Breakfast Links: Week of January 2, 2012

Served up fresh: our weekly offering of Breakfast Links!  Our favorite links to other blogs, web sites, pictures, and articles, collected from around the Twitterverse.

• It’s 2012, the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee - read about Queen Victoria's Jubilee celebration: http://bit.ly/vatUMq

• The incredibly elegant costumes of Francisco de Zurbarán's 1598–1664 female saints - http://bit.ly/kEqYjR

• 19th century daugerreotype portraits of dogs: http://bit.ly/tKAURP

• Ever considered becoming an 18th tailor? Colonial Williamsburg is looking for a new apprentice: http://bit.ly/vMog06

• Lord Byron was one of the first diet icons, says historian Louise Foxcroft http://tinyurl.com/86hus2t

• If you're hooked on DowntonAbbey, you'll love these 1910s dresses http://bit.ly/rMlAqf

• George VI Coronation portrait early example of 'photo-shopping' http://tgr.ph/yn6XGA

• Fascinating - scientists ID head of French King Henri IV http://on.msnbc.com/AwenwG

• Roman brothel token discovered in Thames: http://dlvr.it/13T5zT and http://twitpic.com/83fpit

• The handwritten prayer book love notes sent by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn before they married http://bit.ly/wFtgWO

• Favorite vintage photo of the week:Top hats & a big gun on the beach c1856: http://bit.ly/wrflM1

• Locavore aristocrats prefer calves heads to beef-stakes for Sunday dinners, 1750 http://bit.ly/x50XCN

• Isaac Newton's sins, 1662: note #2, #8, and #25 http://bit.ly/yWjkPo

• 17th Century Arctic exploration, murder, and polar bears on Bankside http://bit.ly/wO5Wae

• Maria Cosway (née Hadfield) 1759 - 1838, painter, socialite, and a real looker! http://bit.ly/Azf65e

• Spongata - An Italian Minced Pie in Georgian London, 1820: http://bit.ly/A7zN7P

• Jane Austen's History of England as an ebook: http://bit.ly/AEdeOf

• Lincoln and angels/ages: the impossibility of getting at truth in accounts of the past http://bit.ly/zYB1IW

• The baroque interiors at Tredegar House, Newport, are astonishing: http://bit.ly/wCtIFX

Modern Women of the 1890s

Riverside Drive, New York, c. 1896

Loretta reports:


Two voices from the past offer some insight into the thrills and challenges of being a modern woman in the Gay Nineties.

Illustration:  Riverside Drive, New York, c. 1896. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA,  

Readers who receive our blog via email might see only a black rectangle where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on this link to the  Two Nerdy History Girls blog.

A Freshman at Oxford Discovers Smoking, c. 1850

Susan reporting:

Leaving home for college or university has always represented a big step towards independence and adulthood. But it's not only Knowledge that draws youthful students. Temptation, in every form, has also proved most attractive to young scholars freed for the first time from the guidance of home and parents.  While Animal House would have us think otherwise, this is nothing new. As long as there have been universities, there have been tales of misbehaving students.

Recently Loretta introduced us to an Oxford freshman of 1825. Published a generation later in the 1850s was Mr. Verdant Green: Adventures of an Oxford Freshman. Written by Cuthbert M. Bede (a pseudonym - what a surprise! - of  Edward Bradley, an English clergyman and novelist), young Verdant experiences all the highs and lows of every first-year student. One of Verdant's greatest revelations is smoking, which he encounters to prodigious excess. In fact, nearly every illustration of student life like the ones shown here includes at least one young gentleman puffing up a storm.

But then, let's read Verdant's introduction in a classmate's rooms:

"A great consumption of tobacco was going on, not only through the medium of cigars, but also of meerschaums, short dhudheens of envied colour, and the genuine yard of clay; and Verdant, while he was scarcely aware of what he was doing, found himself, to his great amazement, with a real cigar in his mouth, which he was industriously sucking, and with great difficulty keeping alight. Our hero felt that the unexpected exigencies of the case demanded from him some sacrifice; while he consoled himself by the reflection, that, on the homoeopathic principle of "likes cure likes," a cigar was the best preventive against any ill effects arising from the combination of the thirty gentleman who were generating smoke with all the ardour of lime-kilns or young volcanoes, and filling Mr. Smalls' small room with an atmosphere that was of the smoke, smokey. Smoke produces thirst; and the cup, punch, egg-flip, sherry-cobblers, and other liquids, which had been so liberally provided, were being consumed by the members of the party as though it had been their drink from childhood; while the conversation was of a kind very different to what our hero had anticipated, being for the most part vapid and unmeaning, and (must it be confessed?) occasionally too highly flavoured with improprieties for it to be faithfully recorded in these pages of most perfect propriety."

