Historianka

Tag: nineteenth century

  • The Nineteenth-Century ‘Wedding Tour’ 

    A wood fire, a heap of congratulatory letters, and the smiles of her who every day ncreases [sic] my dependence on her love, made our breakfast table delightful – Charles Sneyd Edgeworth, 5 Sept 1813 The post-wedding holiday that we now call a ‘honeymoon’ emerged in the late eighteenth century, when couples from the European…

  • Scientific Travels in Nineteenth-Century Donegal

    Donegal welcomed some notable scientific travellers in the nineteenth century. They were drawn to the region principally because it was, in the words of one of the era’s most celebrated scientists, Humphry Davy, ‘in many respects peculiar and out of the track of ordinary tourists.’[1] These people were attracted by what they saw as the…

  • Mending her health: Irish Women in Eighteenth-Century Spa

    The small mountain town of Spa in present-day Belgium had been well-known for its mineral springs from the sixteenth century, but its popularity with visitors soared in the eighteenth century. The town grew, and developed amenities like the Parc de Sept Heures, assembly rooms and a casino. It attracted the wealthiest families in Europe, as…

  • Catharine Parr Traill, Author of Natural Histories for Children

    Catharine Parr Traill (1802-1899) was a prolific author who published children’s books, emigrants’ guides, and popular natural histories. Under the name Catharine Parr Strickland, she published at least 15 moral tales and natural histories for children between 1818 and 1831.  Catherine had a great deal of knowledge about natural history, and in her books she…

  • Anna Maria Chetwood – a forgotten 19th-century Irish novelist?

    Anna Maria Chetwood was the author of at least two anonymously-published novels published in the 1820s. She was also not the author of at least two anonymously-published novels published in the 1820s. Despite my efforts to confirm either one of these statements, she remains for me Schroedinger’s novelist. There are layers and chains of contradictory…

  • A Derry Merchant’s Memoir, 1830s

    While doing some other research in Library and Archives Canada some years ago, I came across a reference in the catalogue to an anonymous diary describing a journey from Derry to Canada in 1830. Intrigued, I took a copy of the manuscript and filed it away for later. But the author’s anonymity bothered me, as…

  • Sarah Curran’s Previously Unknown Poetry

    Sometimes, research leads to unexpected places. My 20-year obsession with the nineteenth-century travellers and diarists Martha and Katherine Wilmot has introduced me to some fascinating Irish, English and Russian women of the era. Women like Princess Dashkova, friend and confidante of Catherine the Great, first woman president of a learned academy (Russian Academy, 1783), and…

  • Lovers and ‘Paupers’: the ‘Gap Year’ in the 1830s

    This post takes a look at another young gentleman on a series of ‘gap year’ tours – William Hartigan Barrington, son of Sir Matthew, who built Glenstal Castle, Co. Limerick. Barrington was interested in new experiences, meeting young women, and finding out about poverty. Has the ‘gap year’ changed all that much? Between 1833 and…

  • Befriending Byron and Poaching Antiquities: John Lee in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1810–1815

    Who spends five years travelling in the Mediterranean and Middle East, hangs out with Byron in Athens, and gets in trouble for poaching Greco-Roman antiquities? A Cambridge maths graduate called John Lee, that’s who. This post looks at some key moments in Lee’s five-year tour of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East in 1810–1815. He…

  • John Ross’s Arctic Artefacts on Display in Oxford

    The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, is home to thousands of treasures. Many of those treasures were taken from (or “gifted by”) indigenous peoples around the world for study or as status symbols in European museums, universities, and private homes.  Among the artefacts on display in the Museum, is a collection of Inuit hunting and fishing tools.…