By Arlys Holloway & Vaughn Treude Our model: Arlys Endres, photo by @ In our extended celebration of Valentine’s Day, we’d like to summarize some of our research about love in Victorian times. We’ve learned some interesting and sometimes surprising facts. The Victorian period, which is defined by Queen Victoria’s long reign as monarch of […]
Black Butler is a popular manga series by Yana Toboso that first appeared in 2006. A few years later, A-1 Pictures adapted it as an anime, directed by Toshiya Shinohara. (Noriyuki Abe directed season 3 and the animated movie “Book of Murder.”) The story concerns an orphaned English aristocrat and the butler who serves and […]
* A tip of the hat to the great Sam Cooke. If I’m not mistaken, this is my grandfather Otto Treude circa 1904. In those days, moms put all babies in dresses, both male and female. To be successful, works of historical fiction, or in a quasi-historical genre, need to have an air of […]
Christmas is one of the few times in the year when we Americans celebrate our nation’s European heritage. Though Christmas itself dates back over a millennium and some of our holiday traditions are ancient, many hail from the Victorian era. I believe this is partly due to the surplus of great literature from that […]
It’s that time again, to hear the conservative lament about the “War on Christmas.” Is this, as the New York Times has opined, merely in our imagination? I’d agree that the term “war” is a bit of an exaggeration. “Cultural skirmish” might be a better fit. No one has outlawed Christmas in America, but […]
This charming 2009 book by Gail Carriger (pen name of Tofa Borregaard, a more interesting name in my opinion) has an intriguing premise. Its protagonist is a woman with no soul. Unlike Bart’s nightmarish experience on The Simpsons , her lack of a soul doesn’t seem to be a problem. The main effect of her […]
The hat pin has gone down in history as one of the most surprising, yet practical weapons at a Victorian woman’s disposal. As the amazing lovely hats of the period grew bigger, so did the hat pin, which could be artfully concealed among their ornate decorations. Some were up to thirteen inches long and resembled […]
