In “The Adventures of The Blue Carbuncle,” Holmes relates the current circumstances of his latest mystery to Watson. The constable, Peterson, retrieved the goose that laid the sparkling gem that the narrative revolves around.

Peterson witnessed a staggering man on the corner of Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road who gets accosted by a gang of ruffians. The muggers, as well as the owner of the goose, are scared off by the sound of breaking glass and a man in an official looking uniform, according to Holmes, but not before the goose is left abandoned and the opportunistic constable takes home a fresh bird for dinner (Doyle).

According to British History Online, this street was not a home of dukes or duchesses but the “prosaic and work-a-day world” that one would find more pawnbrokers and “gin palaces” than clubs or churches (Walford). Not all of Tottenham Court Road was dangerous, however, but as the “Blue Carbuncle” tells us. The street was surrounded by tenements and low and squalid thoroughfares. The main street was middle class and had some “fine streets and handsome squares” along with a few public buildings or private mansions (Walford).

To attest to the reputation told to us by British History Online, we only have to look at the many accounts in Old Bailey Online. To put in Goodge Street or Tottenham Court Road brings up scores of highway robberies, murders, and assaults throughout the Victorian Age. Tottenham Court Road seems to have been a thriving business district during the daytime but not a place one would like to walk the goose at night. A Michael Ranton committed highway robbery on the 16th of October 1782. This is one of many acts of larceny that occurred on a middle class section of London on a nightly basis.

According to Charles Booth online Archive, this section of London was a mix of middle-class, well to do citizens, but surrounded by poor neighborhoods. In the context of our story, it serves as the perfect location for a robbery on a man carrying a goose home to occur.

 

Works Cited

 

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The Adventure of The Blue Carbuncle. Web. 7 November 2015. http://ignisart.com/camdenhouse/canon/blue.htm

 

Edward Walford, ‘Tottenham Court Road’, in Old and New London: Volume 4 (London, 1878), pp. 467-480 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol4/pp467-480. Web. 8 November 2015. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol4/pp467-480.

 

“Michael Ranton”, Violent Theft, October 1782 (t17821016-5).” Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Web. 8 November 2015.

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17821016-5&div=t17821016-5&terms=Tottenham|Court|Road|or|Goodge|Street#highlight

 

Charles Booth Online Archive. Web. 8 November 2015. http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?sub=view_booth_and_barth&args=529432,181653,1,large,0

Cards:

Maps

 

Bar Chart:

 

Pie Chart:

Network graph:

 

and Url:https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1jN3JofxVaKwO1Mh3k21oT6JxoKwIR7gpYbbXaV65

Hi everyone, here’s my video. I hope you like it.

https://www.wevideo.com/hub#view/492187064

 

For my ngram I chose commodities. This was a rather broad subject and it did lead to a rather predictable amount of word spikes, however, they were all very informative and a few surprising bits of information associated with them poped up. My words were cotton, tea, silk, and whales.

Cotton was the most predictable since it spiked right around the beginning of the Civil War and then again at the rise of World War I. This is really rather apparent considering the vast amount of uniforms and war materials being made out of cotton.

The surprising thing was the use of silk went up during the time of WWI (I extended my search to 1920).

Apparently silk postcards and handkerchiefs were bought as souvenirs by soldiers on the western front and became a source of income for families in Belgium and France. This turned into an entire cottage industry due to the war. We have to remember that the total amount of casualties for both sides combined was ten million men so this amounts to a lot of silk being used. The other interesting spike I found was in the word “whales”.

As one can see there is a rather large spike in the use of the word “whales” around 1820. Whale oil was the fuel of choice before kerosene, unfortunately for the whales, and the animals were hunted near to the point of extinction. When most of the northern whaling stations had begun to run out of whales to hunt a new whaling ground was opened up in Japan and Australia for the British fleet. Another reason for this spike was the incident that inspired Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. In 1820, a sperm whale sank The Essex whaling vessel and the twenty-man crew spent months at sea until finally having to resort to cannibalism to survive. Eight men were finally rescued from the doomed ship. The Essex was considered a “lucky” ship to be on.

