Logo Loading

Fascinating Victorian Facts

“An Epoch in Our Social History”: The Diamond Wedding of 1859

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 […]

Read more

Celebrate the Queen of Ices on National Ice Cream Day!

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, […]

Read more

The Pemberton Mills Collapse

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 […]

Read more
1 2