Anton Mauve

I went to a Anton Mauve exhibition in the Springer museum. Mauve was a nineteenth-century painter, painting Dutch weather and rural scenes. I was especially charmed by his depictions of farmer’s gardens.

The museum’s website, do visit it if you get the chance!
You can read some more about his life here.
There is no online gallery, only Google images.

Victorian Halloween!

A bit of a Halloween spirit with this cute Victorian witch!

(Her dress seems inspired on 18th century Rococo dresses and paniers, how intriguing! If anyone wants to analyse that, please feel free!)

Jane Austen’s Emma (or BBC’s Emma!)

By accident I caught the second episode of BBC’s recent adaption of Jane Austen’s Emma this weekend. It’s beautiful! I didn’t catch the story at all but sat for an hour, fascinated by the beautiful costumes, settings, and filming.



Apparently, almost all clothes were recycled from other movies and tv shows! You can read the list here.

I got so excited, I wanted to read the novel as well, which you can find here: Project Gutenberg

And if you like screenshots and icons, or you missed the first two episodes and would like to see them on your computer, go here: Livejournal’s BBC Costume Drama community.

Learning to knock like a gentleman.

Here is a quote from an article called “British Politeness and the Progress of Western Manners: An Eighteenth-Century Enigma” by Paul Langford. It’s eighteenth century but it speaks mostly of visitors to Great Britain after the peace treaty of Amiens, so after 1802!

It was easy to fall foul with of a system which like the British Constitution itself was unwritten yet intimidatingly authoritative. One subject that features frequently in the accounts of visitors to London was the seemingly trivial yet evidently perplexing matter of door-knocking, something that did not feature in conduct manuals. Servants were trained to respond to a hierarchy that extended from the single and almost silent touch of a milkman to the five deafening onslaughts of a duke or his footman. Foreigners initially adopted a hesitant, degerential approach which brought humiliation at the hands of servants. In due course the practise found its way to other cities, reminding visitors that learning to knock like a gentleman was an essential art in Britain.

Glass, greenhouses, & Dahlias

This is from a book I read called Tuinieren Door de Jaren Heen (I can’t find the English title for this! ) by A. Huxley and M. Michael.

In England between 1695 and 1699 there was a tax on glass objects. In 1746 it was re-instated, but at that time mostly for glass plates and windows. In 1810 the tax on windows was raised, and in 1812 the tax for all glass objects was raised so much that production began to slow down. Then the tax was slowly lowered again, until the entire tax ended in 1845. because of the rarity of large parts of glass and the high price of it, it was really in demand with the upper classes, who showed off their riches by building enormous glass greenhouses and winter gardens, which were greenhouses that looked like gardens and would protect plants and flowers from cold weather, so you could enjoy them even in winter.
Undoubtedly, the removal of the glass tax had something to do with the building of the Crystal Palace in 1851, which was at the time the largest glass construction ever build.

Dahlia’s were a very popular flower in the nineteenth century:, from 1813 on it was the most important flower for distributors, in 1830 there were 1500 varieties. Of course this fragile flower had to be preserved carefully, so protective cases were invented to protect the flowers from rain. Often these were very luxurious and decorated cases which could be placed over the flower.
Many other flowers got cases as well, or were protected by glass cases. The Victorians liked showy, fragile flowers like Dahlia’s and Lillies, flowers that required a lot of care and money to display to the best of their ability.

Here are a bunch of pictures from the book! Victorian lawnmowing:


A greenhouse or large case build against the window, which was very fashionable

A Wardian case, in which ferns were grown, and which was kept for decoration.

Some Victorian fashion prints

Recently, Jean-François de Buren (who writes at The Grand Tour and The De Büren Family) was kind enough to scan some images from a magazine for me, to share with you! The magazine is from 1866, and was the property of his great-great-grand aunt, Guillaumine Louise de Büren.

I hope you like them as much as I do! Thank you to Jean for scanning these!

Even more book-news: Dracula the Un-dead

On October 13, an official sequel to Dracula will come out. Amazon says:

“Dracula The Un-Dead is a bone-chilling sequel based on Bram Stoker’s own handwritten notes for characters and plot threads excised from the original edition. Dracula The Un-Dead begins in 1912, twenty-five years after Dracula “crumbled into dust.” Van Helsing’s protégé, Dr. Jack Seward, is now a disgraced morphine addict obsessed with stamping out evil across Europe. Meanwhile, an unknowing Quincey Harker, the grown son of Jonathan and Mina, leaves law school for the London stage, only to stumble upon the troubled production of “Dracula,” directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself.”

Apparently it’s written by Stoker’s nephew, Dacre Stoker. That name itself is befitting of a horror-novel, I think. I’m very curious! You can check it out here.

A few posts ago I wrote about Little Lord Fauntleroy and the fashion for Fauntleroy suits that existed. Immediately after I found a reference to it in another book, The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald!

“[The picture] showed a dandy of the nineties, spare and handsome, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown curls, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit.”

How fun! The book is said to be a bit autobiographical but since Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1894 it is doubtful that he is speaking about himself here, or maybe the Fitzgerald family was a bit unfashionable and wore Fauntleroy suits and bustles into the 1900s.

Speaking about fashion, here’s something funny I found on La Mode Illustree

opium-confessions and affordable books

If a book about a Little Lord Fauntleroy and his little velvet suits is to sweet for your taste, how about a book about opium and homelessness? In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) Thomas de Quincey tells the tale of his laudanum addiction, the way opium is taken, the way it works upon the mind and body, and how he finally managed to get clean again.
The book is supposed to be a cautionary tale, because telling of the joys of drugs was not something the Victorian Era agreed to. The book is split in parts, for example The Pleasures of Opium and The Pains of Opium. I think the part about the pleasures is a beautiful and enjoyable read, and the part about the pains is mostly quite boring, but you might feel differently.

You can read the e-text here. (And if you like to see some opium use in a movie, watch From Hell with Johnny Depp, it’s a most excellent movie!)

Unrelatedly, if you’re looking for affordable books on various topics, have a look here. I think these books would make excellent gifts to history-lovers!

Paying compliments in the Victorian era & Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy

Here’s a fragment from Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, in which you can see a little bit of the customs regarding compliments in the later half of the nineteenth century:

“Come here, Lord Fauntleroy,” she said, smiling; “and tell me why you look at me so.”
“I was thinking how beautiful you are,” his young lordship replied. Then all the gentlemen laughed outright, and the young lady laughed a
little too, and the rose color in her cheeks brightened.
“Ah, Fauntleroy,” said one of the gentlemen who had laughed most heartily, “make the most of your time! When you are older you will not
have the courage to say that.”
“But nobody could help saying it,” said Fauntleroy sweetly. “Could you help it? Don’t YOU think she is pretty, too?”
“We are not allowed to say what we think,” said the gentleman, while the rest laughed more than ever.


So there you have it. The name Hodgson Burnett might sound familiar: she was the writer of A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). Little Lord Fauntleroy was a much earlier work: it was published in 1886. I found the book to be an unexpectedly good read; it was very enjoyable, funny at times, and with a great and amusing use of language. It was so engaging even that I finished it in less than a day. You can read it online here.

An interesting fact is that this book, just like Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, influenced fashion. Little Lord Fauntleroy’s velvet suit with a white collar and his soft curls are mentioned often in the book, and apparently started a fashion (mostly with mothers of young boys) for little suits and pincurls for boys!