Breakfast Links: Week of April 7, 2014

Spring is finally in the air, and the breakfast links are fresh! Our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, blogs, articles, and images, collected for you from Twitter.
• How to carouse like a proper Regency gentleman.
• The erotics of shaving in Victorian Britain.
• Jane Austen wrote this letter to her sister while on a six-week visit to the fashionable city of Bath.
• How Europeans imagined exotic animals centuries ago, based on hearsay.
• Tripadvisor in the 18th c? A review of English inns from 1719.
• Image: London's original Shard: the York Buildings Water Tower c 1750-1765 and the same area today.
• Today's important quiz: which Charles Dickens character are you?
• Marianne North: the radical Victorian lady behind an essential collection of botanical art, plus beautiful landscapes of India.
• Historic Harris Tweed's new style icon: Miss Piggy.
• A Georgian REGARD brooch and the history of love in jewels.
• Portraits of 16th-17th c. children, used as commodities to gain power and wealth.
• George III, Tartan archer
• Hugs, Roman baths, and banks.
• The now-lost Henry Phipps Mansion on Fifth Avenue, NYC, cost $40 million in today's dollars to build, and only lasted 20 years.
• Image: Desperate remedies for desperate ills: plague, poison, cholera, and lunacy.
• Advice to anyone considering pilfering a vegetable in the 1770s: don't.
• The air we breathe: a 16th c. Venetian perfume burner.
• Engravings of the inns of long-forgotten London.
• Transportation changes everything: It's 1845, a 17-year-old Brighton socialite disappears, and the race is on to find her.
• England's first filling station dates from 1919.
• A beautiful souvenir fan from the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1867
• "She speaks with much dexterity": the life of a female forger in 18th c. London.
• A 17th c. recipe for miner's brandy.
• Image: This week in 1093, Winchester Cathedral was dedicated.
• Eight fast facts about camp followers during the American Revolution.
• All the tea in China: English words of Chinese origin.
• President Abraham Lincoln's "whiskers were seen - first and foremost - as an effort at fashionable urbanity."
• "Women Working", an online exhibition with 1400+ photos & illustrations from 1800-1930.
• One hundred and ten years ago this week, the old horse-and-buggy district Longacre Square in NYC was renamed after a newspaper: Times Square.
• Image: Actress Mary Pickford enjoying a party in the 1920s with her stylish friends from the film industry.
• William Woolley's "Patent Improved Bedstead for Invalids" and other antebellum inventions for disability.
• Special hats were a 17th c cure for headaches and migraines.
• Top tips for surviving life in the Georgian court.
• Five women printers and booksellers of the 17th c.
• Image: The 2nd Earl of Chatham's (John Pitt) weight record in the ledgers of Berry Bros. & Rudd (then Clarkes) from 1816-26.
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