Cabinet of Curiosities - a Baby Dinosaur

A few months ago I wrote on this blog about an ending for me – finishing my life as a civil servant. Since then I've had another ending – and, excitingly, a new beginning – because I've moved from London to Brighton.

I’ve lived in London all my adult life and in Crystal Palace for nearly fourteen years. It has been a wonderful place to live. I’ve always loved its history and the sense of community and shared identity that brings, and I’ll miss it very much. 

Me on Dinosaur Island, Crystal Palace Park

Photo: L O'Sullivan 

Crystal Palace wasn’t always known as such. But after the success of the Great Exhibition in 1851 it was decided to rebuild Joseph Paxton’s masterpiece on a permanent site, and run it as a commercial enterprise. A commanding position on top of a ridge in south London on the borders of Upper Norwood, Penge and Sydenham was chosen, the Palace rebuilt and a new identity forged.

It became the defining feature of the area, bringing millions of people to visit and live over the next 80 years and changing it forever. Two train stations were built to manage the influx of visitors. Many of the bus routes in south London end in Crystal Palace even now because of the number of people who wanted to get to the attraction. And, as across London, huge numbers of houses were built, but in this case many of them were large and beautiful villas for the well-to-do, wanting to live in this now-fashionable spot.

The Crystal Palace burned down in a catastrophic fire in 1936. The site of the Palace and grounds is now the local park. You can see the foundations of the Palace at the top of the hill, complete with a few of the original statues. There are two more complete reminders of the heyday of the Crystal Palace, however, which I have especially loved while living here:

The Megalosaurus, striding through the

autumn foliage. Photo C. Wightwic

1) The Dinosaurs. I’ve written about them before, but I make no bones (boom boom) about doing so again. Declaring an Interest, I’m now on the Board of the charity that works to promote and conserve the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (most of which aren’t actually Dinosaurs, but hey…) They were built in the 1850s as an attraction in the grounds of Crystal Palace and were the first ever life sized sculptures of dinosaurs (and other extinct creatures) anywhere in the world. The sculptures were created at the dawn of dinosaur palaeontology, taking into account the cutting-edge science of the day. We obviously know much more now, so many of them look weird and ‘wrong’ to our eyes. From the point of view of the history of science, therefore, they are a testament to how our knowledge changes and grows with each generation. For the general viewer today, their ‘wrongness’ adds to their charm.

2) The Subway. This gorgeous subterranean space isn’t often open to the public, although the Friends of the Subway are doing an amazing job to provide occasional access days. One of the last remnants of the Crystal Palace and its associated infrastructure, the subway was the passageway between the ‘high level’ train station and the great Crystal Palace itself. The red-and-white patterned space is all that remains of the high level station, but gives an impression of the grandeur and excitement of a visit to one of the greatest spectacles of the age. 

The Subway in 2017. Photo: C.Wightwick

So, what to take to Brighton as part of my ever-expanding Cabinet of Curiosities? Well, the Ruling History Girl wasn’t very impressed a few months ago when I tried to bring a life-sized sculpture of a naked man into the Cabinet (apparently he wouldn’t fit) so I don’t suppose I can get away with a life-sized Dinosaur either. And I wouldn’t want to take them out of their natural habitat, even virtually. In designing the Dinosaurs, smaller maquettes were made, about 1/8th size of the final pieces. None of them survive, to our knowledge. But if they did, maybe I could fit one of those into the Cabinet?

Find out more at:

Crystal Palace Dinosaurs: https://cpdinosaurs.org/

The Crystal Palace Subway: www.cpsubway.org.uk

Victoria's voice, the fiction of Caro and other thoughts, by Gillian Polack

Right now I’m revelling in different readings of historical periods. Normally I do this with my historian’s hat on and the different views are the different interpretation s of vast amounts of data and close and careful reading of sources by historians. Today, that’s not what’s happening at all.

I borrowed the TV series Victoria from the library and have watched just one episode. When I finish my writing, I’ll watch some more. It’s addictive.

I’m seeing early Victorian England from the view of the TV series and also from the view of the actors. Jenna Coleman’s accent isn’t even close to Victorian (I want to haul out my late Victorian dictionary of how to pronounce English to check, but really, it’s too late both the date of the dictionary and the time of night) but it does show us the way she feels Victorian English should be presented. She used the same accent when she was a governess in an episode of Doctor Who. It’s mostly her everyday accent, but not quite. Victorian England then, is like us but not quite to those who take their feel for the period from popular television.

