Author: Johanna Turano

Victorian London Locations: Covent Garden Market

~ Johanna Turano

The Covent Garden Market was known for being a noisy, lively market place in the Victorian era, where people from around the neighborhood would come to buy and sell various goods. The market itself has been a  hub for purchasing fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs for several hundred years and  the surrounding church, pubs, and theaters also gives the square an array of activities and sights to see. However, the Covent Garden Market has not always been such a friendly place to take a trip to with the family. Ironically enough, the area used to be used for orchards for the Westminister Abbey and by the 18th century, the area became a well-known red-light district, attracting prostitutes, playwrights, and street performers. The area was quickly cleaned up and organized back to being a market place for the town. Although the site now serves as more of a tourist location, to this day people still continue to visit the cafes, pubs, and small shops the Covent Garden Market has to offer

  • .Covent Garden Market map view for Victorian London

Covent Garden Market

 

 

  • Street view of Covent Garden Market nowstreet view

In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” by Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock mentions and visits the Covent Garden Market. In the story, the characters are said to pass through the slums of Endell Street to get to the market place to hassle the salesman and find out where the goose with the precious gem came from. By using the Charles Boothe Online Archive, we as the readers can see that on Endell Street there are parts where poverty is prevalent and where thievery and criminal activities were more likely to happen.

endell

The Charles Boothe Online Archive also shows us that the market place, as well as the surrounding area, are where the middle to upper class resided. This evidence along with the Old Bailey Proceedings, lead the readers to believe that because of this social class gap, criminal activity was very common around these parts.

Charles Booth

Work Cited:

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The Adventure of The Blue Carbuncle. Web. 8 November 2015. http://ignisart.com/camdenhouse/canon/blue.htm

Charles Boothe Online Archive. Web. 8 November 2015.http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?sub=view_booth_and_barth&args=530156,180800,1,large,0 

Locating London. Web. 8 November 2015. http://www.locatinglondon.org/index.html

 

 

 

Pies, Cakes, and Biscuits

~ Johanna Turano

For some reason, I find what people ate and their diets back then very interesting. It might just be that my sweet tooth acts up and makes me want to learn more about Victorian desserts and how the desserts have changed and morphed into the modern desserts we have now. It is intriguing to discover the unexpected timeline of these desserts however. So I decided to compare three desserts that seem popular today as well as popular during the 1800’s-1900’s. Pie, cake, and biscuit looked appropriate enough for the time period, but instead of using cookies like I originally planned I used biscuits because the word cookie didn’t really come about until later on.xPePSDMUAccording to the graph, cake is by far the winner! It could possibly be obvious to some people that cake is above the rest when it comes to dessert popularity since it’s presented on so many holidays and special occasions nowadays. However, pie was actually mentioned the most for a good portion of this chart! All of the desserts have a long history and background to mark their always changing recipes.

Cake might be the most popular dessert from the 1800-1900 time period, but pie has a much longer history that dates back to the Egyptian Neolithic period (the New Stone Age) and is mentioned in 1301 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. These pies consisted of oats, wheat, rye or barley and usually contained honey for the inside treat, it wasn’t until 5th century BC where fruit was added. Cake also has an expansive history as well, it’s origins have been traced back to the 13th century. Pie definitely wins in longevity, but what about biscuits (cookies)? Actual confectionery biscuits (cookies) didn’t come about until 7th century AD, so biscuits have cake beat too, but they are mentioned in literature around the same time. Cake most likely took the lead when the first dry cake mixes were produced in England around the 1840’s. This lead to a much faster and less time consuming way to bake a dessert that excluded several ingredients from the traditional recipe, making this process very convenient.

Work Cited:

“Food Timeline: Cakes” foodtimeline.org Web. 7 Oct. 2015

Strdaley, Linda “History of Pie-Pie History” whatscookingamerica.net Web. 7 Oct. 2015

Stradley, Linda “History of Cookies-Cookie History” whatscookingamerica.net 7 Web.7 Oct. 2015

 

Book Traces: Penrod & Sam

~ Johanna Turano

After looking through much more then 20 books, I finally found an interesting yet slightly comical example of marginalia. The book I picked up was Penrod and Sam by Booth Tarkington. The book was published in 1916 by Doubleday Page & Co, located in New York City. Penrod and Sam is actually the sequel to Tarkington’s book Penrod, written in 1914 and there is another book named Penrod Jashber written in 1929 that is the final book and completes the series. These books provide comic sketches and the stories are about an 11-year-old boy named Penrod Schofield, growing up in a pre-World War 1 United States. The second book, Penrod and Sam explores Penrod’s friends and other minor characters. There have also been film adaptions, stage performances, and parodies based on the misadventures of Penrod and his friends.

What I found interesting about the marginalia I discovered, was that it wasn’t actually a message or a note of any kind, but instead a math problem. It looks as though the owner of the book was trying to figure out the length of a side of a scalene triangle. I’m not the best at math, so I’m assuming the person who owned this book is better considering it looks like they successfully solved the problem they were given. I also found this marginalia interesting because the book is about a pre-teen and his misadventures and the math problem being solved is a geometry problem, something we learn when we are only a bit older than the boy in the story. So, I thought it was a bit ironic that a kid might have been doing homework in a book about a kid doing anything but his homework.

I couldn’t find an actual name written on the book that could tell me who the owner was, but a possible nickname “Speedy S.” was written on the page as well. This leads me to believe that the book might have been owned or was being used by a kid around the age of the protagonist in the story.

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Victorian London: Making-Up

~ Johanna Turano ~ 2 Comments

After searching for a while trying to find an article that interests me in Lee Jackson’s Dictionary of Victorian London, I stumbled upon the Women’s section http://www.victorianlondon.org/index-2012.htm. I expected most of the articles to provide false tips and ridiculous fads for the women of Victorian London, but to my surprise, many of the articles gave useful advice. The article Making-up introduced women to the most refined way to make yourself presentable to society. For example, to put too much rouge on one’s face would cause a lady to “look like a clown” and overdoing it would make one look “foolish” and frankly, offend the rest of society. I found it almost comical that women of that era cared so much about one simple aspect of their appearance.The next paragraph however, talked about to danger of whitening your skin with powder and how that to do such an unthinkable thing “is even worse than rouging”. It seemed, at this point, that make-up all together during this period was too troublesome and only caused controversy. Surprisingly, there is a way to have a happy medium with make-up in Victorian London, it just takes much effort and time to do so. To ensure you have the best possible outcome in your rouging ventures, “It should be put on in straight lines under the eyes, for a layer of carmine heightens their brilliancy; three other layers lower down should be gently rounded off, and be placed exactly between the nose and ears, never reaching below the mouth…” just in case anybody really wanted to be a pro at making yourself not look like a side-show freak on the streets of Victorian London. The author of this article did in fact promote the use of one’s natural glow and blush to assure the ladies that their own delicate coloring is even better than the finest of make-ups, which I found amiable and considerate.