Small histories, closely read
Victorian Footnotes
Essays from the margins of the nineteenth century — Staten Island cricket grounds, a Victorian villain or two, and the odd note on Mr Wilde.
From the journal
11 entriesPlaces
A Street named…
The street names of Devonport, Auckland, keep a Victorian literary past alive: Scott, Cowper, and the notorious Bulwer-Lytton, husband of Rosina Wheeler.
Cartoons
Cartoon of the Week
A Thomas Nast cartoon from Harper's, 'Blaine Language', and a one-line caption: what a difference 138 years doesn't make.
Books
Book of the month
Catherine Jinks's Charlatan follows Thomas Guthrie Carr, mesmerist and showman, around Australia and New Zealand between 1865 and 1886.
Cartoons
History rhyming again?
An 1896 Judge cartoon of William Jennings Bryan and the Populists swallowing the Democratic mule, and a note on where populism comes from.
Brooklyn
“Mr Wilde’s Thrilling Legs”
Oscar Wilde's 1882 American tour is well known; the vitriol the press poured on him is less so. The Brooklyn Eagle's review is a fair sample.
Auckland
The Opening Ceremony
Reading the Auckland Star's report of the opening of the Auckland Technical School on 10 June 1895, the 105 years between the school and the university do not seem so far apart.
Echoes
Tom and Jerry
Before the cat and the mouse there were Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn, Pierce Egan's Regency rakes, whose names attached themselves to beer houses and a Christmas eggnog.
On this day
On this day… December 29th 1871
One page of the Hull Packet, 140 years on: Marx snubbing Bradlaugh, censored pantomimes, the Peculiar People dancing, and a mysterious 'Mary Ann' at a Sheffield grinding wheel.
Staten Island
The Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club
A stray line in the Staten Islander for 1886 led to a cricket club founded in 1872, the first tennis court in the United States, and a ground that briefly hosted major league baseball.
New Zealand
Hatch, Victorian Villain or Forgotten Hero
An invitation to a one-man play in Devonport turns up Joseph Hatch, Invercargill mayor and MP, who boiled two million penguins for oil on Macquarie Island.
People
Foundation Footnote: John De Morgan
A fading photograph of the 1876 Plumstead Common riot led to twenty years on the trail of a professional agitator who ended up writing dime novels on Staten Island.
Victorian Footnotes is an independent history journal, rebuilt and kept from its own web archive. Where a piece quotes a period source, the quotation is preserved; on method and sources, see the about page.