‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ by Maggi Hambling. ‘It’s a sculpture about now, in her spirit.’ Statues of women are troubling. Just look at the reaction to the 2020 Mary Wollstonecraft statue by Maggi Hambling. ‘Catastrophically wrong,’ cried Caroline Criado-Perez, the prime mover behind the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square; ‘A wet dream of a woman.’ WouldRead more
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Victorian campaigner Emily Williamson was so incensed by the millinery trade’s use of plumage that she invited her friends to tea — and persuaded them to sign a pledge to wear no feathers. The all-female group called itself the Society for the Protection of Birds — “a very ambitious title,” noted The Times, under theRead more
Uneasy mingling: the Servants’ Ball at ITV’s Downton Abbey, where Lady Grantham rightly couples Carson, the butler — and Lord Grantham escorts housekeeper Mrs Hughes Was the Servants’ Ball really so marvellous? It is invoked as an example of the cosy, protective relationship within the English country house between the family and their servants. ButRead more
Did servants suffer from SAD ??Seasonal Affective Disorder? The Victorian diaries of Mrs Sarah Wells, housekeeper of Uppark and mother to novelist H. G. Wells, reveal the physical and emotional cost of working in subterranean servant quarters. ?So dark in these underground rooms!? she wrote in 1892, twelve years into an anxious and exhausting tenureRead more
A dozen feathered hats, hidden within the fashion archives of the Victorian and Albert Museum, London, were my first introduction to Edwardian fashion addict Heather Firbank. Having viewed the hats ? seductive, stylish, the last word in couture millinery ? I was intrigued to know more about their wearer. And so I made an appointmentRead more
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