I found Ngrams to be a lot of fun and it was enjoyable to be able to try to dig up the secrets of the words. It was elementary.

I have found traces throughout so many books at the library that I thought this would be a walk in the park, however, this task proved to be very difficult. I must have looked through a hundred books trying to find that distinctive script and paper. I realized that it really is unique to see how much better the materials, craftsmanship, and paper were from that time in history. You notice it after the first fifty books. The paper is still white and vibrant after a hundred years. I finally found what I was looking for in the PR section. Specifically, the Shakespeare stacks. There were quite a number of old books from the turn of the century, but alas, most had the distinctive mark of current times; bad penmanship and ballpoint pen.

In a copy of “Shakespeare: The Man And His Stage” I found a gift inscription that read:

To Barry Lufino,

Second of a great line

A souvenir

Theater Royal Huddersfield

July 16^th 1923

From Alfie (illegible)

It was written in a cursive, flowing hand that one just does not see anymore. The ink was both thick and thin saying that I had struck Trace gold. I immediately did an internet search and found that someone had already found my trace. I ignored that and pushed on.

I found nothing on the two names in the inscription. It was a mystery of who these people were, but the book had come all the way from Northern England to our library over ninety years ago. I was able to dig up some information on the theater, however.  that the Theater Royal had burned down in 1880 and then rebuilt. It was a beautiful, massive, brick building that was demolished in 1961 for a garden market. Unfortunate, but the march of progress moves on and the invention and popularity of the moving pictures really did nothing for the theater.

I will keep my eye out while in the stacks from now on for traces from this time period. They are very distinctive and are completely unlike the handwriting of modern times. I found it fun to try to find these old traces of people that had come before me and look forward to finding more in the future.

 

http://holmesiana.net/items/show/116

http://holmesiana.net/items/show/92

http://holmesiana.net/items/show/83

http://holmesiana.net/collections/show/21

http://holmesiana.net/exhibits/show/sidneypagetestate/pagetmemorabilia

I posted two of Sidney Paget’s illustrations of Holmes characters from “The Man With The Twisted Lip.” In addition, I posted a picture of his own personal magnifying glass and Hunting crop. These are Holmes’ favorite items of interrogation and speculation.

 

Before I was introduced to the Victorian dictionary, I was under the impression that there was a small problem with youth on the streets and bad working conditions, but the truth of the time period is quite staggering. The poor, and especially poor women of the time, were taken advantage of. Capitalists had figured out that if they used women for the same factory work as men, they could pay them less. During slack times in work the women, according to Lee Jackson, would have to fall back on any work they could get. This led many of them to end up in prostitution.

Having no job security and no family or support in London led to a horrid state of affairs for women. Many articles spoke of women and children getting themselves arrested so as to get out of their situation for a short period of time; preferring prison to the workhouses or the streets. Children could be paid even less than both the sexes and since feeding unwanted children was a burden for poor families many children were either thrown to the streets or forced into child-prostitution by their own parents. The laws had nothing to say about child prostitution at the time and policemen turned a blind eye to “flower-girls” on the streets. If these women happened to get pregnant the cycle got worse and worse leading to an estimate of “no less than 100,000” prostitutes in London. The irony was that other women were told at the time that no “decent lady” even knew of such happenings in their society. This led to a great social problem not even being acknowledged. http://www.victorianlondon.org/index-2012.htm

Unwanted boy children were in the business of thievery and crime. Both sexes could be employed by capitalists for shillings a day but we must remember that a work shift was from dawn to dusk and crime paid the children more. If one could not afford to take care of oneself, then they were put into workhouses where board and rent were exchanged for back breaking labor and which all agreed the streets or prison were preferable to.

 

Hi everyone. Welcome to dhm293. My name is Jesse Keplinger, and I am a creative writing major. This is my senior year and I am excited to be in the digital humanities. The amount of resources and information available in this class is mind boggling.

My interests are varied, but they include art, literature, and science as well as hiking, climbing, and biking through the woods.