Hospitality and Treachery: Something Wicked This Way Comes
As you gather people around your table this festive season, sharing hospitality with friends and neighbours, spare a…
British History
Sculpture Victorious
The exhibition Sculpture Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837–1901, currently showing at the Yale Center for British…
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 30
‘The fact that sewers and cesspools brought miasma into the home was an important factor, creating powerful anxieties. Fear of…
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 28
‘In the previous arrangement, no-one cared how many friends and family shared a room – nor even pigs….
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 27
‘The capital was increasingly blighted by darker, longer visitations of gloom; and doctors were able to collect more…
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 26
‘The Lady’s Newspaper, keen to plug a new shopping street, waxed lyrical: ‘the most loathsome of the haunts of vice…
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 25
‘The idea that women – particularly respectable women – might want or need purpose-built public toilets, on the streets of the capital,…
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 16
‘Respectable householders and shopkeepers regularly wrote letters to the parish authorities, describing disused doorways or entrances being used…
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 15
‘Remember, a filthy person indicates filthy habits; dirty in his apartments, he will be dirty in his mind;…
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 10
‘Though the dustmen may come regularly once a week and empty the dustbin, if it is carelessly filled…
Scotland Decides: Global Politics and the Independence Referendum
In the wake of the Scottish independence referendum, which takes place on the 18th September, Yale author James E….
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 9
‘If one lives in dear, dirty old London, [washing] three times a day is none too often’ …
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 8
‘For many Victorians, the capital’s slums were not a source of misery but a profitable little investment.’ …
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 7
‘In 1849, the notion of modest females requiring such public conveniences was almost inconceivable; or perhaps Bazalgette merely thought such…
Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 6
‘Few working men could afford the luxury of a bathing costume. Most (in)famously, the Serpentine was ‘obscene with…