Browsing Category
1750-1900
Arthur John Story’s Do’s and Don’ts for the Victorian Fresher
In 1893 a new guide for freshers began to circulate at St. John’s College, Cambridge. It was authored by ‘A Sympathiser’, later identified as Undergraduate Arthur John Story. Story was an Undergraduate at St John’s from 1893 to 1896…
Mary Ellen Pleasant, Businesswoman and Civil Rights Activist
If you’ve heard of Mary Ellen Pleasant before, then chances are that what you’ve heard wasn’t good. “Mammy Pleasant” has often been a favourite of sensational accounts, the “evil Voodoo Queen of San Francisco” who made a good villain to…
Caroline Norton, Criminal Conversationalist
It's a testament to Caroline Norton's charm and personality that despite her involvement in a sex scandal that nearly brought down a British government in the notoriously prudish 19th century, she managed to remain free of public distaste.…
Roger Casement, British Knight and Irish Martyr
Roger Casement was born in Dublin in 1864. His father, Captain Roger Casement, was a Belfast-born soldier who had served in India and fought in the bloody war for Afghanistan in 1842. Young Roger was raised on his father’s tales of travel,…
The Butterfly With Lightning Fists | Pete McCoy, Listowel’s Prize Fighter
Pete McCoy was born in Listowel on the 15th of October, 1856. From there he went across the broad Atlantic where he carved out a career for himself as a prize fighter.
McCoy stood at 5' 10'' and had a right hand punch that some opponents…
Samuel Pratt aka Courtney Melmoth, Playwright and Writer
Samuel Jackson Pratt was born on Christmas Day 1749 in the historic English town of St Ives. At the time it was the last stop before London for many travellers, as well as being a nexus for canal traffic to move onland for transportation to…
1816, the Year Without a Summer | The Eruption of Mount Tambora
The summer of 1816 has an unusual claim to fame. It is known as The Year Without a Summer. How did it come by this unusual moniker? The answer lies in the events of the previous year. In 1815 Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the…
Ignaz Semmelweis, Persecuted Medical Pioneer
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was born in Buda in Hungary on the first of July 1818. Nowadays Buda and Pest form a single city (Budapest), but that unification wouldn’t happen for another 55 years. Ignaz was the child of an ethnically German…
Horatio Bottomley, British Politician and Fraudster
Horatio Bottomley was born in the East End of London in 1860. He had only one sibling - an elder sister named Florence. When he was three years old his father, an ex-tailor named William, died in Bethlehem Hospital (better known as Bedlam).…
Delia Bacon, Writer and Shakespeare Theorist
Delia Bacon was born in a log cabin in Ohio in the February of 1811. Her father David was a Congregationalist minister who had been born in Connecticut forty years earlier. In 1801 he had tried to establish a mission in Detroit, but it had…