A Friday five: sex, death, Dickens, botany...
Charles Dickens: newly discovered documents reveal truth about his death and burial: the name of John Forster was fresh in my mind from the less than glorious role that he played in the sad saga of L.E.L. (and yet another case of reputation management...)
Passionate pioneers - increasing access to botanical artwork by women artists and putting women botanical artists back into the story.
The Shim Sham Club: ‘London’s miniature Harlem’: a queer-friendly jazz club described in Metropolitan Police records as a ‘den of vice and iniquity’.
A Book So Far Ahead of Its Time, It Took 87 Years to Find a Publisher: this must have been written a bit after the period when he was hanging out with Sylvia Pankhurst and the Workers' Socialist Federation, George Lansbury, & co, just after the Great War.
And on sex just after the Great War, it was very depressing to read this, over 100 years since the publication of Marie Stopes' Married Love: What I learned talking to 120 women about their sex lives and desires: [A]s women further described their malaise, their dwindling desire seemed less the result of faulty biology than evidence of sound judgment. It was a consequence of clumsy partners, perfunctory routines, incomplete education, boredom and the chafe of overfamiliarity.
Marie may have writ more poetical, but that was pretty much her line. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3038129.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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