Welcome to my very first Victorian true crime post! I chose a topic close to my heart because it’s related to prejudice against the Irish in the 1800s. I write about that terrible time for the Irish in my historical fantasy series Grimoire Society of Dark Acts. In the series, we meet a few Irish […]
One of the things that is so well-loved about stories like Cinderella and similar fairy tales is the rags-to-riches trope. This…is not that. This is riches-to-greater-riches, and then an insulting poem! Here’s what happened. The Bride, The Groom, and The Jewels On October 13, 1859, 18-year-old Frances Amelia Bartlett married 55-year-old Cuban planter Don Esteban […]
Memorial Day didn’t start out as a day honoring all soldiers who’d fallen. It didn’t even start out being called Memorial Day! Like all good things, Memorial Day started in the Victorian era. The Civil War “claimed more lives than any conflict in US history and required the establishment of the country’s first national cemeteries.” […]
Do you relate Christmas to burning yourself over flames while trying to grab hold of fruits and nuts? No? If you were living in the 19th century, that’s part of what you’d look forward to during the holiday season. Let me explain. Snap-dragon is the game we’re talking about. To play, you turn down the […]
It’s National Ice Cream Day! It’s also a day to celebrate a very special Victorian lady—Agnes B. Marshall, known as the Queen of Ices! Agnes (born in 1855) was quite the culinary entrepreneur and cook in her time, as is evidenced by the four cookbooks she wrote, one of them titled The Book of Ices, […]
“The ‘New Woman’”, Stereograph by Keystone View Company, Missouri History Museum This late 19th century image is meant to be satirical, a role reversal of men and women of the time. The woman is “wearing the pants” (not literally allowed in real life yet though, that was still off limits), wearing a masculine hat, and […]
St. Patrick’s Day has become synonymous with drinking in modern days, but do you know what kinds of celebrations they had in the 1850s? The Pilot, an Irish-American newspaper in Boston, dedicated the whole of page 2 of their April 10, 1858 issue to the many celebrations in different areas of the States and world. […]
On February 27 in 1869, The Pilot, an Irish-American newspaper, printed a disturbing letter from a Catholic priest that led me to do a bit of true crime investigation. The priest was writing on behalf of a girl named Margaret Nolan, 19. Ten or eleven years prior, she had been kidnapped while playing in the […]
Ever heard of Keokuk, Iowa? Some interesting history on an unusual location…. FOUNDING A NEWSPAPER Iowa was admitted to the Union in December of 1846, and its population was about 500. Around that time, a writer named Robert B. Ogden and his brother decided to head over to Iowa to open up a newspaper. Traveling […]
On this day in 1860, the entire front page of The Pilot, a Boston newspaper, was dedicated to “The Calamity at Lawrence”, a now forgotten disaster. The Pemberton Mills at Lawrence in Massachusetts suddenly collapsed, crushing an estimated 300-500 workers. One in four workers were killed. The building consisted of one six-story main building and […]