The choice of actors gives us a view of the period and place that is quite different to the actual period and place. I took a break to check this one out, too, for everyone looked wrong. Lord Melbourne and Rufus Sewell both don’t ring true. I was trying to think of why and it strikes me that Sewell doesn’t look like the person whose physical presence was so great that he dominated Victoria’s life for several years. Sewel has plenty of presence, so it isn’t lack of presence that’s the problem. It’s more that his body language in a crowd works quite differently to the body language from contemporary caricatures of important people. That is to say, when he is surrounded by other politicians, he doesn’t use his body language like the politicians of that time. We have some knowledge of their body language (although I’m very rusty on it) because there were publications that mock it. 

These aren’t right history or wrong history, good history or bad history, but they are different ways of seeing and presenting history. This is very much with me today.

Modern work is important to the way we think about the past. Thanks to Regency novelists (not English novelists of the late Georgian period, but modern novelists who use Regency settings) I’ve a picture of Lady Caroline Lamb that focusses on the exotic and the daring and the Byron side. I always have to stop and remember that she was involved in the political side of things through her husband, who, after her death, loomed large in the life of Queen Victoria. She was a lot more than Byron’s failed affair and the centre of gossip. She was a mover and a shaker in her own right. There often a lot more to history than we see on television. When I say this to a class, I often hand round a cup to make my point. Let me give you a photo of it.

I have yet to see a moustache cup as part of a TV series.

Given I’m adding more ways of seeing historical figures to my mental collection tonight, I need to add one for this woman. The one that needs to be added is the most important. It has nothing to do with society and everything to do with society. It’s the way I would enter into her life if I were writing a novel about her. 

I wouldn’t start with her husband or her lover or her public arguments or the shocking things that some people liked to explain about her: I’d start with her fiction.

The best element of her fiction to begin with is Glenarvon. It links all the elements we think we know about Lady Caroline Lamb and turns them into a Gothic novel, mocking them. She wrote a best-seller that laughed at the attitudes of people to her. I could move from the novel itself to what it did to her reputation, and be back on traditional grounds, or I could go from one work of fiction she wrote to all the others, and to the material she wrote to Byron that was apparently good enough to confuse Byron’s publisher. (I say ‘apparently’ because I need to check sources for this!)

There’s a detective novel in Caro’s life. It consists of finding out who she actually was as a person. She’s left popular history littered with evidence and false leads. This is why we write about her a lot. And Victoria. And Lord Melbourne.

Different views for different moods and different moments. This to me, is an evanescent form of history, resting on popular versions of stories of famous people. It’s a lot of fun, and, as long as we know we’re living in a temporary interpretation, we can take Jenna Coleman’s voice as true for Victoria and admire how Lord Melbourne has got over the loss of his novelist wife and become … whatever  the writers and actors make him become in Victoria’s life. Impermanent truths, full of charm and emotional understanding.

This is how we read and how we watch. We immerse ourselves in a story and follow it. I love this. I love the way I can follow and yet not trust. I love pulling it to pieces and finding out where all the components come from and what other stories are told with them elsewhere.

It’s more related to historiography (the study of how history is written) than to history proper. It’s understanding how complex our knowledge of the past can be, through seeing how people interpret history from as many angles as we can.

Why am I thinking along these lines? There is a reason. I have a conference paper to work on and masterclasses to prepare for the Historical Novel Society of Australasia’s biennial event. I’ll report on the weekend itself next month. This month, though, I’m living the dream. I’m trying to see how many ways of envisaging history I can fit into my mind at once and what makes them come alive for me.

Fitting everything in and understanding them is what I do while wearing my historian hat. Making them come alive for me myself is step one in making them come alive for other people and that’s for my teaching and, of course, for my own fiction.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to return to the young Queen Victoria.

Parks and Gardens by Penny Dolan

In my junior historical novel, set in Victorian times, the young hero arrives alone in Victorian London. Needing a safe space for the night, he considers climbing over the railings into one of the garden squares. Those green spaces were private gardens for the key-holders, the residents of the big houses nearby, and acted as distinct social spaces where children could play, infants be “aired” in perambulators and a variety of respectable adults could greet each other while strolling about.

