Breakfast Links: Week of October 26, 2015

Time for Breakfast Links - our weekly round-up of fav links to other articles, images, blogs, and websites via Twitter.
• Oscar Wilde's tenure as editor of a high-end woman's magazine.
• English fertility towns: was there really something in the water?
• Gossip girls: early tea parties and the sexist slang they inspired.
• New National Parks Service website allows you to tour Ellis Island through your computer.
• For sale: Edith Wharton's $16,500 baby rattle.
• The real story of witches in Salem, MA, 1692 to 2015: "tragedy to farce without the pause for history in between."
• How Pauline Bonaparte lived for pleasure.
• Image: a lovely example of marbling in a 19thc. book.
• Ghosts are scary, disabled people are not: the troubling rise of the "haunted" asylum for entertainment.
• Changing image of American girlhood: scanned Girl Scout equipment catalogues, 1918-2015.
• The London beer flood of 1814.
• Benjamin Howell, a 19thc. confectioner who also sold patent medicines
• A young Nantucket woman paints autumn in 1797.
• Image: the fashionable silhouette for 1900.
• Atmospheric photographs of 1930s London at night.
• A spider that tumbled into a paper press in 1650 can be seen today, embedded in a math book.
• A woman convicted and beheaded for witchcraft 300 years ago to get a retrial.
• Ernest Hemingway, clutterbug: the stuff he left behind.
• Who was the mysterious female Agent 344, a Revolutionary War spy who has never been completely identified?
• Erotic dreams and nightmares from antiquity to the present.
• Image: WWI munitions workers - no medals for an extremely dangerous job.
• A medieval love letter (and eat your meat!)
• Running his stall and crying his wares: recording of a 1930s herbalist from Petticoat Lane, London.
• Glastonbury Tor and the labyrinth of the soul.
• Witch houses.
• Just for (Halloween) fun: what if your favorite books were Halloween candy?
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Friday Video: Skeleton Dance

Loretta reports:

Concluding Halloween week, we’re taking another trip to the cemetery. This time, it’s courtesy Disney’s Silly Symphonies, and the amazing artists and musicians who made them in the days before computers. This one is from 1929.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Revisiting a Special 18thc Wedding Dress

Isabella reporting,

While I was in Boston last week, I visited the Bostonian Society at the Old State House to see an old friend - if an 18thc wedding dress can be considered a friend! I've previously written two other blog posts (here and here, with many more photos) about this extraordinary wedding dress, embroidered by Boston bride Elizabeth Bull Price in the 1730s.

At that time, I'd only seen the dress flat on its back in its storage box. Now, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, the dress has been conserved for exhibition and a custom mannequin and display case provided, and it can currently be seen in the Council Chamber of the Old State House. In that historic and very male space, the dress is a decidedly feminine interloper, standing there across from the life-sized portrait of King Charles I.

But history affected the women of Boston as well as the men, and Elizabeth Bull Price (1717-1780) saw the small colonial town of her childhood grow into one of the most important cities of a new country. Her dress is a reminder that while the heated politics of 18thc. Massachusetts may dominate the history books, men and women were still falling in love and marrying, with all the usual dreams for shared and happy futures.

With the dress on the mannequin, it's now possible to see Elizabeth's skillful embroidery, right, from all sides; the back, above left, is particularly striking. (It was a very sunny morning, so my apologies for the slanting sunlight in these photos.) Although nearly 300 years old, the colored silk threads are vibrant, the floral designs elaborate and lively. It's also easier to see the alterations that transformed the 1730s dress into an 1830s one, to be worn by a later Price family member. This is the version of the dress that survives today.

That young woman was tiny. According to the measurements of the mannequin, she was about 5'2", and her corseted figure would today wear a J.Crew size 000. The now-unknown 19thc seamstress who updated the dress fortunately was respectful of Elizabeth's handiwork, and it's fascinating to see how she made deep pleats in the skirts to avoid cutting. Alas, the bodice and the puffy sleeves are decidedly 1830s additions, but I'm guessing that the little embroidered "wings" , lower left, over the puffed sleeves are the sleeve flounces from the original dress.

