Edwardian Promenade

Ladies began to carve out a separate, independent life of their own by the late 1890s, and there came to London a proliferation of clubs catering specifically to gentlewomen of rank and means. Inside, the clubs mirrored that of their more famous counterparts like White’s or the Marlborough Club, as centers of leisure and relaxation, [...]

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, meals could be obtained at chop houses, coaching inns, hotels, and coffee houses, yet all these ways of eating were deemed unsuitable for respectable women, who generally ate at home. This situation changed in the 1860s with the arrival of better railway hotels, who welcomed women in the [...]

The concept of the bachelor girl (or girl bachelor, woman bachelor, in common vernacular of the day) was an extension of the New Woman, both of which equally frightened traditionalists and gender divisions at the turn-of-the-century. As seen in a previous post, the girl-bachelor was seen as “a ‘comfortable creature’ and a ‘clever nest-builder.’” Where [...]

Much as today, the publishing industry of the Edwardian era wrestled with such familiar issues as distribution, declining interest in reading, literary fiction versus “trash” for the masses, competition for bookstores from cheap editions & used book sales, and the eternal assumption of an “us versus them” between aspiring authors and editors/literary agents of major [...]

The House of Lords measured 100 feet by 50 feet, and was decorated in solemn hues of gold and crimson, with lofty stained-glass windows depicting the past kings and queens of England. At the end of the Chamber was a canopied throne of gold where the reigning monarch sat when opening Parliament. On the [...]

According to E. Beresford Chancellor, if “we sought for one particular feature distinguishing London from the other capitals of Europe, apart from its immense proportions, it would probably be found in the number of its large houses–many of which are indeed private palaces.” Mayfair had not always been fashionable, and long after the areas of [...]

In the manner of New York City’s Broadway, the hub of London theatre and nightlife was The Strand. A famous music hall song of the period entitled “Let’s All Go Down The Strand” sums up the general exhilaration tourists and Londoners alike experienced along this slice of the English capital:
One night a half ‘a [...]

A bicameral parliament, with an upper house, the House of Lords, and a lower house, the House of Commons, the Parliament of Great Britain is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom. When the Founding Fathers of America worked to construct the government, they looked to British Parliament for structure, creating the Senate [...]