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Cynthia Longfield, Madam Dragonfly
”I find machetes so useful in the jungle, don’t you?” Cynthia Longfield, quoted in The Times, 9 July 1991 Cynthia Longfield, ‘Madam Dragonfly’, was born in London in 1896. Her home schooling there was interrupted by regular visits to her maternal grandparents’ farm in Cloyne, Co. Cork, where she enjoyed roaming the countryside. Her early love of…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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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‘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…