I recently came across The Food of London by George Dodd (1856). It’s a dizzying compendium of statistics about the sales and consumption of food and drink in 1850s London. I can now tell you that about 100,000 people worked in the trade out of a population of about three million. I doubt if the […]
Mr Dickens’s New Words
I ended my January newsletter with the word ‘fanteeged’. I meant fatigued, but it seems to suggest fantastic, too. Sam Weller uses it in Pickwick Papers, referring to Mr Pickwick. And you would have been ‘fanteeged’ had you participated in a ‘farinagholkajingo”, a word which Dickens uses in Sketches by Boz (The Dancing Academy). It […]
About Mr Dickens
From The Hampshire Courier, February 10th, 1812: Births On Friday at Mile-end Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq., a son. Mile-end Terrace was in Portsmouth, a modest house with a basement kitchen, a parlour, two bedrooms and two attics – nothing to write home about. John Dickens – Esquire as he presented himself rather grandly […]
Ghost Stories
The Victorian age was the age of the ghost story – the Victorians were fascinated by the supernatural, by all sorts of matters connected to the spirit world. Seances were popular; there was a lot of table rapping, there was that desire to communicate with the other world. There was also a deep interest in […]