The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
It is hard today to come to terms with the speed of communication that existed some 150 years ago. In an age where instant video conferencing is available to all it can bring some of my readers up short when I tell them that even 50 or 60 years ago to speak to...
As we all celebrate Aspects of History Day – I thought I’d reflect on where AoH is after two years. The whole project: magazine, website and podcast has been hugely rewarding. After all, for the four years previously I’d worked in an obscure office at a large American...
A play within a play. A nod towards music hall theatre. A Wilde evening, with a subtle and suitable amount of smut. The Canterville Ghost is the perfect tonic for cheering up an audience which may be as gloomy as the weather at the moment (especially those who have...
The Hope Theatre has staged a coup in hosting the first UK production of Jen Silverman's The Moors. The play may be bizarre in places, but it is never dull. Phil Bartlett directs the show with ingenuity and precision. The play toys with certain tropes of 19th century...
Ronald, you wrote Queens of the Wild during 2020, when Covid struck the land, and we were all confined to our homes. Did this experience bring any historical examples to mind when writing the book – a time when plagues were a more frequent occurrence? Covid was...
The Huxleys. I like to think of nineteenth-century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and his twentieth-century zoologist grandson Julian as one very long-lived man. This Huxley lived from 1825–1975. Controversial exponent and explainer of evolution by natural selection,...
What's My Poison? ‘It is clear that the “favourite” poison with us is arsenic.’ So wrote Charles Dickens in his journal, Household Words, in December 1851. Dickens argues for the enforcement of laws regulating the sale of medicines. Dickens refers to the Sale of...
‘… the sufferings of which were dreadful … when I awoke with that horror upon me …’ Charles Dickens had a cold. Man flu? One might wonder when reading the dramatic description of his anguish. But he was a novelist given to melodrama at times, and, considering the...
Jean Briggs, welcome to Aspects of History! What prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in? It was my interest in Charles Dickens that decided the period. I was reading his journalism and found that he had written about the Victorian police...
I was looking for a drowned girl. My old friend, Professor Swaine Taylor had provided the grisly forensic detail in his Medical Jurisprudence: ‘the eyelids livid, and the pupils dilated; the mouth closed or half-open, the tongue swollen and congested, frequently...
