Addictive Research

I recently stumbled across an Ebay auction of a double volume of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS. Of course, I had heard of that newspaper before (after all, my current academic research focuses on Victorian periodicals), but I hadn't realised what a gem it was. But the person selling his copy on Ebay kindly provided pictures. OH MY! Where are my smelling salts?!?!?!?

That volume on Ebay was in a bad shape and the price was already quite high when I discovered the page, so I decided not to bid on it. The volume that I ended up buying (because, hey, it's for research, right? and I can use it for both my academic work and my creative work -- awesome! it's like "Buy one get one free"!!!) arrived today. In a word: it's gorgeous!

So far I've just leafed through it and took pictures of some of the highlights, e.g.

• intriguing bits of paper pasted into the newspaper (pic on upper right)
• prize cattle
• masses of people emigrating to the New World
• the construction of the Crystal Palace for the Grand Exhibition in 1851
• the new railway station in Newcastle upon Tyne (pic on upper left)
• some sheet music
• the Assyrian sculptures from Nimrod at the British Museum*
• Stamp Duty in action

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* I yelled "Wheeee!" when I came across that particular picture because DEVIL'S RETURN deals with the excavations in Nimrod in the mid-1840s. :-)

Traffic Woes in Victorian London

If you think that complaints about pot-holed roads, traffic jams, and incomprehensible bus routes are merely a phenomenon of our modern age, you couldn't be more wrong. Traffic, the state of the roads, and public transport caused already the Victorians countless woes. Londoners were well acquainted with traffic jams as the following picture shows:

Partly, this problem was caused by the sheer numbers of carriages, carts, buses and cabs that drove about London's streets each. In addition, the problem was exacerbated by obstructions that were erected and blocked roads, e.g. in Fleet Street in 1846.

 The thoroughfares in particular were so busy and so stuffed with vehicles that getting on and off the bus could present a problem, which is why Punch joked that omnibuses should be outfitted with emergency ladders:

 Omnibuses had been a common sight in London since 1829, when George Shillibeer's first two horse-drawn buses took up their service. Thanks to Shillibeer's success, other companies followed and within two decades serval bus services and routes had been established in London. Bus drivers and passengers were the butt of the joke in many Punch cartoons - and many points that the magazine ridiculed are certainly familiar to modern users of public transport. The following cartoon and article, for example, satirise the organisation of bus routes:

 The traffic problem in London was not helped by the state of the roads, as the next cartoon shows. Roads were often full of holes, which made navigating them difficult.(Naturally, this doesn't mean that they were quite as bad that - the cartoon below once again highly exaggerates the situation.)