Isabella Bradford's Blog, page 66

Fashions for January 1836

Morning & Opera Dresses Jan 1836 Loretta reports:

This month’s fashion plate is connected to my recently released book, Dukes Prefer Blondes , whose heroine’s clothing styles cover the time between August 1835 and May 1836, when fashion finally begins its shift away from the gigantic sleeves to the less flamboyant style we might think of when we think of “Victorian”: the top of the dress gets smaller, and hair and bonnet styles grow sleeker.

In January 1836, however, The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons is still showing enormous sleeves. The black dress on the right gives a nice view of what’s under the opera cloak. One note: the pelerines, which look so stiff in the plate, were rather more graceful in real life, being made of fine muslin.
Dress Description
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Holiday Break

Holiday greeting card Loretta & Isabella report:

As mentioned on Friday, we’re taking our annual break from social media to enjoy in-person holiday festivities with our families. We’ll be back on the first Monday of 2016, and we hope you’ll rejoin us as we begin yet another nerdy history year. Thank you for continuing to encourage us!

We wish you the most joyous of holiday seasons and a New Year filled with all kinds of good things, historical and otherwise.

Image of what is apparently a news carrier’s greeting card —appropriate, we thought, for the 2NHG bringers of old news. Dated between 1880-90. Image courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Breakfast Links: Week of December 14, 2015

Breakfast Links on Friday? Why not? Loretta and I are heading off on our annual holiday break from the blog and the rest of social media, but I couldn't go away without posting one more round of Breakfast Links. You're just getting them a bit early this week.
• What greed put asunder (a stunning 13thc. missal ) scholarship can reunite.
• The untold story of the hairbrush .
• How Thomas Jefferson learned architecture .
• Piecing together the life of centenarian Mary Hicks (died 1870), who spent the last 27 years of her long life as an inmate in the Brentford Workhouse.
• Ten of England's most beautiful and historical  synagogues .
• Image: Amazing photo of a woman cleaning casks for Tennents Brewery during World War One.
• The science of life and death in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
• Exploring Hyde Park's hidden pet cemetery.
• Are longer words falling out of use because of texting and social media?
• Did you read this series? The Cherry Ames nurse books, published between 1943-1968.
• Dissecting the dream of the 1890s: A skype-date with those curious neo-Victorians.
• An American historian meets the American Girl dolls.
• Image: This unpicked 19thc bodice of 18thc silk brocade is equally stunning on the reverse side, where the weave creates a stripe.
• Clothes make the woman: a century of Chinese women and what they wore.
• Victorian adventures and terrible tales: the Illustrated Police News.
• The historical stories that make Revolutionary War researchers laugh.
• We can dream: some seriously amazing holiday party dresses from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• The other Boleyn girl's daughter.
• A pair of stunning mid-19thc. papier mache bookbindings with mother of pearl here and here .
• A Georgian farting club.
• Did falsified medieval history help create feminism?
• The snowflake man from Vermont produced the first photographs of snowflakes in 1885.
• Image: Carbonized bread from Herculaneum , 79 CE.
• The poignant last letter of Mary Queen of Scots before her execution.
• Designer Jacqueline Durran's 11thc-style costumes for the latest film version of Macbeth.
• The Georgian circulating library .
• How an intern saved a museum by discovering this Revolutionary War treasure in the attic.
• Just for fun: cartoonish Kate Beaton draws the painter J.M.W.Turner and some of this artistic contemporaries.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.