Most of London’s squares and gardens are open to the public by day, and locked every evening to deter vagrants, although not always successfully. Returning to my hotel in Mecklenburgh Square around 11pm recently, I saw a young man hoist himself up over a set of spiked railings, drop down on the other side and disappear into an overgrown corner of the Coram Fields grounds for the night, just as I had imagined my own Victorian runaway doing in a fictional garden setting.

As cities grew larger and more congested, the private parklands surrounding an industrialist’s mansion or a wealthy landowner’s now-unwanted residence might be converted into a public space, such as the small park created around Bruce Grove Castle, although surely altruism was only one strand in the creation of such places.

These green parkland spaces were seen as a way of refreshing the polluted, miasmic city air and also as a way of improving the health, education and social mores of the urban population. Titus Salt, the Yorkshire textile manufacturer and temperance enthusiast, made sure his model village at Saltaire provided a park for his mill-hands, although he provided them with rules about how to behave within his park too.

Gradually, as the middle-classes increased and workers were granted half-days and holidays, parks became even more a social venue. The expected expanse of trees and lawns might include impressive botanical gardens, floral displays, bandstands and room for sporting activities as well as the obligatory swings, slides and see-saws of children’s playground area.  

In Harrogate, the old Bogs Field where spa visitors had once walked off the effects of the Spa purges, changed character during Victorian times. As part of town improvements, the area became the genteel Valley Gardens, intended to attract high-class visitors to the town, which it still does. 

The open grass acres of The Stray, where horse-races were once held, is still used by many groups and individuals during the week and weekends. They, and others, recently signed a forceful petition against some councillors wish to “improve” The Stray further by increasing the number of paying events planned for the much-valued open spaces. The local newspaper claimed the people's petition had won. It has, so far.

The city of Leeds has generous parklands too and one - Roundhay Park - offers another reason for the tone of my post here today. A private leisure company, providing healthy outdoor activities for children, had been in negotiations with the city council about taking over an area of park and woodland for their own exciting proposal. Local residents pointedly pointed out that at £25.00 per family visit, the new facility would not available to the families who currently use the park daily and weekly. Furthermore, the plans would cause significant damage to a much-loved natural habitat. Fortunately, the council took note and Roundhay Park still remains a public space. Yet the pattern of commercial encroachment seems worrying right now.

Moreover - and less noisily – many parks are facing deeper threats. Intense cuts in public funding mean that trained gardeners are often the staff of the past. The gardens in parks are now a facility that can be maintained, like libraries, by groups of keen volunteers. Alongside this pattern comes the additional matter of developers spying out prime land for housing and new planning regulations and I find myself worrying about the role of parks in the future.

Why were the parks created? Surely the increasing density of the urban populations will need open spaces just as much as the urban workforce of the past? Or will public parks, in this continuing age of austerity, be necessarily absorbed into the ticketed-leisure industry and recreated for a different ideology? In fact, will the provision and upkeep of public parks in Britain become, to all intents and purposes, history?

ps. I hope, by my next post, to have my eyes and words more firmly on the past. 

 

Penny Dolan

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Everybody’s Scrap Book of Curious Facts – Michelle Lovric

 A recent gloriously sunny morning at the Columbia Road Flower Market yielded not blooms but a book. Forgive my unctuous and outdated verbosity. My prose style has been contaminated by a little red book I found at an antique stall among the flowers. Published in 1890, it’s called Everybody’s Scrap Book of Curious Facts – A BOOK FOR ODD MOMENTS. This afternoon I have spent some very odd moments indeed with its compiler, Don Lemon.

His argument on his book’s behalf is this: ‘I have often found that when the mind was so wearied that even a sensational novel failed to fix the attention, short paragraphs about unusual things in science, art, or literature, were interesting enough to divert my thoughts from cares of business.’

 Mr Lemon thus conveniently liberated himself from any editorial scruples or considerations other than shortness and diversion. His book is of its time. So to our time, it is imperialist, racist, sexist, credulous and rather humorous.

Here are a few things I learned from Mr Lemon:

The mostly costly leather in the world is known to the trade as piano leather. The secret of tanning piano leather is known only to a family of tanners in Thuringia, Germany.

Wednesday and Thursday are especially lucky for weddings in Bulgaria.

