My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.
As the boulevards are associated with Paris, Hyde Park with London and Fifth Avenue with New York City, so also is the cafe entwined with the city of Vienna. Such was the renown of the Viennese cafe, Mark Twain was moved to rapture: “that unapproachable luxury–that sumptuous coffee-house, compared with which all European [...]
Ah Jane Austen! It is apparent that she shall never go out of style, as witnessed by the many TV & movie adaptations and novels inspired by her life and works. But the obsession with all things Austen goes much farther back than spate of movies released in the 1990s.
The “cult” of Jane Austen finds [...]
With love and marriage, there can unfortunately be divorce. For our Edwardian counterparts, divorce was a difficult and arduous process that could be, depending upon the social circle, a one-way ticket to the cut direct.
The law of England regarded marriage as a contract, a status and institution. Up until 1857, divorce was administered by ecclesiastical [...]
There arose in the 1880s, the phenomena of the “professional beauty.” A curious phase had come over society wherein publicity became the fashion, and from it, the craze to exhibit photographs of “Ladies of Quality” in the windows of Fleet Street. Instrumental in creating this sensation was London-based artist Frank Miles, who specialized in watercolors [...]
