This book was first published in the USA in 1857 and was a very early account of the effects of hallucinogens. He describes in great detail the fantastic visions and distortions of reality he experienced after taking large doses of cannabis extract. He also warns of the unfortunate side-effects he experienced. Despite these, the book stimulated a brief fashion for emulating him: clubs were formed in several cities to experiment with the effects.…
Mendès was a French writer who lived 1841-1909, and wrote prolifically, producing plays, poems, short stories and novels. The stories included fairy tales and fables, wry parables about love, accounts of crime and the uncanny. Very popular at the time, he is now mostly forgotten, but deserves to be remembered.…
Henry Mainwaring,(1587-1653) was an English lawyer, soldier, writer, seaman and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1621 to 1622. He was for a time a pirate based in Newfoundland and then a naval officer with the Royal Navy. He supported the Royalist cause in the English Civil War. In 1616, shortly after he had given up piracy, he wrote this, addressed to King James I. It is an detailed account of piracy as it existed in the early 17th Century, and consists of sober and accurate fact, far removed from the romantic picture and exaggerated stories current at the time, and even more so today.…
Jacques-Louis de Bougrenet De La Tocnaye (1767-1823) was a minor French aristocrat, who fled France at the revolution along with thousands of others. He took refuge in Britain and, with no occupation, depended on the hospitality, not always generous, of various English and Scottish gentlemen. To occupy his time, and in the hope of making some money, he wrote an account of his travels, Promenade autour de la Grande Bretagne, "A Tour around Great Britain." This was a modest success and stimulated him to produce similar accounts of wanderings in Ireland and Scandinavia. The Irish volume, Promenade d'un Français dans l'Irlande, is the only one which has been translated into English, published under the title A Frenchman's Walk in Ireland in 1917. His journey, in 1796 and 1797, took him around the island in a clockwise direction, with a brief sojourn in Scotland during the winter. He walked almost the whole time, staying mainly in the houses of the Ascendancy when he had a letter of introduction, and in wretched inns and worse peasant hovels when this failed. As Britain was at war with revolutionary France at the time, he often found it useful to pretend to be Scottish, and conversed with people of all ranks of society; he even seems to have learned a little Irish. His observations are sympathetic and penetrating, and he always tries to see the good in everyone he meets, and to explain the country's defects on misgovernment rather than the innate inferiority of the Irish, which was the usual attitude of English visitors at the time.…
Eliza Fowler Haywood (1693?-1759) was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the early 18th Century. After a none-too-successful career as an actress, and having acquired a husband (she said) and two children, and lost the former, she hit her stride in 1719 with Love in Excess; Or, The Fatal Enquiry. Over the next forty years she produced a stream of novels and other works which were the equivalent of today's Mills & Boon or Harlequin romances. Immensely popular, they were read mostly by women, but sneered at by the male arbiters of literary merit. Since the 1980s, however, they have enjoyed something of a revival, a few of them being published by small academic or feminist publishers. Regardless of that, they are great fun to read, and recommended to those who like their books a century or three old.This selection contains the following• Idalia, or the Unfortunate Mistress• Love in Excess; Or, The Fatal Enquiry• A Wife to be Let (A play, in which she acted herself)…
The London Guide for Strangers was first published in 1819, under the title (or blurb) of The London Guide, and Stranger's Safeguard against the Cheats, Swindlers and Pickpockets that abound within the Bills of Mortality; forming a picture of London, as regards active life, collected from the verbal communications of William Perry, and others. To which is added, a glossary of cant terms. By A Gentleman, who has made the Police of the Metropolis, an object of enquiry for twenty-two years. It really needs no further introduction, except to say, that the methods used by criminals on the unwary had not changed much in the two centuries since Green described them in The Complete Cony-Catching (also on this site); and probably have not changed much in our day, another two centuries later.…
Paul De Kock was in his day a very prolific, famous, and successful writer of slightly salacious novels set in his native France. That Rascal Gustave, published in French as Gustave ou le Mauvais sujet in 1822, is a typical example of his manner, which 19th century audiences found titillating, though of course, it is very tame by ours. Gustave is a harum-scarum, forever running after women, sometimes catching one, and getting into ludicrous scrapes. His father, who loves him but is exasperated by his antics, is trying to make him settle down with a more eligible partner, and Gustave expends a lot of time and energy in trying to avoid this. It ends, of course, with wedding bells and both father and son happy with the outcome.…