The well-proportioned woman wears a shoe one half the size of the glove her hand calls for.

The thin angular ear is said to denote bad temper and cruelty … Great philosophers and statesmen have been noticed to have large and sloping ears.

When to Pare the Finger Nails (not on Sunday)

In the Arctic region, a man who wants a divorce leaves home in anger and does not return for several days. The wife takes the hint and departs.

That the colon was introduced in about 1485 and the comma 35 years later

In the month of February 1866, there was no full moon.

The stork is partial to kittens as an article of food, and finds them an easy and wholesome prey; and the cats reciprocate by a love for young storks.

It may be consoling to red-headed people to read that out of 165 patients at the Kirkbride insane asylum only one has read hair.

Among Things that Never will be Settled: ‘whether a long screwdriver is better than a short one of the same family’.

Fair Rosamund was not poisoned by Queen Eleanor, but died in the odour of sanctity in the convent of Godstow.

 A centipede is afraid of a tarantula, and when he lies down to sleep he always takes the precaution to build a cactus fence about him. A tarantula will never crawl over cactus.

It has been estimate that we get a complete new outfit of brains about every two months.

The list of thing that can be eaten from the fingers is on the increase. It includes all bread, toast, tarts and small cakes, celery and asparagus.

 We must all make our apologies to the pig, who has been grossly maligned in regard to his food. Instead of being ready to eat anything, he turns out to be the most fastidious of animals.

Of all quarrels, the most senseless, the most bootless, the most worrying, is a quarrel with your circumstances.

The Guanches, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands, rudely embalmed their corpses, drying the bodies in the air and covering them with varnish.

In 1695 Limerick and Tipperary, Ireland, had many showers of a soft, fatty substance resembling butter. It was of a dark yellow colour, and always fell at night. The people gathered it and use it as an ointment, reporting many astonishing cures.

The Fijian cannibals’ emotions have reference for the greater part to food, so he worships the god Matawaloo, who has eight stomachs and is always eating.

Australia is a country full of absurdities in animal, vegetable and human life.

 When I started to write this post, I typed in some of the ‘anthropology’ but found that I could not dare to propagate Mr Lemon’s observations of the Chinese, the Indo-Chinese, the Australian aborigine and the ‘Peruvian’.

Otherwise, I found the Scrapbook quite fascinating and fairly authoritative, and certainly an index of knowledge and attitudes if I need to set another book in the late Victorian era.

 Meanwhile, if anyone needs to know anything about anything – or feels an odd moment coming on -I am happy to lend out my Everybody’s Scrap Book of Curious Facts, for the price of postage.
Michelle Lovric's website

STEALING A SHAKESPEAREAN DRESS by Penny Dolan

Dear Reader, I once stole a famous Shakespearean costume, although the crime is hard to detect. This is how my theft began:

Much of my middle-grade children’s novel, A Boy Called Mouse, is set in the world of the late Victorian theatre. My reading and researching was inspired by three overlapping interests: the working conditions of the theatre children before Fawcett and others campaigned for their safety and education; the role of the actor-managers like Irving who made theatre-going respectable for the middle-classes, and the use of Shakespeare as a vehicle for spectacle and dramatic effects.

I’d like to pretend that this work was seriously-organised study but now suspect that much of the reading was random, seeing-where-it-led pursuit with my main worry being “getting the whole thing written”, a state I’m very much in at the moment.

 

However, my searches introduced me to a particularly beautiful garment: the dress  worn by the actress Ellen Terry when she played opposite Sir Henry Irving in his 1888 production of Macbeth. Descriptions of this or that famous actor’s costumes or props, and the cost, had long been an important part of the publicity for the production, drawing in an audience as keen to see the dresses as to see the play.

This was true of Ellen Terry’s dress. Styled like a medieval robe, it created the most spectacular sensation: this Lady Macbeth was not dressed in sultry black silk or blood red velvet but in a gown of glittering emerald-green, an effect created by the hundreds of beetle-wings stitched to the background fabric, creating a stunningly jewelled contrast to Ellen Terry’s clouds of red-gold hair. 

She was delighted by the success of the gown, particularly as it was comfortable on stage, saying that “It is so easy, and one does not have to wear corsets!”

