Author Archives: dgm

Yesterday I was puzzling over the rise in the use of the word collodion as a term for early photographs. The term derives from the collodion process (or wet plate process) which allowed photographs to be made using glass plates … Continue reading →

Following on from my trying to work out when we started calling photographs photographs, I though I’d use the Google Ngram viewer one more type to look at the relative usage of the following terms for photographs over the period … Continue reading →

The first photographic images widely used were known as daguerreotypes after the technique used.  (There were other techniques and names in the 1840s and 50s, eg calotype, ambrotype, but daguerreotype was the first.) Later on we started calling them the … Continue reading →

I’d fed the cat, and it wasn’t quite time to start cooking dinner, so I thought I’d trawl Trove for the earliest advert I could find for someone offering to take your daguerreotype from the Australian of 18 January 1843. … Continue reading →

From the February 1855 edition of Bradshaw’s guide: interesting to see that daguerreotypes and stereoscopic images were being advertised as early as 1855 or perhaps not as J A Rochlitz was working as a daguerrotypist in Beechworth in 1857, and … Continue reading →

Years of BBC adaptions of Jane Austen novels and Christmas cards showing mail coaches in the snow might have led us to expect that Mary might have travelled all the way from London to Dundee by mail coach or by … Continue reading →

Last night we watched Mary Shelley on SBS On Demand. Other than knowing her as the author of Frankenstein, and some vague gossip about her and both Shelley and Byron, I knew nothing – I even had her father, William … Continue reading →

As I have said, I’ve been trying to find references to cases of hysteria and distress occasioned by the Madeleine Smith trial. In the course of doing this I’ve come across a number of reports which show just how fascinated … Continue reading →

Six or seven years ago I blogged about an interesting report on the use of beads by Maccassar fishermen to buy access to trepang beds of the coast of Arnhem land from the local population. The interesting thing about these … Continue reading →

I was trawling various Scottish newspaper archives to try and find further reports of the stress occasioned by the Madeleine Smith trial – I was looking for reports of lunacy or hysteria occasioned by the event when I came across … Continue reading →