I read this during the pandemic of 2020, trapped in my own house.
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson, 2010
- Confetti GPS: Guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes with personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridor to help them find their way back to, or between, rooms. (p138)
- Dude so cheap that he refused to dot his i's when he wrote, to save on ink (p213)
- Another dude so rich, he owns two houses side by side, one to live in, and one to redecorate over and over (p335-6)
- The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Co. and the Stiff Express Railway, 1854 (p390)
- The track transported mourners and coffins to two private stations within the cemetery: the Brookwood Cemetery South station served the Anglican sections, whilst the North station served the nonconformist sections. The London terminus, which opened in 1854, was specially built to perfectly meet the needs of its primary purpose, with waiting rooms for mourners and funeral services, storage for coffins, and a hydraulic lift to raise the coffins to platform level for their transport to the Cemetery. Brookwood Cemetery and the London Necropolis Train [link]
- The railway was operated by the London Necropolis Company, who offered three different classes of funerals. First class funeral parties were offered private waiting rooms and carriages, and could gather to watch the coffin being loaded into a first-class compartment. Third class parties shared a communal waiting room; however, Brookwood offered each body an individual plot, granting a level of dignity to the “pauper class”, as most other cemeteries continued the practice of mass graves for the poor. Brookwood Cemetery and the London Necropolis Train [link]
- Society for the Rescue of Boys Not Yet Convicted of Any Criminal Offence (p591)
- Not YET [Homer Simpson]
Thomas Barnardo's Fake photographs of 1858 (p595)
After his first homes for orphans began to open in the 1870s, Barnardo used photographs of his rescued children to use in adverts for fundraising - of which he was a master."Before" and "after" pictures would be taken, showing orphans in a state of neglect immediately after they had been rescued from the street, and then afterwards, all scrubbed clean and full of promise.But in 1877 Barnardo found himself accused of artificially staging the photographs, alongside other allegations that he enriched himself with charity money and that children were physically abused in his homes.In a pamphlet entitled Startling Revelations, the minister said: "[Barnardo] tears their clothes, so as to make them appear worse than they really are. A lad named Fletcher is taken with a shoeblack's box upon his back, although he never was a shoeblack."In July 1877, Barnardo admitted in court the artistic license he took with the photography, claiming that he never intended to make particular portraits but rather wanted to depict individuals as representative of their "class".The case was so important because the status of photography was, at the time, a medium by which some kind of visual "truth" was supposed to be revealed. The idea that Barnardo had staged many of his photographs destabilised a Victorian notion of what it was to be an "authentically" poor child.[It's still being done in 2002, for the foundation he started, and nobody seems to mind anymore, because the intent is good.]-The Echoes of Barnardo's Altered Imagery, Mark Oliver and Zeta McDonald, The Guardian, Oct 2002
No comments:
Post a Comment