Glamorous the dress might be, but the “easy” costume had to deal with a long hard-working life, facing many hasty and less-than-careful backstage changes. Not only did Irving’s 1888 production of Macbeth run for six months, but the beetle-wing dress went travelling for tours and productions, both in Britain and across to North America.

 

Ellen Terry appeared in this most favourite costume personally and when John Singer Sargent painted her iconic portrait, he chose to show her wearing her famous green dress. He posed her with arms upraised, drawing attention to the long folds of the sleeves, suggesting the robe of a medieval knight. Despite the painted stance, Terry never appeared in such a pose on stage during Irving’s “Macbeth”.

I could not help falling in love with this thought of this dress, although knowing Terry’s diminutive stature knew the thing would never have fitted me. So I borrowed the fame and mood of it to inspire a stage costume in Mouse, converting the beetle wings into peacock feathers for a different Shakespeare play. Here it is, in its new guise, mentioned as part of the great actor-manager Hugo Adnam’s Press Conference on his forthcoming “Midsummer Night’s Dream”:

Newspaper men in crumpled tweed jackets visited the Albion Theatre. Supping ale and oysters, they scribbled down Adnam’s description of  the forthcoming play. The ladies magazines published illustrations of Bellina Lander as Titania, trailing the iridescent cloak of peacock feathers she would wear on stage, a garment that had cost over a thousand guineas without its silk lining. Just seeing that cloak, in all its coloured glory, would be well worth the price of a good seat. The opening night had sold out already.

Or here:

"Now the hungry lion roars!" Puck began "and the wolf be-howls the moon." 

Adnam and Bellina entered for their final speeches. The peacock cloak swirled out under the lights, and Adnam's deep and wondrous tones resounded magnificently. 

Looking back through the pages of A Boy Called Mouse, I am now surprised how briefly Terry’s faux dress appears, given how largely the real dress still features in my sense of the history and visual memory of that period while I was working on the manuscript.

The brief entry may be because, while writing, I chose to make my fictional actress Bellinda Lander as unlike the real Ellen Terry as possible. Terry with her red-gold hair, seems to have been as warm and loveable in private as she was scandalously popular in public, with her three marriages and rumours of numerous affairs, while my dark-haired Lander is definitely not a loveable woman. 

Besides, by this part in the plot, I had plenty of dramatic deception, untangling and adventure going on backstage for my hero Mouse and his friend Kitty. Maybe that is why the ghost of Terry's wonderful beetle-wing dress just whispers by on the pages?

The good news is that while I may have down-played Terry’s inspiring dress, it still exists and can be seen. Back in 2011, after long and expensive renovation and the re-stitching of many beetle-wings, the dress went on display among the collection of theatrical memorabilia at Smallhythe Place in Kent, Ellen Terry’s most favourite home, where she died in 1928. The property is now owned by the National Trust.

Penny Dolan

The Victorian Tattoo, by Y S Lee

In my recent novel, Rivals in the City, a young gentleman in 1861 jokes about body art: "'Perhaps I'll have your name tattooed on my arm so there's no doubt as to whom I belong', he said, tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow and resuming their steady walking pace. 'What would you say to your initials in Gothic letters, surrounded by scrolls and hearts?'" I loved being able to include this moment of dialogue because it's such a familiar cultural motif for us now. It's another way of bringing the Victorians closer to us, one of the projects at the heart of my fiction. But it's also rooted in a fairly well-documented tradition.

There are brief mentions of tattoos in Victorian literature. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sybil Vane's brother, James, is identifiable as a sailor because of his tattoos. I believe Sherlock Holmes notices and assigns tattoos the same kind of cultural value. According to wikipedia, it was during Captain James Cook's voyages to Polynesia from the 1760s to the 1780s that the idea of tattoo (from the Tahition word, tatau) was introduced into English culture.

Apparently the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, a member of Cook's expedition, came back to England with a tattoo. (portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1773)

By the mid-nineteenth century, tattoos were firmly established as the domain of seamen and soldiers - working-class Englishmen who had travelled widely and come into direct contact with tattoo culture.

Tattoos, however, were about to make an interesting social transition. In 1862, when the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) toured the Middle East, he acquired a tattoo of the Jerusalem Cross.

