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I Like Monday 27
Aug. 4th, 2014 06:00 pmThis Monday, I like... Jeremy Clay's Victorian Strangeness series.
Image taken from this particular column in the series
They say that the past is a foreign country. Thanks to Jeremy Clay's Victorian Strangeness series at the BBC News Magazine Monitor blog, we can find out exactly how foreign the nineteenth century was. Each Saturday, Mr Clay, the author of The Burgler Caught by a Skeleton, posts a new tale of the outlandish, ghoulish, bizarre and sensational, gleaned from the glut of newspapers and periodicals of the Victorian age. So far, we have met with a lion in the spa town of Llandrindod, monks running a black market trade in clothes stolen from corpses, a wife-beater getting a taste of his own medicine from an all-female mob, and a monkey whose interest in public hangings does not end well.
The nineteenth century is a time period that's close to my heart: old enough to be properly 'historical', modern enough that you can see how it connects with today. These tall-but-true tales are a fascinating and wry glimpse into a time when technology seemed to run amok, eccentrics were ten a penny, and everybody was obsessed with death, particularly violent death. Suddenly, all those ludicrous Victorian potboilers don't seem quite so ludicrous anymore...
Image taken from this particular column in the series
They say that the past is a foreign country. Thanks to Jeremy Clay's Victorian Strangeness series at the BBC News Magazine Monitor blog, we can find out exactly how foreign the nineteenth century was. Each Saturday, Mr Clay, the author of The Burgler Caught by a Skeleton, posts a new tale of the outlandish, ghoulish, bizarre and sensational, gleaned from the glut of newspapers and periodicals of the Victorian age. So far, we have met with a lion in the spa town of Llandrindod, monks running a black market trade in clothes stolen from corpses, a wife-beater getting a taste of his own medicine from an all-female mob, and a monkey whose interest in public hangings does not end well.
The nineteenth century is a time period that's close to my heart: old enough to be properly 'historical', modern enough that you can see how it connects with today. These tall-but-true tales are a fascinating and wry glimpse into a time when technology seemed to run amok, eccentrics were ten a penny, and everybody was obsessed with death, particularly violent death. Suddenly, all those ludicrous Victorian potboilers don't seem quite so ludicrous anymore...
