Tag Archives: Great Britain

1882: Jumbo

Posted on July 12, 2021 by corvusfugit

An anecdote from Matthew Scott’s biography of Jumbo the Elephant (1885): Once when I was riding him around in the Zoological Gardens, in London, sitting on his neck, with about a dozen children on a panier-saddle across his broad back, … Continue reading →

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1909: The Seven Ravens

Posted on March 17, 2021 by corvusfugit

The good little sister took a knife and cut off her own tiny finger, fitted it into the keyhole, and succeeded in opening the lock. When she had entered, she met a Dwarf, who said: “My child, what are you … Continue reading →

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1808: Portrait of a Horse’s Ass

Posted on November 23, 2020 by corvusfugit

Henry Raeburn: Portrait of George Harley Drummond (ca. 1808–9); “It is curious…that the animal’s hindquarters should be so prominently displayed” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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1832: The Destructive Sphinx

Posted on August 22, 2020 by corvusfugit

Illustrations from The Book of Butterflies, Sphinxes and Moths; illustrated by one hundred and forty-four engravings, coloured after nature; in three volumes (Thomas Brown, 1832-4)                  

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1629: The Most Trivial Disagreements

Posted on August 15, 2020 by corvusfugit

Such personal correspondence and diaries as survive suggest that social relations from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries tended to be cool, even unfriendly. The extraordinary amount of casual interpersonal physical and verbal violence, as recorded in legal and other … Continue reading →

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1867: Distant View

Posted on July 30, 2020 by corvusfugit

Frederick Leighton: Distant View of Mountains in the Aegean Sea (1867)

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1808: Squares Eight Times Eight

Posted on July 29, 2020 by corvusfugit

It was a fancy of the eccentric Mr. Pratt…to propose a game of Chess to a friend after dinner without Chessboard and men, and stipulate that instead of describing the moves with the usual prosaic abbreviations, a sort of poetical … Continue reading →

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1639: Thoughts

Posted on May 23, 2020 by corvusfugit

From a letter written by James Howell, 17 March 1639: Having got into a close field, I cast my face upward, and…began to contemplate as I was in this posture the vast magnitude of the universe and what proportion this … Continue reading →

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1918: Munitions Girls

Posted on May 7, 2020 by corvusfugit

Stanhope Forbes: The Munitions Girls (1918)

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1802: The Eagle

Posted on April 24, 2020 by corvusfugit

William Blake: Headpiece to “The Eagle,” an illustration for William Hayley’s Ballads Founded on Anecdotes Relating to Animals (1802).

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