Sakura of DOOM

I suppose people will never not be interested in the Mary Toft rabbit-birth case: this however is a somewhat different take born of going into a particular archive, Mary Toft and the Radical Birth Control Movement (an archive of which I have knowledge), though I am perhaps more interested that Griffith was asking Helena Wright to ask her side-piece, Kenneth Bruce MacFarlane, a distinguished historian, for reading recommendations. But that is because the ladies running that clinic, who were trying to make birth control a respectable cause were all into all sorts of what would now be considered polyamorous configurations.

(I will not advance my critiques from my personal knowledge of the birth control movement of the 20s and 30s....)

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Baptism record at Manchester Cathedral offers insight into Black Mancunian life in Georgian-era England:

When the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson gave a sermon in 1787 at Manchester Cathedral – during the city’s first mass meeting against the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans – he saw a “great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit”.
However, little is known about Black Mancunians in the Georgian era, which makes one recently rediscovered entry in parish records at Manchester Cathedral particularly significant.

The 6‑7 craze offered a brief window into the hidden world of children:

But as media scholars who study children’s culture, we didn’t view the meme with bewilderment or exasperation. Instead, we thought back to our own childhoods on three different continents – and all the secret languages we spoke.
....
With or without access to the internet, children will continue to transform language and games to suit their needs – which, yes, includes getting under the skin of adults.

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Not precisely 'history from below' - this was still the monarch's court, after all - but looking beyond the obvious players and how much there is to discover about them beyond the immediately apparent: Dwarfism, Institutionalisation and Marginalisation at the Court in Early Bourbon France:

I aim to demonstrate through my new Transactions article that a meticulous examination of archival sources can reveal far more about the lives and activities of people with dwarfism – and marginalised people in general – than the archive’s apparent silence initially suggests.
At the same time, I hope this study can serve as another example, alongside my book on Louis XIII’s court, of the rich potential in an approach to court studies that de-centres the monarch, his ministers and absolutism to better understand the court – its institutions and its culture – in its own right.

The man who invented the Tube: or rather, had the idea and campaigned for it, died shortly before the opening of the Metropolitan line, which may have something to do with his absence from the annals.

Brain’s sex differences are subtle and contradictory, large MRI study finds:

But even apparently null results, as in the current study, are useful, Sanchís Segura says, “because it’s important to talk about when men and women are similar” in a field that is biased toward finding bias. For example, the way brain activation mapped onto behavior was largely the same for men and women, the new study found.
“You can prove that a difference exists, but you cannot prove that a difference doesn’t exist,” she says. “You can put into PubMed, ‘sex differences,’ and you will have thousands of papers, but what if I want to look for the absence of differences? We don’t even have a word.”

No evidence for ‘witches’ marks’ claims at old English buildings, historian says:

Over the years, English Heritage and Historic England have claimed to have identified large numbers of “witches’ marks” or “ritual protection symbols” on the walls of historic buildings, including medieval churches and houses.
Now a leading architectural historian has said there is “absolutely no evidence” that these marks have anything to do with witches or any “mystical meanings”.
Daisy wheels, or hexafoils, are among symbols that are no more than the marks of stonemasons who worked on those buildings, according to Jennifer Alexander, a professor of architectural history at Warwick University and author of a new study.

What Do You Do with a Phantom Sailor Suit? A New Note with Some "New" Old Evidence on Cornell Woolrich, the Blackton Sisters and the Infamous Story of the Sex Diary

I had some vague knowledge of Woolrich, but pretty much only as 'er, wrote noir novels in the 30s or thereabouts? some of them became movies???'

I'm also slightly sceptical of the 'unconsummated marriage' alternative narrative simply because if you realised you had made A Dreadful Mistake this was probably an easy out via annulment? (will concede that I have personally written scholarly article deconstructing a famous allegedly non-consummated marriage narrative in the light of the British divorce laws of the early C20th)

But the whole 'create sensationalist account on basis of I think this happened/I made it all up' is not unfamiliar to moi.

What I read

Finished Second Wind, which was really a bit kitchen-sinky in all the stuff that happened to Our Hero the Physicist Turned Weatherman - I thought Rare Form of Bovine TB was really going a bit far after all the flying through hurricanes etc.

Finished Free for the book-group - account of growing up in Albania just before and just after the Fall of Communism, in a family with rather a lot of intricate backstory on both sides. And a lot of it narrated via perspective of very young person who is, understandably, not being told everything by the parents and living under that particular regime.

Then read JD Robb, Stolen in Death, (In Death #62) (2026), and while I am always pleased when Dallas is not chasing a serial killer or someone with weird perverse agenda, this one did not seem to me one of the top entries in the series, quite apart from the jewel theft from the TATE!!! blooper. (I was trying to construct any scenarios in which there would be v pricey jewels on display alongside, you know, all the PAINTINGS and some sculptures.)

Then I re-read, the first time in a Very Long Time, George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). A lot of it reads like practice-steps for Middlemarch, which has so much more going for it. The plot-stuff to do with legacies, lost heirs, etc, is pretty clunky. Felix himself is somewhat of a pain. There's not much of her humour. Even so, there's some terrific stuff there.

On the go

Winifred Holtby, Poor Caroline (1931), which I appear to have re-read slightly more recently than I thought, though still not very recently.

Up next

There's a new Literary Review. Otherwise, feel I am on a bit of a re-reading things kick.

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1,000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students.

This would be rather startling to the ladies who had studied as home students, at Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall, St Hugh's and St Hilda's, before women were admitted to Oxford degrees which was what actually happened in 1920 -

- and those ladies who were still around were there to collect the degrees they were now entitled to.

I am so hoping that this is a blurb produced either by AI or by some intern at the publishers who has not actually read the book but has gathered that it is about women going to Oxford in 1920?

Because if the book is written in some apprehension that there were No Female Students among the dreaming spires before 1920 I hope the author is visited in her sleep by the shades of all, or at least some of, the women who were, who included some notoriously stroppy and acerbic characters.

This is even more egregious than the historical romance which posited a daughter of an Oxford prof at a date of obligatory celibacy for College fellows, which is a bit niche perhaps, but Women's Struggle for Education is surely well-documented???

(Come on down, Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford: a fragment of history)

In further Did Not Do The Research, or at least have a Brit-Picker, JD Robb Stolen in Death has significant plot around theft of Important Jewels - from the Tate in London, wtf, surely you meant the V&A....