Category Archives: Uncategorized

A few days ago I read an article as to reasons why New Zealand really hadn’t produced any significant writers before the twentieth century. I was reading the article as I’ve taken to reading nineteenth century novels as part of … Continue reading →

Well, I though I would do the obvious and repeat my investigation of the distribution of the trial reports in New Zealand. Well that turned out not to be sensible – the non-Maori population in 1857 was only around 50,000, … Continue reading →

As part of my looking into how the news of the Madeleine Smith trial got to Australia I thought I’d break the reports of the trial down by date and place of publication. And it’s quite striking – the first … Continue reading →

Having established that it’s likely that the news of the Madeleine Smith trial reached Australia via the India/Sri Lanka route, I thought I’d look to see if there were any searchable digitised newspaper resources available for South African papers. I … Continue reading →

I’ve previously written about how the Madeleine Smith trial was reported in Australia, so I thought I’d have a fairly superficial look at how it was reported in America. Remember that in 1857 there was no transatlantic telegraph cable – … Continue reading →

Shakespeare and I have never really got on. Sure I’ve seen productions of his plays that were fantastic, and some that were quite frankly terrible, and the odd experimental version that was, well, odd. And the reason why I went … Continue reading →

A couple of Saturdays ago we treated ourselves to a day out and drove, with no clear plan, to Echuca, a town on the Murray about 200km to the west of us. In the nineteenth century Echuca was a major … Continue reading →

As a final bit of investigation around the Madeleine Smith case I thought I’d have a look at how widely it was reported in Australia and New Zealand. First of all I went to QueryPic to see if the case … Continue reading →

Continuing on the theme of what we can learn about life in 1850’s Scotland from the trial of Madeleine Smith, one interesting detail is that she exchanged ambrotypes (an early type of glass plate photography) with her lover, at around … Continue reading →

I’ve recently been reading an account of the trial of Madeleine Smith, which took place in Glasgow in 1857 – in essence Madeleine Smith was accused of poisoning her lower class lover because of her upcoming more respectable marriage to … Continue reading →