Eliza Gilbert (1821-1861), better known by her stage name Lola Montez was one of the leading courtesans of the 1840's. Her lovers included the King of Bavaria, who was absolutely besotted with her, made her a countess, and in the end abdicated rather than give her up. However, she soon left him and continued her career as a dancer in England, and later the USA. In her later years she published The Arts of Beauty, a manual of dress, hairdressing, cosmetics etc. This included as an appendix Hints to Gentleman on The Art of Fascinating, based presumably on her own experiences of men, and consisting of 50 hilariously satirical recommendations.…
The Batrachomyomachia or The Battle of the Frogs and Mice is an ancient Greek parody of the Homeric epics. The armies of the frogs and mice go to war over a misunderstanding, mighty deeds are performed by warriors on both sides, the gods become involved and great slaugher ensues before the resolution. There have been several translations from Chapman onwards; our version is in Draytonian stanzas by Jane Barlow in 1894, with illustrations by Francis D. Bedford.…
In 1703 a man appeared in England calling himself George Psalmanazar and claiming to be a native of Formosa (nowadays called Taiwan). He sustained this pretence by publishing a book, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan, which purported to be a detailed description of Formosan customs, geography and political economy, but which was in fact a complete invention. As time went on, he was less and less believed, and had to make an honest living. Towards the end of his long life he published this memoir, describing his adventures and confessing his impostures. Two things he kept secret to the grave, however: his real name and his country and place of origin.…
In 1789, two seekers after religious truth, John Wright, carpenter, and William Bryan, engraver, were instructed by the spirit to go to Avignon in France and there meet a group of disciples of the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite having no money and no word of French, they set out and after various adventures reached their destination. They stayed there for several months. On their return, both Bryan and Wright published accounts account of their journey and what they had learned there. Subsequently they became followers of Richard Brothers, who called himself "The Nephew of the Almighty," but after he was shut up in an asylum they faded back into the obscurity from which they came.…
James Freney was a notorious Irish highwayman of the 18th Century. Known as "Captain" Freney because he was the leader of a gang, who terrorised the roads and robbed the houses of the well-to-do in County Kilkenny and Waterford for five years in the 1740's. His exploits and daring escapes from the lawmen made him a folk hero, but the net was closing in on him in 1749. So he made a deal with the authorities where he would betray all his associates in return for clemency and a subsidy to emigrate. The gang were all hanged, and the clemency was forthcoming, but the subsidy was not. In order to make alittle money, he published his memoirs which were extremely popular in Ireland for many years.…
This murder of Ellen Hanly was one of the most sensational and widely publicised crimes. of 19th Century Ireland. In 1819 John Scanlon, one of a family of minor gentry in Co. Limerick in the South of Ireland, set his eye on the 15-year old niece of a local peasant. He seduced her, went through a sham marriage, and took her away, along with her uncle's life savings. After a while he tired of her and had spent all the money, so he got his manservant Stephen Sullivan to murder her and dump the body in the river Shannon. It was washed up a few months later, and the culprits were identified by the rope which had been used to tie her body, which was identified by a local man as one he had lent Sullivan. Scanlon was soon captured and convicted, despite being defended by Daniel O'Connell, and hanged still protesting his innocence. Sullivan evaded capture for a while, but was finally caught, tried and executed. Between conviction and execution he made a detailed confession, saying he had acted entirely on Scanlon's orders.The case was the basis for Gerald Griffin's novel The Collegians, Dion Boucicault's play The Colleen Bawn, and Julius Benedict's opera The Lily of Killarney. All of these were more or less fictionalised, and this stimulated Richard Lloyd Fitzgerald, the local rector, who had met her and took part in the inquest on her body, to print an accurate account.…
The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwell, the Wife of the Late Usurper was published in London in 1665, a few years after the death of Oliver Cromwell. The author is unknown, but was certainly not Mrs. Elizabeth Cromwell. It is a genuine cookery book but in addition there is a great deal of anti-Cromwellian abuse along with the recipes. The recipes themselves are not the expensive and elaborate dishes which might be expected to grace the table of a head of state, but plain solid cooking, such as would be served in the household of a prosperous farmer or merchant. The implication of this, of course, is that the Cromwells did not keep the state appropriate to their position; various anecdotes emphasise her avaricious and penny-pinching attitude.…