If you'd like to follow more of young Verdant's adventures, the book is available here through Google. I found it particularly amusing that the copy scanned came from the Harvard University library, where no doubt many of the same shenanigans took place.

Many thanks to our friend Patrick Baty for reminding us of Mr. Green's colorful exploits.

Fashions for January 1808

Loretta reports:

Sharp-eyed readers will note the date of La Belle Assemblée provided below.  Unlike the other ladies' magazines, each monthly LBA provides fashions for the following month.  Thus, the fashions for January 1808 appear in the December 1807 issue.  I thought these were especially interesting, with the curious method of wrapping the scarf on one and the construction of the velvet wrap in the other.  The fashions for January included a ball dress in black and white, which I'll put up later in the week at my other blog as a Color-Your-Own.

~~~

 NO. I.—A MORNING DRESS.

A round cambric gown, a walking length, with short full sleeve, and puckered cuff, buttoned or laced down the back, and made high round the neck, with a full frill of lace. A military stock, edged round the chin with the same. A figured Chinese scarf, the colour American green, twisted round the figure in the style of antique drapery. Melon bonnet the same colour, striped, and trimmed to correspond with the scarf. Hair in irregular curls on the forehead. Earrings of gold or topaz. Long York tan, or Limerick gloves, above the elbow. Slippers of yellow Morocco. This dress, divested of the bonnet, is considered genteel neglige for any period of the day.

NO. 2.—A MORNING WALKING, OR CARRIAGE HABILIMENT.

A simple breakfast robe of Indian muslin, or cambric; with plain high collar, and long sleeve. Plain chemisette front, buttoned down the bosom. A Calypso wrap of morone velvet, or kerseymere, trimmed entirely round with white ermine, or swansdown. Spanish hanging-sleeve, suspended from the back, and falling over the left shoulder, terminating in a round, point below the elbow. This ornament is lined throughout with skin the same as the trimming. A mountain hat of white imperial beaver, or fur, tied under the chin with a ribband the colour of the coat. Gloves and shoes of American green, or buff. Cropt hair, confined with a band, and curled over the left eye.
—La Belle Assemblée, Volume 3, 1807

Love Thwarted by Greenery, 1712

Susan reporting:

No one enjoys taking down holiday decorations, which is often the reason pine garlands and holly are still found lingering at Valentine's Day. But for the author of the letter below, the Christmas decorations in her local church are becoming a genuine hazard to her romantic hopes, shielding her from the amorous attentions of Sir Anthony Love!!!

Well, perhaps not so genuine. It's doubtful that Miss Jenny Simper was any more real than Sir Anthony Love, and much more likely that both are the satiric creations of The Spectator, a daily publication of witty observation published in London by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele between 1711-12. But just as I've been recently posting the 18th c-inspired holiday decorations of Colonial Williamsburg (such as these here and here), it's possible that there truly was a parish clerk who enjoyed bedecking his church for the Christmas season, and hated taking down the greenery afterwards.

                                                                                                January the 14th, 1712.
Mr. SPECTATOR,
I am a young woman and have my fortune to make for which reason I come constantly to church to hear divine service, and make conquests: But one great hindrance in this my design, is that our clerk, who was once a gardener, has this Christmas so over-deckt the church with greens, that he has quite spoilt my prospect, insomuch that I have scarce seen the young baronet I dress at these three weeks, though we have both been very constant at our devotions, and do not sit above three pews off. The church, as it is now equipt, looks more like a green-house than a place of worship: the middle isle is a very pretty shady walk, and the pews look like so many arbours of each side of it. The pulpit itself has such clusters of ivy, holly, and rosemary about it, that a light fellow in our pew took occasion to say, that the congregation heard the word out of a bush, like Moses. Sir Anthony Love's pew in particular is so well hedged, that all my batteries have no effect. I am obliged to shoot at random among the boughs, without taking any manner of aim. Mr. SPECTATOR, unless you will give orders for removing these greens, I shall grow a very aukward creature at church, and soon have little else to do there but say my prayers.
I am in haste,
                                             Dear SIR, 
                                                 your most obedient servant,
                                                     Jenny Simper.

Above: December, Published by Richard Sayer, London, 1767.