Small histories, closely read

Notes from the nineteenth century

Essays from the margins of the Victorian age — a Staten Island cricket ground, a villain or two, a note on Mr Wilde, and whatever else the old newspapers turn up.

The contents

11 entries
  1. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, after the portrait by Henry William Pickersgill. 16 January 2018 Places A Street named… The street names of Devonport, Auckland, keep a Victorian literary past alive: Scott, Cowper, and the notorious Bulwer-Lytton, husband of Rosina Wheeler.
  2. The cartoonist Thomas Nast. 16 January 2018 Cartoons Cartoon of the Week A Thomas Nast cartoon from Harper's, 'Blaine Language', and a one-line caption: what a difference 138 years doesn't make.
  3. 19 August 2017 Books Book of the month Catherine Jinks's Charlatan follows Thomas Guthrie Carr, mesmerist and showman, around Australia and New Zealand between 1865 and 1886.
  4. William Jennings Bryan, whose 1896 campaign the cartoon skewered. 19 August 2017 Cartoons History rhyming again? An 1896 Judge cartoon of William Jennings Bryan and the Populists swallowing the Democratic mule, and a note on where populism comes from.
  5. Oscar Wilde, photographed by Napoleon Sarony, 1882. 31 December 2012 Brooklyn “Mr Wilde’s Thrilling Legs” Oscar Wilde's 1882 American tour is well known; the vitriol the press poured on him is less so. The Brooklyn Eagle's review is a fair sample.
  6. 4 February 2012 Auckland The Opening Ceremony Reading the Auckland Star's report of the opening of the Auckland Technical School on 10 June 1895, the 105 years between the school and the university do not seem so far apart.
  7. Cruikshank's 'Life in London': Tom, Jerry and Logic at Carlton Palace. 29 January 2012 Echoes Tom and Jerry Before the cat and the mouse there were Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn, Pierce Egan's Regency rakes, whose names attached themselves to beer houses and a Christmas eggnog.
  8. 30 December 2011 On this day On this day… December 29th 1871 One page of the Hull Packet, 140 years on: Marx snubbing Bradlaugh, censored pantomimes, the Peculiar People dancing, and a mysterious 'Mary Ann' at a Sheffield grinding wheel.
  9. The first official tennis tournament on American soil, at the Staten Island Cricket Club grounds, 1880. 24 May 2011 Staten Island The Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club A stray line in the Staten Islander for 1886 led to a cricket club founded in 1872, the first tennis court in the United States, and a ground that briefly hosted major league baseball.
  10. 18 May 2011 New Zealand Hatch, Victorian Villain or Forgotten Hero An invitation to a one-man play in Devonport turns up Joseph Hatch, Invercargill mayor and MP, who boiled two million penguins for oil on Macquarie Island.
  11. 8 May 2011 People Foundation Footnote: John De Morgan A fading photograph of the 1876 Plumstead Common riot led to twenty years on the trail of a professional agitator who ended up writing dime novels on Staten Island.

For readers & writers

Much of what appears here began as a paragraph in an old newspaper, chased down and written up. If you write about the past yourself — a life, a place, an argument that keeps returning — the hard part is rarely the research; it is getting the prose to hold. Two things we keep at the elbow: a plain guide to writing a life as an essay, and, when a draft needs a colder eye, a human editor who tightens the structure without flattening the voice.

Victorian Footnotes is an independent history journal, rebuilt from its own web archive and kept online and findable by a South Florida search studio. Where a piece quotes a period source, the quotation is preserved; on method and sources, see the about page.