Locating London's Past: A Gem of a Website

Locating London's Past is a new website that lets users find information from a vast array of  historical sources that cover crime and punishment, the distribution of wealth, poverty and occupations, mortality, and the ownership of consumer goods.

Partial view of the website

Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are turning increasingly to geographical analysis as a way of bringing the facts and figures to life. What’s exciting about this resource is that the existing data you can explore today is just the start – the interface could be expanded to include new data sets and new maps, making it potentially useful to scholars in dozens of different disciplines. JISC’s commitment to funding open source projects means that other universities are already looking at how they might reuse the programmes that the Sheffield team has developed.” 

Trial accounts from the Old Bailey, tax and population data, and even archaeological records can all be uploaded onto John Rocque’s famous 1746 map of London, now fully referenced to modern geographical coordinates by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). 

Locating London’s Past is the result of a collaborative project between the University of Sheffield, the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of London. - JISC

The First Lawnmower

"The fashion for the great sward, which required a dozen men constantly scything, was promoted by the 18th-century English designer Capability Brown for the oh-so-rich landed gentry. The invention of the lawn mower in 1832 enabled ordinary people to appropriate for themselves the lawn as a symbol of wealth and it has been with us ever since."

Highclere Castle with park lands designed by Capability Brown. Grazing sheep cropped the lawns, but they left behind droppings.

• From "Ask the Master Gardener."
• Icons of Invention: The First Lawnmower
• Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton

Lydia Bennet's Recommended Reading: Redcoat, by Richard Holmes

Gentle Readers, If Jane Austen's character Lydia Bennet could ever be tempted to read a book, then Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, by Richard Holmes might just do the trick. Filled with pages and pages of the personal memories of hundreds of British soldiers between Georgian and Early Victorian times, it also includes letters and memories of the wives and women who followed them. Here is the publisher's description.

"Redcoat is the story of the British soldier - those noncommissioned men whom Kipling called "the backbone of the army" - from roughly 1760 to 1860. Based on the letters and diaries of the men who served and the women who followed them, this book is rich in the history of a fascinating era. Among the highlights are Wolfe's victory and death at Quebec, Wellington's Peninsular War, Waterloo, the retreat from Kabul, the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny." The focus of Redcoat, however, is on the individual recollections and experiences of the ordinary soldiers in the wars of Georgian and early Victorian England. Through their stories and anecdotes - of uniforms, equipment floggings, wounds, food, barrack life, courage, comradeship, death, love, and loss - Richard Holmes provides a comprehensive portrait of an extraordinarily successful fighting force. "

Oh la! She will certainly be fagged just by looking at the pictures of all those glorious men in redcoats!

If you would like to read more about the Bennet families scandalous youngest daughter Lydia, then check out Lydia Bennet's Story: A Sequel to Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Odiwe which has just been released in a new international edition by Sourcebooks. You can also read two reviews of it from this blogs two co-author's Vic and Laurel Ann, and visit the author's web site devoted to Lydia's online journal.

posted by Laurel Ann, Austenprose