The Prince of Wales in Constantinople at the end of his Grand Tour (1862). Somewhere on his body, there is a fresh tattoo. (image via the Royal Collection)

By 1870, the trend had spread not only amongst the English aristocracy, but into the courts of Russia, Germany and Spain. And beginning in the 1880s, upper-class women also began to sport discreet tattoos. One of the most celebrated was Lady Randolph Churchill, who had a "dainty" and "elaborate" tattoo of a serpent entwining her left wrist.

Lady Randolph Churchill, with her signature bracelet. (image via NYPL)

 She frequently covered it with bracelets, but it was described in the New York Times in 1906. Tattoos were fashionable enough that Country Life magazine featured them in an article dated 27 January, 1900 - as if to kick off the new century. As you might expect from Country Life, it described “one of the most popular Masters of Foxhounds in England” who had “tally-ho!” tattooed on his forearm along with a fox’s head and brush and a hunting crop.

Like all fashion trends, however, tattoos were fairly swiftly brought down by mass imitation.

Nora Hildebrandt claimed that she was forced by Indians to receive hundreds of tattoos. The truth was more mundane: her father was a tattoo artist. (image via the Human Marvels)

Once performers like Nora Hildebrandt began displaying her hundreds of tattoos for the horror and delectation of the masses (she travelled as part of P. T. Barnum's American circus), aristocrats promptly lost interest in tattoo art.

I haven't. I've always been intrigued by the idea of a tattoo, yet never been able to choose a single motif or image that I'd want to wear on my body forever. In the meantime, I'll keep reading. May I suggest Margot Mifflin's Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo? To start you off, there are some amazing images pulled from Mifflin's book right here.

Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books). She blogs weekly at www.yslee.com.

THE (HISTORY) GIRLS' OWN PAPER by Leslie Wilson

I was given a copy of the 1899-1890 Girls' Own Annual when I was a teenager, by an old family friend; I don't know where she got it from: maybe it came from her mother, but she is dead now and I cannot ask her. It's a shame that we often don't ask people things until it is too late. It wasn't the kind of 'Christmas Special' that annuals were in my childhood, just the bound-up numbers of that year. I read them with great interest; the serials - 'Work, Wait, Win'; 'Kathleen's 'Handful,'' Elsie's Victory,' and the truly revolting 'Story of a Summer,' whose heroine, Winifred, gave up the man she loved and who loved her, so that her cousin could have him.

Kathleen's 'Handful.'

A high-risk strategy, if you ask me, but in the story the man obligingly did fall in love with the beautiful but emotionally-constipated Eva (Eva loved him, and Winifred 'knew' that Eva would only love once. Odd, that Victorian superstition. ) Winifred ended up devoting herself to her mother, a tyrannical invalid, and became the Angel in the House, though at the time I didn't know about that image. In the other stories, the heroines, especially Kathleen, were luckily less door-mattish, or I might have ended up binning the volume, and that would have been a pity.I read the advice from 'Medicus' - largely common-sensical - the historical articles, which amused me because I had travelled into history to look back at history. I made some of the 'home-made sweetmeats' toffee, and cocoa-nut tablet. They were good.

The book sat neglected, through my adult life after that - till I began to write about Victorian times, and then I remembered it, feared I had got rid of it, and whooped with pleasure when I found it. It is a mine of things that authors want to ask. I set my novel The Mountain of Immoderate Desires in 1899, just because I had such a wealth of material to hand in that volume. And I made Lily, the heroine of The Mountain, possess some copies of the paper, and use its words - usually in ways that would have horrified the virtuous Christian publisher - for guidance.
How useful I found: 'Dress: In Season and In Reason,' by the 'Lady Dressmaker', when I wanted to envisage the fashions of that era.

I think the lady on the left, particularly, looks as if she would run on wheels. See my post-it in the top corner.

There was a wonderful series of articles called: 'On the Purchase of Outfits for India and the Colonies.' From it I learned that each passenger on the P&O steamers (such as went to Hong Kong) was allowed a whacking 336lbs of luggage and that travellers to the East needed 'the tin boxes with plain pine covers, which are made for the purpose, for, owing to the climate and the insects, everything must be kept in tin, or else it will be spoilt.' Having lived in Hong Kong, I was familiar with the mould-inducing damp and the depredations of cockroaches that made this precaution necessary; and we too kept food in insect-proof containers and tins, if they weren't in the fridge. I also learned that woollen underwear was considered best for really hot climates, something I thought hilarious, till someone told me that really fine wool is excellent for wicking perspiration away from the skin. That was, of course, after I had made fun of my hero Samuel's woollen underwear in the novel, and it had been published. Oh, well..

