Category Archives: Uncategorized

The disappearance of the long s from handwriting

The long s (ſ) and its disappearance from handwriting is a bit of a mystery to me. Printers had more or less abandoned its use at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although it continued to continued to be used … Continue reading

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An unused Queen Victoria letter card

I’ve picked up rather a nice example of an unused UK Queen Victoria letter card – which we can date to somewhere between 1892 when they were first introduced to sometime shortly after 1901 when she died and the existing … Continue reading

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Letter cards

Over the past year or so I’ve developed a slow burn fascination with late Victorian and Edwardian postcards. I don’t simply collect them, when I get a new one I try my hand at transcribing the card and trying to … Continue reading

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The Featherstone riots of 1893

This past few months I’ve been researching the interconnections between various translators of nineteenth century Russian novels, radical Russian exiles and the birth of the socialist movement in England. Along the way we’ve had a diversion or two, such as … Continue reading

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Tea and the English Class System

Three Victorian Ladies drinking tea – public domain Recently, I’ve been reading Sam Llewellyn’s Shadow in the Sands (ignore Amazon’s silly pricing – second hand copies are available for a few dollars). The novel is positioned as a sequel to … Continue reading

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The Panjdeh crisis and Australia

As I’ve written before there was a major panic in 1885 that, on the back of the Panjdeh incident, there might be war between Britain and Russia, including the chance of an attack on the east coast of Australia by … Continue reading

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Iron 2 heller

A few weeks ago I wrote about how both Imperial Germany and Austria Hungary replaced their small change during world war one with coins made of base metals such as iron as the as the metal from the original coins … Continue reading

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Cooktown and the Panjdeh crisis of 1885

Over on one of my other blogs I mention that there seems to be some confusion over the provenance of the Cooktown gun. The myth is that in 1885 the town council was worried about a Russian invasion an requested … Continue reading

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Another first world war propaganda postcard

A nice example of a British propaganda card entitled ‘One of our tanks’ showing a British Mark IV tank The text is quite legible and written in ink My transcription of the text reads Auchmacoy still exists and is a … Continue reading

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Pfennigs and fillers

You may remember that in a previous post I mentioned in passing that during the first world war, the German Empire withdrew the low value cupro nickel coins in favour or iron coins as the metal in the cupro nickel … Continue reading

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