In 1588, the Spanish Armada of 130 ships set sail from Lisbon, its mission to transport a Spanish army from the Low Countries to invade England. As every schoolboy knows, they were defeated after several battles with the English defenders, and forced to sail north around Scotland and west of Ireland on their way home. More than 20 ships were wrecked off the Irish coast; those of their crews which managed to struggle ashore were mostly butchered by the English or their Irish allies. A few managed to take refuge in those parts of Ireland still holding out against the English conquerors; one of these was Captain Francesco de Cuellar. His ship was wrecked at Streedagh Strand in Co. Sligo, but he managed to get ashore alive. His subsequent adventures included being apprentice to a blacksmith, and enduring a siege by the English in a castle which had been deserted by its Irish occupants. He was eventually shipped to Scotland (at that time an independent country) and subsequently to the Spanish-held Netherlands, where he wrote this account of his adventures.…
In 1732 Linnaeus, then aged 25, was commissioned by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences to journey to the far north of Sweden, (an area considered as remote as Borneo by the sophisticates of Stockholm,) and report on the plants, animals and minerals to be found there. He set out on the 12th of May and journeyed as far north as the Arctic Circle, west to the coast of Norway, and then east again to the Baltic Sea, and south along the coast of Finland to Åland before returning home on the 10th of October. The major product of this expedition was the Flora Lapponica, a detailed account of the plants of the region, in which he first made extensive use of his binominal system of plant nomenclature, which is now universal. He also kept a journal in which he included his observations on the land, the people and their customs. Translated into English, it was published in 1808 under the title Lachesis Lapponica.…
This remarkable collection of graffiti poems from toilet walls was first published in 1730 and offers a unique and fascinating window into Georgian life. The poems are variously misogynistic, erotic, scatological, sentimental and insulting, but they all show a level of literary talent far above their modern counterparts.…
In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey the central character, Catherine Morland, has read too many Gothic novels, and under their influence imagines the abbey to conceal lurid secrets. She discusses them with her friend:"Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.""Have you, indeed! How glad I am! - What are they all?""I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.""Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?""Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them."Here we have The Necromancer, treacked down by Nina Zumel…
"There are some books, like some people, of whom we form an indulgent opinion without finding it easy to justify our liking. The rare, and yet not celebrated, miscellany of which I am about to write has this character. It is not instructive, or very high-toned, or exceptionally clever, but if it were a man, all people that are not prigs would say that it was a very good sort of fellow. Love and Business has one definite merit. Wherever we dip into its pages we may use it as a telephone, and hear a young Englishman, of the year 1700, talking to himself and to his friends in the most unaffected accents." Thus Edmund Gosse, of this miscellany, published in 1702 by George Farquhar, playwright best known for The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem. The collection contains poetry, an account of a trip to Holland, an essay on play writing, and - with perhaps doubtful taste - the love letters he wrote to his wife when they were courting. There is something for every taste here!…
Sir John Harington lived 1560-1612. His best known work is The Metamorphosis of Ajax, a description of the first flush toilet, on the strength of which he featured in an episode of South Park. In 1769 his descendant Henry Harington, M.A. edited some of his papers, and published them under the title Nugæ Antiquæ.("Ancient trifles".) This includes poems, letters and essays by Harington, as well as much by other authors (not included in this edition).The letters reveal his varying efforts to gain and retain favour, from James I as well as Elizabeth, as well as his financial troubles, his efforts to restore the abbey church of Bath which had been stripped and looted during the Reformation, and the consolation he received from his domestic happiness. Other highlights are:· His description of the campaigning in Essex's failed attempt to defeat Irish rebels in 1599· A pageant presented by the ladies and gentleman of the court to James I and the King of Denmark, where both kings and the entire cast were helplessly drunk.· A supplie [i.e. supplement] or addition to Bishop Godwin's Catalogue of Bishops. This is not the dry-as-dust ecclesiastical history one would expect from the title, but a lively collection of scandalous and otherwise interesting anecdotes of mostly late 16th Century bishops, many of whom Harington knew personally. It greatly resembles Aubrey's "Brief Lives" in content and style.…