Author Archives: dgm

A few months ago, I wrote about lunacy in the Victorian goldfields in the nineteenth century, or rather I didn’t, but I did pose the question about the treatment of the wandering disturbed who inevitably would have been attracted to … Continue reading →

The most recent post on the Christchurch Uncovered blog has been gnawing away at me over the past few days. In the post the author suggests that what we find in the archaeological record are those items that were seen … Continue reading →

I like books. Always have, and always will. And what I particularly like reading about is history, especially late antiquity and early medieval, plus a fascination with the Victorian era. And what I’ve learned about these fascinations I’ve learned by … Continue reading →

Punch to the rescue: This rather charming cartoon from the 3 August 1867 edition of Punch (see http://www.victorianweb.org/periodicals/punch/seaside/15.html for attribution etc) clearly shows that most of the young women depicted are wearing a simple shift. Which makes perfect sense – … Continue reading →

I’ve been reading a book – Three Men and a Bradshaw – which is an edited set of Victorian travel journals by John Freeman, a London clerk. John Freeman’s journals date from the 1870’s and are roughly contemporary with those … Continue reading →

A couple of years ago, I became fascinated by the Madeleine Smith case – not by the story itself, involving as it did sex and murder among the middle classes of 1850’s Glasgow, but how it was reported world wide. … Continue reading →

Yesterday I tweeted a link to an article from the Atlantic about how libraries, and we really mean university and research libraries, are seeing a massive decline in the use of the books on their shelves. No real surprises there. … Continue reading →

Well about the Polish origins of the name anyway. The name Petropaulowski was in use in English long before the Crimean war. Searching GoogleBooks for the name shows it is used in an account of Cook’s voyages published in Manchester … Continue reading →

The Crimean War has been referred to as the first modern war, by which people usually mean that there was something very like modern trench warfare during the siege of Sebastapol, few large set piece battles with the exception of … Continue reading →

We’ve just had brunch – baked beans (Watties’ from NZ), toast, bacon and the last of our home grown tomatoes. And it struck me that everywhere we’ve been that was governed by Britain in colonial times has a local brand … Continue reading →