It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is one of the most remarkable English women of the eighteenth century, yet she remains relatively unknown outside eighteenth century scholarship. This is certainly undeserved, as she was an influential courtier, a prolific writer, and the author of the entertaining Turkish Embassy Letters, in which she wrote of her experiences living in …
The 19th century witnessed the rise of the celebrity musician. Previously, musicians were wholly dependent on aristocratic or ecclesiastical patrons, and their output was determined by the wishes of these sometimes despotic individuals. Bach, for instance, was a mere Kapellmeister, and Haydn was not much more than a court servant. Even Mozart was unhappily dependent …
Continue reading ‘Lisztomania’: Franz Liszt, sex, and celebrity
In 1851, the journalist Henry Mayhew published London Labour and the London Poor, a groundbreaking and influential survey of London's working classes and criminal underbelly. What is particularly striking about the work are the lengthy quotations describing their lives from the people themselves. The result is a poignant and sometimes humorous portrait of Victorian London's …