Breakfast Links: Week of October 31, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• A dress of Spitalfields silk.
• A place that harbors memory: the children's burial grounds in Mayo.
• Sure to ease voting concerns: 18thc recipe for Election Cake.
• Where did those pointy, black, "witch hats" come from?
• The divine messages of a Victorian spiritualist's drawings.
•  The Scottish play and the real Macbeth.
• Monkeys acting like humans in art.
• A woman's work: the market Narrative of Nancy Prince.
• Floating worlds: the letters (and envelopes) of Edward Gorey.
• Adelaide Knight, leader of the first east London suffragettes.
• Image: World War Two soldiers made clear grips for their pistols to display photos of their sweethearts.
• The problem with museum acquisitions....
• Long-toppled statue of King George III to ride again, thanks to a Brooklyn studio.
• Thomas Edison's least successful invention was the Spirit Phone.
• Image: Never be lost: 17thc map-patterned court robes
• Mid-life crisis? John Adams contemplates his birthday.
• The mysterious and majestic stone circle at Lochbuie, on the Isle of Mull.
• The Green Book was an essential guide for 20thc black motorists.
• Image: Victorian-era embroidered slippers.
• The Empress Josephine and the French prophetess.
• The strange history of books bound in human skin.
• Discovering a Belle Epoque theatre inside a Parisian shoe store.
• Nelly Custis, George Washington's step-granddaughter, received many letters from the Lafayette family; explore them here.
• How Britain learned about bathrooms from the Ottoman Empire.
• Image: A whimsical book store sign in the Netherlands.
• Are book collectors really readers, or just cultural snobs?
• The story of 20thc Stepney sewing machinist Marie Iles.
• For all of you watching Poldark: the history behind the series.
• Video: A real-life race between a tortoise and a hare. Guess which one wins?
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Friday Video: Jewelry & Its Stories at the V&A

Loretta reports:

A while back, Susan/Isabella posted a blog about a jewelry reward the Prince Regent gave to the women he’d entrusted with keeping his daughter, the Princess Charlotte, from running amok.

Today’s video spotlights these peridots as well as revealing the letter’s contents—and can’t you just picture the conditions under which the letter was written? In a few cryptic words, the writer conjures quite a scene—at least in this writer’s mind.

This isn’t the V&A jewelry collection's only story. The video features several other pieces, including some worn by Catherine the Great. I was particularly intrigued by the tale of how one modern piece was created.

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.

From the Archives: How Guy Fawkes Crossed the Atlantic & Became Pope Night, 1745

Isabella reporting:

Because our friends in Great Britain will celebrate Guy Fawkes Day on Saturday, it seems like an excellent time to revisit this post. 

Guy Fawkes Day is a holiday that may have a dark past, but it's certainly alive and well and full of bonfires and fireworks. Yet while it may seem a quintessentially British holiday, there's also a strong history of the celebration in New England as well as Old.

The Massachusetts colony was largely settled in the early 17th c. by English Puritans, and those conservative Protestant values continued to rule the colony. The bonfires and effigy-burning of the Fifth of November was one of the transplanted traditions that prospered, but by the middle of the 18th c., it had developed a few distinctly Yankee quirks. Several colonial wars against the French served to increase distrust and fear of Catholics. While the memory of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot weren't forgotten (the "Remember, Remember" song was duly sung), in all the northern colonies the celebration was now called Pope Night, and a rowdy time it was.

In Boston, crowds of  young men, sailors, and apprentices thronged the streets, dividing into two rival gangs, while costumed boys thumped on doors and begged money for drink. Each gang had their own procession and effigies of the Pope, friars, priests, and devils, and after a fierce brawl between the two gangs (ah, American contests of sports supremacy!), the winners captured the losers' effigies, and everything was finally burned in a satisfying bonfire. Special noisemakers, fashioned from conch shells and called "Pope's horns", added to the din, like 18th c. vuvuzelas.

As political tensions in Boston increased with England in the years before the Revolution, other effigies of unpopular public figures found their way into the procession, including the Catholic Pretender to the British throne James Stuart, Lord North, and Lord Bute. Later infamous Revolutionary War traitor Benedict Arnold earned his place in the flames, too. A 1745 newspaper described the scene:

Tuesday last being the Anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, two Popes were made and carried thro' the Streets in the evening...attended by a vast number...armed with clubs, staves, and cutlashes, who were very abusive to the Inhabitants, insulting the Persons and breaking the windows, &c., of such as did not give them money to their satisfaction...the two Popes meeting in Cornhill, their followers were so infatuated as to fall upon each other with the utmost Rage and Fury. Several were sorely wounded and bruised, some left for dead, and rendered incapable of any business for a long time to the great Loss and Damage of their respective Masters.

