Victorian Blogaround

If you are looking for a new online procrastination aid with a nineteenth-century twist, allow me to recommend the Wellcome Collection’s High Tea game. Spend hours you could be dedicating to productive research smuggling narcotics and selling tea in the decade preceding the opium wars.

In other news:

• In honour of certain current events, Edwardian Promenade has an ongoing series of posts on C19th royal weddings.

• The Virtual Victorianist, meanwhile, offers a brief history of Easter eggs.

• Following the Cadbury link to Birmingham, Art Daily reports that the Library of Birmingham has bought a collection of photographs of the Prince of Wales’s ‘Tour of the East’ in 1862.

• On Sunday May 1, ITV will be showing a documentary with Andrew Lloyd Webber discussing the Pre-Raphaelites (part of their ‘Perspectives’ series).

• The Victorian Peeper has an interesting post on Victorian dust heaps.

• While a 1901 article in the Daily Mail dubbed Dorset Street “The Worst Street in London”. (Edwardian promenade)

• The Wellcome Library has a series of posts on ‘Stigmatics of the South Tyrol’ which defy synopsis, and are rather wonderful.

Finally, in case you should ever find yourself in a situation where it’s vitally important to explain the digital revolution to a citizen of the mid-nineteenth century, here’s how to explain the Internet to a C19th Street Urchin, and how to explain Amazon’s Kindle to Charles Dickens.

Victorian Blogaround

Today, poor old  Edward Lear is unwell, weary, and most miserable. But in better news from around the Victorianist blogosphere:

• Pre-Raphaelite Art has some beautiful pictures of a Victorian dress made from 1,000 beetle wings, which has been recently restored.

• The BBC has an interesting piece on the diaries of Abdul Karim: Queen Victoria and Abdul: Diaries reveal secrets.

• This is a photograph of Henry Ford racing in 1901.

• But this is not a photograph of Lewis Carroll.

• The Victorian Peeper posts an essay on Representing the Unrepresentable: Portraying Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, on the Victorian Stage.

• One can listen to a recording of Paul Lincke’s 1899 “Luna Waltz” played on a 1905 Mira 18 1/2 inch Concert Grand Console Music Box. (This music is from Frau Luna, an operetta about hot-air ballooning to the moon.)

• NINES have An Informal Review of the Google Art Project

• The Virtual Victorian talks about Pteridomania: The Victorian Fern Craze

• While there’s information on why Humphrey Bogart’s mother’s claim to fame in her own right at the Edwardian Promenade: Fascinating Women: Maud Humphrey

• Finally, over at the Cat’s Meat Shop, Lee Jackson has two great posts about Victorian finances: A Plumber and Family and 150 – 200.

Monday Blogaround 13/6/10

• The Victorian Web has a wealth of new material for June. View their post with links to their updates here.

• The Bronte Parsonage Blog reports on the annual Bronte Society weekend. Speakers included Elaine Showalter and Lucasta Miller.

• Lee Jackson at the Cat’s Meat Shop posts an informative guide to vampyres, penned by Frederick George Lee, and published in Reynold’s Miscellany (1849).

• Reflections on Dracula in Twilight and Goth Janes: Nineteenth-century Young Adult Fiction Today at the Floating Academy blog.

• The Celebrated Meen Fun: Lidian at The Virtual Dime Museum writes about a mid-nineteenth century cosmetic for “Restoring, Beautifying, and Preserving the Skin and Complexion, Preventing Cutaneous Eruptions, Chapping, and Obviating too Copious Perspiration.”

• While The Quack Doctor has a piece on The Poor Man’s Friend - guaranteed to cure everything from sore eyes to scrophula – the rather worrying recipe for which finally came to light in 2003.

• Via, Victorian Peeper – a six-degrees of Kevin Bacon chart, which connects back to eminent victorians, including Queen Victoria herself.

• Meanwhile, Edward Lear has been having a rather rainy and uneventful week.