Breakfast Links: Week of January 27, 2014

We can't predict whether or not the groundhog sees his shadow this weekend, but we can guarantee the freshness of our Breakfast Links - our weekly round-up of favorite links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, gathered for you via Twitter.
• This beautiful shawl was a 17th birthday present in 1838.
• Book cover nightmares: a collection of bad Jane Eyre covers.
• The real Flashman? Incomparable Victorian adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby (1842-1885)
• A life in tattoos: William Jenkins, transported at age 19 in 1845.
• Everything you need to know about firing an arquebus in one simple GIF! (Professional soldier; do not attempt.)
• Image: Beautiful light at Hampton Court Palace.
• Russian menu from the Cafe Paris in Archangel in 1917, seven weeks before the October Revolution.
• Mapping the silence of housekeeping in 1925.
• When Edgar Allan Poe needed to get away, he went to the Bronx - but he had connections to Boston, too.
• Image: "A Soho night club serious disturbance," Illustrated Police News, 1897.
• How twelve million letters a week reached soldiers in the trenches during WWI.
• This expressive face from the 8th c. survives from an ancient city that was washed away by Lake Nasser.
• The key of Hell: an 18th c. book of black magic.
• Image: A carte-de-visite of three men standing around a chicken (and why not?)
• An 18th c. recipe for a Marmalade of Oranges.
• British propaganda at its finest declared that Napoleon was short; the truth was that he and Nelson were precisely the same size at 5'7".
• Pilgrim house, lovingly reassembled 350 years after construction, is for sale.
• The first Sherlock Holmes film was made in Union Square, NYC, and the second in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
• An Edwardian expedition to the pyramids, c. 1910.
• Who is Gladys E. Reed? Mystery of an extraordinary WWII Wren artist.
• Why did George Washington travel to Barbados?
• A visit to the abandoned 19th c. Bancroft Road Jewish Cemetery in London.
• The end of the Regency.
• A cat piano? Ten of the strangest musical instruments in history.
• Now online: over 15,000 images of Persian manuscripts at the British Library.
• Image: Socially v. eugenically "desirable" female traits, from Scheinfeld, You and Heredity, 1939.
• I've got my eye on you: 18th-19th c. eye miniatures.
• Jessie Tarbox Beals, the pioneering news photographer who lugged 50 lbs of camera gear while wearing a corset.
• A view that hasn't been seen in 500 years.
• The height of medieval fashion at the 15th c. Burgundian court.
• Let there be light! The lighting of the first gas street lamps in Pall Mall in 1807.
• Frost Fair: when an elephant walked on the frozen River Thames.
• The many lurid broadsides chronicling John Holloway's murder of his wife in 1831.
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