The Wunderkammer of the Mild Colonial Boy, Esq., a Reactionary Tory Gentleman, who armed only with a Steampowered Babbage Engine and Pure Intentions, wanders the Time Streams and Aetheric Plane gathering an Eccentric Hodgepodge of Curiousities, Frivolities, Whimsicalities and Nonsense.
Q. Why is your Tumblelog called "My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning"?
A. Because "My Grandmother's Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning" wouldn't fit in the available space.
‘I don’t really see the point of minimalism,’ Paul Oxborrow says. ‘You’re always going to have to have stuff, so why not show it off?’Some pictures from St. Benedict’s Bed and Breakfast, St. Leonard’s that was in the last post.
How wonderful it looks!
(via anglo-catholic)
Step into this south coast B&B and you are transported back to the 19th century.
This is my perfect house, its just so wonderful I must go and stay there, and you must look at the photographs.
‘I don’t really see the point of minimalism,’ Paul Oxborrow says. ‘You’re always going to have to have stuff, so why not show it off?’
(via anglo-catholic)
Victorian beauty
REALLY? This “caption” would totally be submitted to shit my students write if I got this in a student exam or paper. Try, “her puffy sleeves indicate that it is 1897 and she is in the pink of fashion”! The mourning (if indeed it is, which I am not convinced of, because people on Tumblr seem determined to identify every lady photographed in B+W as wearing mourning) comes from her bodice being trimmed with crepe.
Photo postcard of a Victorian couple sitting in a studio mock-up of a hot-air balloon. Photo by J. E. Ballantyne, from Fantasy Travel: Vintage People on Photo Postcards by Tom Phillips.
New Woman fancy dress, 1896 England, Fancy Dresses Described by Ardern Holt
(See Illustration, Fig. 29.) She wears a cloth tailor-made gown, and her bicycle is pourtrayed in front of it, together with the Sporting Times and her golf club; she carries her betting book and her latch-key at her side, her gun is slung across her shoulder, and her pretty Tam o’ Shanter is surmounted by a bicycle lamp. She has gaiters to her patent leather shoes, and is armed at all points for conquest.
This girl CAN. NOT. BE. STOPPED!!
(via thewidowflannigan)
In my student days, a friend of mine in London came across a couple of very original ladies who produced a little printed magazine called The Romantic. Google has found me their website. They also produced cassette tapes of amusing “news” from the Great Invisible Empire of Romantia. The cassette was to be put into a tape recorder hidden inside the shell of an old 1930′s wireless set. Imagine listening to the hissing cassette and hearing a precious female voice imitating something like the Queen but pronouncing the “r” as a “w” like children in the 1920′s in aristocratic families (as in Be vewwy quiet: I’m hunting wabbits), saying: “This is the News of the Imperial Home Service, coming to you from somewhere in the Great Invisible Empire“!
The implication is that you imagine that you are back in the days of the British Empire, namely the Victorian and Edwardian eras. I found it all very funny and amusing – until. It turned out, according to something I heard, that these two ladies set up a “school” variously in Ireland or north London, where teenage girls could go and get an “old-fashioned” education with corporal punishment – which seemed to have sado-masochistic overtones. They have a site at Aristasia and it all still seems to be in the wrist! Obviously, those two ladies are outrageous eccentrics, and my friends and I took it all as one big joke.
Mohair plus water plus a hot summer day, what could be more comfortable than that?~ Jordan, Marsh & Co., Spring and Summer, 1897
