Sid says HAI: Syphilitic city: One in five Georgian Londoners had syphilis by their mid-30s, a new study suggests - based on a massive article by 2 mates of mine (I tell you, the world of sifilis historians is small). A strong argument for the baudruche.
I'm not sure it's entirely secret these days, and I'm not sure this is the first blog post or ( Read more... )

The Great Immoral Massage Establishments Scandal of 1894
This is one of the lesser known hoohahs of the 1890s - I guess Dear Oscar pretty much overshadows everything else? including the Cleveland Street post-office messangers moonlighting as rent-boys shock-horror, the prosecution of Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion, the colourful matrimonial ( Read more... )

Museum of creepy curiosities opens in London. Hmmmmm. Has he ever been to the Horniman, which far from being a higgledy-piggedly Cabinet of Curiosities, always strikes me as being about Educating The Masses About the Glories of Scientific Understanding of the Natural World, with added benefit of the really manky stuffed walrus, taxidermied by ( Read more... )

So, lots of cheers, sort of, as it's actually a really depressing set of stories she's dug up, for Hallie Rubenhold, who has written a book on the Ripper's victims.
(And has earned the ire of the massed Ripperologists, and is not interested in speculations on who Jack was. Kudos.)
And you know what? It's possible to find out a fair amount about the ( Read more... )

Or maybe, I am well-acquainted with the 'white slavery' trope that first flowered in the early C20th and went on being resorted to by journalists looking for a sensational story into, I think, at least the 1950s -
An ordinary young woman going about her business, though this was usually about pleasure such as shopping or going to the movies, was ( Read more... )

What I read
Did finish Two Serpents Rising, but didn't somehow do it for me: one of those books where you can see it's all very well done, there's nothing wrong with it, but I slid off it it quite a bit and kept picking up other things.
Whereas The Dilly continued intensely irritating but I still read on, thinking that it would be a useful piece of ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished A Banquet of Consequences, and, okay, family that makes the Starkadders look like the Waltons at the centre of the plot. But at least Havers is somewhat on the way to rehabilitation and not being transferred, and while I am not convinced by Lynley's new affair (I consider his new squeeze is entirely prudent to maintain high ( Read more... )

One of the things that is leveled against science fiction of previous eras is that it assumes the continuation of existing mores, yea, even unto the far distant future. And even if it extrapolates that certain current trends will continue, this assumption has been overridden by events.
However, there has lately been something cropping up via ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished both Queer Domesticities and Words Are My Matter, both excellent, would recommend.
Episode 1 of season 2 of Tremontaine, which I though had a bit of the info-dumpy getting back up to speed after a hiatus thing going on, but I look forward with anticipation to where this all goes.
Aya de Leon, Uptown Thief (2016), which is a ( Read more... )

When some while ago I solicited December prompts,
( Read more... )