Later, I found another volume in a second-hand bookshop, for 1899, and I bought that, just for interest. However, I do recommend the GOP for anyone wanting advice on the small domestic details of Victorian life. It was from the 'Answers to Correspondants' column that I discovered that ladies in 1889 were already learning how to operate a type-writer. The 'Girls' Own' title is misleading; the paper was intended not only for teenage girls but for young women setting up as housekeepers and others who wanted to train for a career. So it is a mine of information if you want to find out about Victorian women's work. I'm sure copies can be located nowadays on the web.

The 1899 volume has a set of chatty articles called: 'Three Girl-Chums, and their life in London rooms.' 'Ada is a type-writer in a very good office in the City. She has got on so well that she is earning £100 a year. Jane is a cookery teacher in a distant parish,' and Ada's sister. Marion Thomas lives with them and does the house-keeping for them, but she is working up 'a connection of music pupils.' What may be particularly useful to writers - perhaps to me, some day, is the detailing of the money they spent on their household items - two small enamel saucepans at eightpence-halfpenny and sixpence-halfpenny, a rolling pin at a shilling, weights and scales at fourteen shillings and sixpence - that's an expensive item, but we have upstairs a set of weights and scales perhaps of similar vintage, which my mother-in-law used till her death.

These kinds of minute details might be useful if you wanted to have your characters take a trip to Paris at the period. You could go for six pounds, if you were careful, and the article shows you exactly how. As well as the Louvre, Notre Dame, Chateau de Vincennes, etc, on the list of must-sees is the Morgue, where unidentified corpses were exhibited - supposedly for relatives to find missing loved ones, but in practice it became a ghoulish reality-show. Clearly 'our girls' had strong stomachs.

There's also a series called 'In Mine House,' by Lina Orman Cooper (author of 'The King's Daughter, etc.' Not 'authoress', I noticed with satisfaction.) Miss or Mrs Cooper can tell you just how jam was made in the nineteenth century and of her 'old lady's' (her mother's?) preference for not covering her jam-pots. 'If well boiled and made of fresh sound fruit, it should jell enough to keep without excluding air. A sheet of newspaper laid over the rows of pots' is all that is needed. But your jam-cupboard must be well ventilated. Lina knows how to do DIY, too. 'How well it is when the mistress of a house can wield hammer and gimlet and screwdriver' she tells us, thus driving another nail into the coffin of preconceptions about Victorian womanhood. You may find out, too, what was recommended for the Victorian medicine cupboard: 'some sweet nitre for feverishness, and some pilules of aconite; spirits of camphor for a cold, and a screw of lump sugar;' and many more.

Then there are the above-mentioned 'Answers to Correspondants.' The GOP's answerers supplied quotations the 'girls' wanted, told them how to deal with illness in their children, or 'a wild, unmanageable, girl' (send the clergyman to admonish her first, if all else fails, send her to a Home); opined on their handwriting (often severely), or the poetic offerings they sent up 'quite the usual thing we receive,' one poor girl was brutally told, 'not at all worth printing.' The GOP was often rude or at least forthright. 'The lady always speaks first, not the gentleman, so you were in the wrong, of course'. There is advice about how to train as a nurse, and as a teacher of the deaf; information about a Pension for Protestants on the Normandy coast (why did Protestants need a special Pension of their own? Maybe so that they wouldn't meet Marcel Proust),encouragement for a correspondant wrestling with 'bad tempers and evil thoughts', and a 'regret that we cannot recommend any depilatory.' Just as well; depilatories of the time probably removed your skin into the bargain. There is also advice on how to make a wrist support (perhaps as a result of too many hours at the type-writer?)
My favourite Answer to a Correspondant, however, is the one written to the enterprising young E.M.R.C.  'You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To receive clandestine love-letters, when you owe filial confidence to your mother and submission to her will and judgement, is most ungrateful as well as undutiful. But to take in letters of two men continually, through the blinds of your bedroom window, encouraging them both at the same time, is simply disgusting! 'How shall I squash them?' is a heartless question after so much encouragement. It would be well if your mother were informed of your unseemly conduct and would effectually 'squash' you.'
So who said teenagerdom was a post-war phenomenon?