In which I fall to musing upon the amount of information an average reader of Charles Dickens’ novels would have been expected to possess in his own time and how it compares to that which could be assumed of us today.
At the Society for the Protection of Birds’ sixth annual general meeting in 1896, Miss Julia Andrews, a fifty-eight year old spinster and local secretary for the Society’s branch in Teddington, rose to ask a very uncomfortable question to all the good and the great – as well as the more middling sort such as […]
Meteorology, climate science, magnetism, acoustics, bacteriology; all these fields were greatly advanced by the contributions to them made by John Tyndall. However if you’re like many people – including may who consider themselves relatively well-versed in the history of the sciences – his name may not be a familiar one to you. Yet in his time, his writings were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, and his lectures filled halls night after night.
In Roxanne, the 1987 film adaptation of the Cyrano de Bergerac story, Steve Martin – in the leading male role of the a small mountain resort town’s erudite fire chief somewhat obviously named C.D. Bales – chastises his lovable but incompetent band of volunteer fire fighters upon finding a trash can ablaze inside the fire […]