Breakfast Links: Week of January 4, 2016

Happy new year! We're back with a fresh round of Breakfast Links for you - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, blogs, articles, and images via Twitter.
• Hypnotic GIFs of Victorian optical toys.
• London's oldest theatrical tradition involves eating cake.
• "Stand fast in the liberty": a very rare 18thc. waistcoat belt.
• How did women in the past cope with their periods? Another view here.
• A walk through 1873 London (and earlier) by way of Walter Thornbury's illustrations.
• The mysterious seaweed tunnel of Pegwell Bay, Kent.
• Image: Skating on the Serpentine, 1839.
• A dangerous freedom for unmarried women: Anthony Trollope, pillar post boxes, and love letters.
• How did people sleep in the middle ages?
• "No stimulating drinks": Thomas Jefferson lays out guidelines for students at University of Virginia, 1819.
• A fiercely festive feline from Egypt, 6th-7thc BC.
• Image: Perfect title of an 18thc novel (with a ton of spoilers.)
• Because you never know when you might NEED to know: vintage user's manual for operating Disneyland's monorail.
• An unsolved 1920s murder case: the mystery of Annie Hearn's sandwiches.
• Not too late: how to make cuneiform gingerbread cookies for the new year.
• Image: A little medieval humor from the Abbey of Sainte Foy.
• Buried under a boulder: the grave of a Lancashire "witch."
• The morning after the night before: detoxing in history.
• Image: An 18thc back-scratcher.
• Why the 1960s were swinging (at least fashion-wise.)
• An 1860s acrobat's special corset for "flying."
• A c1800 book to read online, with advice for every kind of lover: The Complete Art of Writing Love-Letters.
• Old Judy, keeper of the Newcastle Upon Tyne town hutch.
• Image: Martha Washington wore these shoes for her 1759 wedding to George.
• Why is the Flying Scotsman so famous?
• Not historical, but still breathtaking: traffic camera catches snowy owl in flight.
• Just for fun: the V&A lets you design your own over-the-top 18thc. wig.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Friday Video: An 18thc Automaton Watch

Isabella reporting,

This is a very short video - less than a minute - but it's still an impressive tribute to the level of craftsmanship of 18thc. jewelers and watchmakers. Made of gold with enamel, the watch's artistic detail is as stunning as the clockwork mechanism that animates it. Alas, both the maker and the original owner's name are now forgotten, and today the watch is most famous for having been in the collection of  King Farouk of Egypt during the 20thc.

But it's easy to imagine some wealthy (for a watch like this would have been a very costly bauble) nobleman easing this from the fob pocket of his silk breeches and ostentatiously checking the time, making sure that all around him saw the tiny country miss swinging back and forth from the dial. Click on the photo right to see all the details. Beautiful!

Automaton watch, quarter repeater, gold and enamel, late 18thc. Shaw Watch Collection, Guernsey Museums & Galleries.

Hackney Cab vs. Hackney Coach

Cruikshank, “The Last Cabdriver"

Loretta reports:

My characters in Dukes Prefer Blondes spend time in hackney coaches and hackney cabs. You will often find the terms used interchangeably, as though they were the same thing. However, a hackney cab was quite a different article from a hackney coach. The cab was a two-wheeled, one-horse vehicle. It held only two passengers, and seemed to be generally regarded as a mode of transportation for those who liked to live dangerously.

Leigh’s New Picture of London for 1834 briefly explains the difference here. You can read about them here in Omnibuses and Cabs, Their Origin and History, which includes excerpts from Dickens’s lively descriptions.

I’ve written a bit more about hackney coaches here, and you can read Dickens’s full version (which originally appeared in Bell’s Life in London in November 1835) here in Sketches by Boz.

1823 Hackney Cab

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Weighing In for 1748

Isabella reporting,

Updated January 7, 2016.

The new year is often a time of grim resolutions to undo all the merry-making of the holidays. If the rush of advertisements for weight loss gimmicks and flashy gyms are any indication, there are many Americans who had a sobering confrontation with their bathroom scale on January 1 (or maybe the second.)

But apparently this isn't anything new. In 1748, a young man noted the results of his family's January weigh-in. Born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, John Holyoke (1734-1753) was the son of Edward Holyoke, who became the ninth president of Harvard College in 1737 and moved his family to Cambridge, outside of Boston. Fifteen-year-old John kept an informal diary on the interleaved pages of his copy of An astronomical diary, or, An almanack for the year of our Lord Christ, 1748 by Nathaniel Ames. On these pages, John wrote of the things that interested him: the weather, family illnesses, and his own studies, travels, and daily activities

Opposite a list of the year's eclipses, above, John made his first note for the new year, titled "January 8 AM. Family Weighed 1747/8." (Detail below right; click to enlarge.) In the days before personal scales, weighing oneself meant going to a commercial establishment and using the same scales employed for weighing goods and produce. This wasn't merely a colonial hardship; in faraway London, even dukes presented themselves to be weighed on the commercial scales of Berry Brothers & Rudd. Apparently John's father must have taken his entire extended household to one such set of scales to start the year, and John wrote down the results.

The results are interesting. We modern people tend to think of our counterparts in the past as being much smaller. True, at 93 1/2 lbs, John himself was on the slight side for a young man his age, but his mother weighed 183 1/2 lbs, and his father weighed a substantial 234 1/2 lbs! All those half-pounds must have been important - especially since John totaled everyone's weight for a neat sum of 1316 pounds.

I guessed that Betty Epes, Betty Hol., and Deb Forster are grown cousins, aunts, family friends, or perhaps servants, and it turned out I was right. Thanks to one our "friends of the blog", historian and writer J.L. Bell, I've learned since writing the original post that I was (mostly) guessing right. All were members of the extended Holyoke household; please see his own post here to learn the details of this "blended" family.

But the last name and weight on the list belonged to an individual who most likely lived beneath the same roof, but wasn't considered a true member of the extended Holyoke family. That final entry with a single name belonged to Juba, the family's black slave.

John Holyoke's diary is included in a fascinating exhibition (free and open to the public) currently on display in Harvard University's Pusey Library. Opening New Worlds: The Colonial North American Project features archival and manuscript treasures relating to 17th and 18thc North America, all from the university's libraries and collections. Reflecting every aspect of colonial life, the documents range from diaries and journals to maps, doodles, sermons, and music. The project will digitize the entire collection, and make the documents available for wider study; click here for more information.

Above: Pages from John Holyoke's diary, 1748. Harvard University Archives.

Fashions for January 1836

Morning & Opera Dresses Jan 1836

Loretta reports:

This month’s fashion plate is connected to my recently released book, Dukes Prefer Blondes, whose heroine’s clothing styles cover the time between August 1835 and May 1836, when fashion finally begins its shift away from the gigantic sleeves to the less flamboyant style we might think of when we think of “Victorian”: the top of the dress gets smaller, and hair and bonnet styles grow sleeker.

In January 1836, however, The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons is still showing enormous sleeves. The black dress on the right gives a nice view of what’s under the opera cloak. One note: the pelerines, which look so stiff in the plate, were rather more graceful in real life, being made of fine muslin.

Dress Description

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.