For more about Pope Night in the American colonies, check out this excellent site commissioned by The Bostonian Society. Also see one of our favorite history blogs, Boston 1775, which has numerous posts on the subject.

Above: Detail from Extraordinary verses on Pope-night, or, A commemoration of the Fifth of November, giving a history of the attempt, made by the papishes, to blow up king and Parliament, printed in Boston, 1768. Collection, Library of Congress

Fashions for November 1908

Dresses November 1908

Loretta reports:

Between 1907 and 1908 fashion underwent a major change in terms of silhouette. If you compare this plate to the one posted at left, the difference is obvious. The top-heavy S-curve has smoothed out, and a more vertical look—which may remind you a bit of the Regency style—has taken over.

According to Jane Ashelford’s The Art of Dress,

 “the waistband was raised above its natural level, the skirt was narrowed, and the longer and straighter-fitting corset, introduced in 1908, produced a much smoother and more elongated shape.”

November 1908 dress descriptions

Images courtesy University of Michigan via Hathi Trust.

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.

Finding Relief in the Lady's Garden at Vauxhall, 1788

Isabella reporting,

As interesting as all life in the past is to us now, it's the common aspects that our readers seem to find most interesting. Forget riding in a coach or dancing in hoops. Where and how did our heroines answer nature's call before indoor plumbing? This explains why a six-year-old blog post on the necessary bourdaloue remains one of our all-time most popular - and why this 18thc satirical print will probably be both amusing and informative. As always, please click on the image to enlarge it.

The pleasure gardens at Vauxhall were among the most popular entertainment spots in Georgian London. Several generations of Londoners of every rank put on their finery (and the occasional mask) and came to stroll, dance, dine, and flirt beneath the legendary lights. With its tree-shaded paths, Chinese-inspired pavilions, popular music, and statues and paintings by famous artists, there was much to amuse - and plenty of places to find mischief, too.

But even Vauxhall's glamorous settings had a baser side.  It had to, after all that drinking and dining. Or as Christopher Smart observed in a popular journal:

   "In sweet Vaux-hall I love to stray:
    But wish it were completely gay:
    In splendid Scenes we drink and eat:
    In sordid Huts – evacuate."*

Apparently many visitors of both sexes didn't bother to seek out the "sordid Huts", but chose to take advantage of the shadowy paths and bushes to relieve themselves. For ladies who were a fraction more fastidious, there was also the "Lady's Garden", shown in this 1788 print.

Apparently being reserved for the use of ladies didn't mean the facilities had much in the way of amenities or privacy. Along two walls is a bench forming a communal latrine, with four women in various stages of relief and distress, their fashionable skirts gathered up around them. Keep in mind that there would have been no "flushing" mechanism beneath the women, and imagine what the smell must have been by the end of a busy evening.

The towering plumes on the women's hats and in their powdered hairstyles come dangerously close to the open flames of the candles in wall sconces behind them, offering one more hazard. Discarded on the floor are a nosegay, an unmatched glove, and an advertisement sheet - which probably would have been used in place of modern toilet paper - for Dr. Leak's pills, a popular quack venereal remedy and a sly jab at the sexual assignations that often occurred at Vauxhall.

To the right sits one woman ostentatiously retying her garter, perhaps a potential customer for Dr. Leake, while another is freshening her makeup at a looking glass. This tall woman, detail right, is believed to be Lady Sarah Archer, an aristocratic widow famous for her independence, her love of gambling, and her interest in politics and outdoor sports (she drove her own phaeton and rode to the hounds.) In the eyes of misogynistic 18thc caricaturists, however, her greatest sin was being over forty with a fondness for makeup and fashion. She is always cruelly drawn with florid cheeks and an exaggerated hooked nose to accentuate her supposedly unfeminine appearance - and what better way to mock her further than to show her painting her face in a communal outhouse?

* From the wonderful Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David Coke & Alan Borg. See Loretta's post about this book here.

Above: The inside of the lady's garden at Vauxhall Drawing attributed to Henry Kingsbury; published S.W. Fores, 1788. The British Museum.