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Scandinavian Artefacts in John Lee’s Private Museum
John Lee’s private museum at Hartwell House was said to contain some 4,000 items. The main room’s sixteen large glass cases and several smaller cabinets formed a ‘miscellaneous collection of articles culled from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; as well as antiquarian relics, and works of industrial art.’ The museum had sections devoted to the arts…
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John Lee’s Walking Tour of Ireland, 1806–07
On 31 July 1806, John Fiott, later known as John Lee, left London to embark on a seven-month walking tour of Ireland, England and Wales. I wrote about his life, and about his walking tour of England in Wales in earlier posts. This post will look at the six months he spent walking around the southern half…
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Agnes Mary Clerke, an Irish Astronomer in Italy and London
Agnes Mary Clerke had no formal education and, despite the gender bar of the male-dominated professional scientific world, she became one of the most important astronomers and science writers of the Victorian period, and has a moon crater named in her honour. Hear me speak about Agnes as part of the Illuminate Herstory festival at…
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‘Balloonacy’ in the Arctic, 1799
The first air balloon launch in the Arctic took place at Enontekiö, Finland, in July 1799. It came about with the meeting of two travelling Englishmen and a local pastor. Edward Daniel Clarke, later first professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University, was then employed as tutor to a young travelling gentleman, John Marten Cripps. The…
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A Rupert’s Land Nativity, 1807
With Christmas just days away, my mind has turned to seasonal tales I have come across in my research. One that stands out is the story of Isabel Gunn. Isabel, alias John Fubbister, alias Mary Fubbister, was born in Orkney in 1780. In 1805–6, she met John Scarth, a Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trader who was…
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Grief and Hardships on the Family Tour
Between 1827 and 1854, Dorothea and John Ladeveze Adlercron of Moyglare, Co. Meath, and their children made a series of tours of France, Switzerland and Italy. Dorothea (1800–79) was daughter of Abraham George Rothe (1768–1846) of Kilkenny and Anne Salisbury (d. 1842). Detailed records of these tours survive in Dorothea’s diaries and the passports issued to the family in various…
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Dublin Obstetrician Meets ‘Ideal Man’ in the Arctic, 1812
In 1812, Thomas McKeevor, a young Dublin obstetrician, crossed the Atlantic as physician to around 70 Irish and Hebridean migrants to the Red River Colony or “Selkirk Settlement” in Canada. In 1819, he published a short, 76-page account of the journey, describing Canadian natural history and the Inuit and First Nations. The book bore a long, descriptive title typical…
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Peter Fidler: the fur-trader who trekked 48,000 miles
Peter Fidler was one of Canada’s greatest exploratory surveyors and his work formed the basis for the mapping of Western Canada. He produced two large-scale shoreline sketch maps, eight smaller-scale maps, and 373 segmental sketch maps, representing 7,300 miles of track and river. While travelling an estimated 48,000 miles by foot and canoe, he assisted in the establishment…
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John Lee’s Walking Tour of England and Wales, August 1806
See John Lee’s biography here. On 31 July 1806, 21-year-old John Fiott (later known as John Lee) set out on a seven-month walking tour of England, Wales, and Ireland. He walked almost every day and kept a detailed diary of the things he saw and the people he met. Those diaries, totalling over 540 manuscript pages,…
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Attempted Murder and Swindling Children: Irish Accounts of 19th-Century Belarus
“I have just written the word Kattova, and what think you, Ladys and gentlemen the place is like?” (Martha Wilmot to her mother, 29 June 1804, Royal Irish Academy, Wilmot papers, MS 12L24, p. 216) Today, Belarus is a country relatively few Irish people visit. In the early nineteenth century, however, the region was the westernmost portion of the…