I’ve put together a simple and sweet magazine in conjunction with Edwardian Promenade. Please click on the link to download the ‘zine and tell me what you think!
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To further enhance your experience at Edwardian Promenade, I am going to put together short ebooks comprising both original content and reprints of articles and snippets I’ve discovered over the course of researching the Edwardian era. Some of the short ebooks may derive from posts on the website, but most will be topics I feel are best suited for their individual space. The first title I am releasing is Women Bachelors in London, a 1896 article written by Mary Gay Humphrey for Scribner’s Magazine. This article is one of my primary sources for an earlier post on Bachelor Girls, and is available in lit, epub, html, and lrf–all included in a zip file. Please click on the link below, download the zip file, and enjoy! Please feel free to give feedback on either this title or requests for future titles in the comments section.

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“It is as futile to argue with a bridge club maniac as with an opium eater or an inebriate. The habit has outreached all rational discussion. Duty, common sense, reputation have become meaningless words before the victim’s devastated conscience.”

So said the pseudonymous “Frank Danby” in a 1912 article in an English periodical. By the time this article was published, the mania for bridge had become a major source of entertainment for society on both sides of the Atlantic, though nowhere else did this card game become a point of obsession than deep within the heart of Mayfair. In a previous article, I discussed the emergence and growth of ladies’ clubs. Though they claimed to be patterned after the historic gentlemen’s clubs dotting Pall Mall, many in the beginning were places for ladies to rest and unwind between bouts of shopping or visiting Town, or for ladies of certain social or education sets to reconnect. With the advent of bridge, ladies clubs began to fall in line with their famous counterparts (White’s, Boodles, Marlborough) as places where women convened to gossip, drink tea and cocktails, gamble, and get away from men.

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