Dagworth Hall as it looks todayAs I believe I’ve mentioned before, medieval chronicles are a gold mine for those of us who like our history to be laced with a bit of the bizarre. In between descriptions of wars, plagues, and other notable events, you are apt to suddenly find deadpan accounts of events that can be best described as barking mad. Ralph of Coggeshall was a monk in
Wouldn’t you love to have interviewed Lizzie’s physician, Dr. Nomus S. Paige from Taunton, the jail doctor, ? He found her to be of sane mind and we can now confirm that he had Lizzie moved to the Wright’s quarters while she was so ill after her arraignment with bronchitis, tonsilitis and a heavy cold. We learn that she was not returned to her cell as he did not wish a relapse so close to her trial. Dr. Paige was a Dartmouth man, class of 1861. I have yet to produce a photo of him but stay tuned! His house is still standing at 74 Winthrop St, corner of Walnut in Taunton. He was married twice, with 2 children by his second wife Elizabeth Honora “Nora” Colby and they had 2 children,Katherine and Russell who both married and had families. Many of the Paiges are buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Taunton. Dr. Paige died in April of 1919- I bet he had plenty of stories to tell about his famous patient in 1893!! He was a popular Taunton doctor at Morton Hospital and had a distinguished career. Dr. Paige refuted the story that Lizzie was losing her mind being incarcerated at the jail, a story which was appearing in national newspapers just before the trial. Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, Taunton, courtesy of Find A Grave. 74 Winthrop St., corner of Walnut, home of Dr. Paige, courtesy of Google Maps Obituary for Dr. Paige, Boston Globe April 17, 1919
How did New Yorkers get through sweltering summer days before the invention and widespread use of air conditioning? Well, a lot of it depended on your income bracket. If you were wealthy, you likely waited out the summer at a seaside resort like Newport or on a country estate cooled by mountains or river breezes. […]
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading →
A boatman working near the foot of Little Street in
Brooklyn, on October 3, 1864, saw a package floating on the water. Thinking it
might contain something of value, he took it into his boat. He unraveled the enameled
oilcloth surrounding the package, and inside, covered in sheets of brown paper, was
the trunk of a human body. The head, arms, pelvis, and legs had been cut off
with a saw or sharp
Soapy Smith STAR NotebookPage 20 - Original copy1884Courtesy of Geri Murphy(Click image to enlarge)
oapy Smith's early empire growth in Denver.Operating the prize package soap sell racket in 1884.
This is page 20, the continuation of page 19, and dated May 6 - May 29, 1884, as well as the continuation of pages 18-19, the beginning of Soapy Smith's criminal empire building in Denver, Colorado.&
[Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
New York, New York, 1873 - In New York City there are many degrees or castes of society; probably in no other city in the world will we find so many phases of human life. Some of these, the most palpable, we would consider, and to that end refer them to those three great thoroughfares of trade and travel, the Bowery, Broadway, and Fifth Avenue.[more]
The Bowery
The Bowery Boy is the personification of the New York “b’hoy” with a careless swagger and insolent leer. He cares “nothing for nobody,” but is bent on having a “general good time anyhow.” He is found hanging around porterhouses or corner groggeries in company with others of like proclivities. He is well known to the police, and well instructed in all ingenious dodges for the evasion of legal process. He is an object of aversion to the law-and-order-abiding citizen, of horror to the timid.
We see the Bowery girl with her gay turban and flowing head dress, yclept “waterfall,” aping, so far as her limited resources will permit, the style of her more fortunate sisters. She steps mincingly and stealthily along, casting from side to side covert glances through her semi-masque veil. She is cat-like in motion and demeanor. She works hard on the hoop-skirt or the sewing machine, and as day after day glides by without any special improvement in her social and pecuniary circumstances, she looks to marriage as the only relief from poverty, and often, trusting too implicitly the representations of a “friend,” she becomes the victim, and then sinks rapidly into a sad state of moral degradation.
Broadway
The Broadway swell is clean and fastidiously dressed, with hairs frizzed and mustache waxed and curled, a la militaire. He attends to some little matter which he dignifies by the name of business, but the greater portion of the day finds him lounging about a hotel or promenading the street cane in hand and staring at the lady pedestrians. He has much to do with sham-jewelry concerns, mock-auctions, and faro tables; is generally on the lookout for a green’un whose pocket he will adroitly lighten of his wallet. He believes in the “high life,” and he lives “fast.”
The Broadway belle is an object of much consideration. She saunters carelessly along, indifferent to everything but the admiration of others. She is far from indifferent to fashion, but consults contrast and conspicuity in her mode of dress. Does fashion prescribe a large bow to her bonnet strings, she is very likely to increase the size of said bow and permit long ends to flow gracefully down either side. She is a strange compound of simplicity and affectation, of naiveté and shrewdness, of intelligence and ignorance; at one time charming by her vivacity, at another repelling by her dullness or airy affectedness. She to a great extent controls her own fortune, and is not all the painted toy which many account her. She is the dashing, sprightly spaniel.
Fifth Avenue
The Fifth Avenue blood claims to be of all others, the very
“glass of fashion and the mold of form.”
He dresses exquisitely; his tailors and barbers are artistes, so that his fine (?) shape is displayed to the best advantage. With mustache and side whiskers of the Dundreary style, and eye-glass straining the orbicular muscles, he rides in his shining “dog cart,” or struts daintily along ogling the passers-by. He believes in aristocratic privileges and glories in castes; he is one of the “upper crust.” He is accounted a great catch by eligible young ladies and maneuvering mamas. He is a fair representation, on the principles of comparative physiognomy, of the furry-faced monkey, while the Broadway dandy is a good goat, and the rowdy an irascible bull-dog.
The Fifth Avenue flirt is a craft of a very different rig. She believes in “Full sail,” in crowding on “all the canvas.” Fashion is one of her chief gods, and they who can not come up to its requisitions re dropped out of her “set.” She sweeps grandly along with an air of assumption and importance that is as ludicrous as it is supercilious. She claims for herself aristocratic privileges, and she is not to be judged according to the “low, mean” standard of common people. Her portrait, as we give it, well portrays the purse-proud, stuck –up sentiments which reign within her mind. She may be likened to the indulged, capricious, and fickle poodle.
From:The Phrenological miscellany, or, The annuals of phrenology and physiognomy from 1865 to 1873. Rev. and combined in one volume. ed. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1882.
"We follow vice and folly where a police officer dare not show his head, as the small, but intrepid weasel pursues vermin in paths which the licensed cat or dog cannot enter."
The Sunday Flash 1841