Breakfast Links: Week of February 15, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Touching love-letters from sailors at sea.
• Wonderful: The friendship book of Anne Wagner, compiled 1795-1834.
• Street life in Victorian London, captured in photographs.
• History of a chair that probably belonged to John Hancock .
• The introduction of anesthesia : imagine surgery without it.
• Curious 18thc cats .
• Image: The 1587 death warrant for Mary, Queen of Scotts , signed by Elizabeth I.
• Parcels and boxes : 19thc textile shopping.
• A 1765 complaint about a wife eloping begins an investigation into an unhappy marriage .
• Not entirely accurate, but still interesting: the Belle Epoque  body-con dresses  that shocked early 20thc Paris.
• In the 15th-17thc, earwax was considered both versatile and useful.
• Thackeray's own original drawings for Vanity Fair reveal points not mentioned in the text.
• Who invented the first false eyelashes ?
• Image: Marie Antoinette's Green Library from Versailles.
• The problem with "always" and "never" in historical costuming (and really history in general.)
• Courting and romance in the 18thc press.
• Forget the groundhog - according to Anglo-Saxon calendars, February 6 is the last day of winter .
• Five lovely letters on the pleasures of reading and the benefits of libraries .
• Image: Word War One poster warning against spies .
• Was Charles Dickens the first celebrity medical spokesman?
• As "White Mouse", Nancy Wake was among the most decorated secret agents of the World War Two.
• The noisy Middle Ages.
• What do Thomas More, Hans Sloane, and a Moravian burial ground have in common?
• Junk mail is nothing new, as these 19thc examples show.
• Did Martha Washington really have a • Image: Block and axe from the Tower of London that was also used as a child's chair in a Yeoman Warden's quarters!
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Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.