber of Horrors. They they decorated this exhibit with the actual perambulator of Baby Phoebe, and the contents of Pearcey's kitchen (forensic science was still a Sherlockian wet dream in the 1890s). This exhibit drew an opening night crowd of 30,000 people.

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the horror stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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The Lambeth Poisoner

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Not every Canadian, who moved to London, was as wonderful as Robbie Ross. One was the Lambeth Poisoner. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow, raised in rural Quebec, and attended to McGill University.

At age 26, he married Flora Brooks in a shotgun wedding; her family forced him to the church at gunpoint (and Canadians are usually very nice people). She was pregnant, and the abortion he performed almost killed her. They went to London, so he could attend medical school, and she died of consumption a year later, or did she?

A year after Flora's death, Cream left London England for London Ontario (my hometown). It was 1878. He set up a medical practice, and had an affair with Kate Gardner.

London, Ontario, 1878.
She turned up dead in the alley behind his office, pregnant and poisoned by chloroform.

Cream claimed a prominent local business man got Gardner pregnant, but suspicions mounted. When he was accused of both murder and blackmail, he fled to the States.

Abortions were Cream's specialty. Before long, he set up a new practice outside Chicago's red-light district. Abortions were illegal in Chicago. In August 1880, Mary Anne Faulkner died on his operating table, but Cream managed to escape charges. That December, Miss Stack also died after being treated by Cream.
A drawing titled
“The Genius of Advertising”
from an 1880 issue of the
National Police Gazette
shows men outside a
brothel gazing at pictures
of some of the attractions
awaiting them inside
(photo via The New York Times)

This time, Cream blamed the pharmacist, and tried to blackmail him.

Cream lost another patient in July 1881, when Daniel Stott died of strychnine poisoning, after seeing Cream for his epilepsy. Stott's death was initially attributed to natural causes, but after the pharmacist refused to be blackmailed, Cream wrote to the coroner.

The police arrested Cream and Mrs. Julia A. (Abbey) Stott, Stott's wife, who was having an affair with Cream and got the poison from him to get her husband out of their way. When push turned to shove, she provided the evidence against Cream to avoid going to jail. Cream was found guilty and sentenced to life in Joliet Prison.

One night, people secretly erected a tombstone at Stott's grave that read 'Daniel Stott Died June 12, 1881 Aged 61 Years, poisoned by his wife and Dr. Cream.'

In July 1891, Governor Joseph W. Fifer commuted Cream's sentence after Cream's brother pleaded for leniency (probably with bribes), and Cream was released from prison.

Cream and his brother had inherited money from their father's death, and Cream used this to go back to England. He set up residence at 103 Lambeth Palace Road. It sounds nice, but Lambeth was full of poverty at the time, not unlike Chicago's red-light district.

On 13 October 1891, 19 year-old Ellen "Nellie" Donworth accepted a drink from Cream. She fell ill the next day and died three days later from strychnine poisoning. In spite of Stott's death, Cream had developed a pattern of poisoning women, and trying to profit from their deaths. During Donworth's inquest, he wrote the coroner hoping for a £300,000 reward if he could name the killer. He was trying to blackmail W. F. D. Smith, owner of the W H Smith bookstalls.


On 20 October, Cream met 27-year-old Matilda Clover. She died the next morning. Initially, the coroner thought the cause was alcoholism.

Cream took a holiday, and went to Canada, but he'd be back.

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream
On 11 April 1892, Cream met 21 year-old Alice Marsh, and 18 year-old Emma Shrivell. He talked his way into their rooms, and gave them each bottles of Guinness. He left before the strychnine  took effect. Both women died.

The hunt for the Lambeth Poisoner had been on since Donworth's death. Cream didn't know that they didn't suspect murder, when he anonymously wrote to them - offering to reveal the killer. The police were convinced that the author of the letter was the serial killer, already referred to in the papers as 'the Lambeth Poisoner.'

Soon, Cream ran into a police officer from New York City, on holiday in London. The officer had heard of the Lambeth poisoner and was interested in the case, so Cream gave him a murder tour, pointing out where each of the victims lived. When the American police officer mentioned this tour to a British police officer, they were right to be suspicious, and Scotland Yard put Cream under surveillance, which revealed Cream's affinity for prostitutes.

It didn't take long for them to find out about Cream's criminal past, and on 13 July 1892, Cream was arrested for the murder of Matilda Clover.

Newspapers from the period refer to him as Dr. Neill because he insisted that was his name, presumably to try to distance himself from his criminal past.

He was sentenced to death in October that year.


On 15 November, Cream was hanged at Newgate Prison by James Billington. Billington claimed that Cream's last words on the scaffold were "I am Jack The..."

Cream was an active serial killer longer than Jack the Ripper was, but his desire to be associated with the famous murderer further reveals the narcissistic nature of Cream's sadistic psychopathy.

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the horror stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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