The dress is on display until early November, to be followed by the dress's original petticoat - also beautifully embroidered. If you're on the Freedom Trail, it's well worth a visit. For more about Elizabeth Bull Price and more photos, see here for an excellent article by Tricia Gilrein, Collections Manager and Exhibitions Coordinator of the Bostonian Society.

All photographs ©2015 Susan Holloway Scott.

The Rural Cemetery of Worcester, MA

Worcester's Rural Cemetery

Loretta reports:

I am a huge fan of cemeteries, and Worcester, though a small city, has several. I didn’t know that the places I admired so much were known as “garden” or “rural” cemeteries until my husband educated me. I had assumed that cemeteries were always park-like places, even though I’d visited a number of the remaining old-style burial grounds—or parts of them—preserved next to churches in the middle of cities. Even when reading Dickens’s Bleak House, with its ghastly image of an overcrowded burial ground, stinking of decay, I didn’t quite get it. Understanding the history deeply enhanced (as history normally does) my appreciation of these places.


So naturally I was excited to attend a lecture* recently “Withdrawn from the Bustle of the World: Worcester’s First Garden Cemetery.” [Coincidentally, a few days ago I came upon a terrific article that explains the development of the garden cemetery. I’ll let you click on the article to get the background, while I offer a few tidbits from the lecture I attended.]


In November 1837, a local lawyer, Edward D. Bangs, gave what turned out to be a stunningly effective Lyceum lecture, pushing for Worcester to create a rural cemetery. Worcester had three burial places in the center of town, all horribly overcrowded, disrespected, and neglected. And kind of gross. One enterprising business used the cemetery next door for drying clothes. Nobody’s grave was permanent. In one case, when railroad needed the space where a burial ground was, the railroad got it.

Bangs's 1837 lecture turned out to be inspiring beyond what you’d imagine. Others in the city, especially those of a horticultural turn, had already caught the garden cemetery bug, and a couple of our prosperous, civic-minded citizens bought land with cemeteries in mind. In September 1838—yes, less than a year after the lecture—Worcester’s first rural cemetery (called, aptly, Rural Cemetery) was dedicated, on land donated by Daniel Waldo.

In their early days, before the advent of public parks, rural cemeteries served as parks as well as places of burial. There, not only could families finally own and tend to their plots, but members of the public could also get away from the bustle and noise of the city and enjoy the trees, flowers, shrubs, and walkways as well as their own thoughts.

Even today, though the city has grown up around it (enough to hide the cemetery—which is why so many people don’t know it exists), the Rural Cemetery remains a beautiful oasis, a place for walking, discovering, and contemplation.


*by William D. Wallace, Executive Director of the Worcester Historical Museum


Photographs by Walter M. Henritze III



Daniel Waldo

From the Archives: Candy Corn, a 19thc. Treat

Isabella reporting:

Trick or treat! Since today is a travel-day for me, I've pulled this Halloween-themed post from the archives. 

While modern candy-makers offer scores of new treats every year, there's one that's stood the test of time: candy corn. According to the food experts at Gourmet magazine, candy corn was first created in the 1880s as the culinary brain-child of Philadelphia's Wunderle Candy Company.

Nineteenth century candy-lovers were already gobbling sugary treats in the shapes of vegetables, fruit, and other plants, and Wunderle owner George Renninger suggested the company try kernels of corn next. This was more a marketing challenge than a candy-making one, for Americans at the time regarded corn as feed for livestock, not people, and very little was consumed on polite dining tables. But Wunderle's tri-color layering captivated buyers, and the new little candies were an immediate hit. Originally linked to harvest and available only in the fall months, candy corn soon became connected with Halloween as well, and as Halloween as a holiday grew in popularity in the 20th c., so did candy corn: today the industry sells more than 35 million pounds of candy corn each year. That's one sweet treat.

The delightful Halloween postcard, below, comes from the collection of the Toronto Public Library. Printed in 1909 in Germany for the American market, this postcard is only one that the library shared on its blog here - definitely worth a look!