this is how we are brave

oldbookillustrations:

Braubach.

Samuel Prout, from Sketches by Samuel Prout, by Charles Holme, London, 1915.

(Source: archive.org)

vicfangirlguide:

A promotional photograph of the actor Richard Mansfield as the title characters from the stage play ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ which was being performed in London in the late summer and early autumn of 1888, at the same time as the murders in Whitechapel committed by the killer known as Jack the Ripper. One theory put forward by the Pall Mall Gazette was that the murderer was an army doctor with sunstroke who had been too heavily influenced by watching the play. Another suspect was Mansfield himself.

Each night the actor transformed himself in a matter of seconds from the respectable Dr Jekyll to the monstrous Mr Hyde using his considerable talent to change his posture, gait and facial expression. Some audience members were so disturbed by Mansfield’s ability to seemingly become a different person that they truly believed him to be Jack the Ripper who could be eluding capture through his use of disguise. Because of public unrest the play was taken off the stage on 29th September the day before the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.

(via hoop-skirts-and-corsets)

lostsplendor:

Oxford Arms, London c. Late 19th Century (via)

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lostsplendor:

Drury Lane, London c. 1876 (via)

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lostsplendor:

Lawrence Poutney Hill, London c. Late 19th Century (via)

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decorativeindulgences:

ca. 1679, [gold and enameled mourning ring]

Jewellery, chiefly rings and lockets, is sometimes worn in memory of a deceased person during set periods of mourning. The practice of bequeathing a ring for remembrance was known from the Middle Ages, and by the seventeenth century it had become customary to engrave rings with the name and the dates of the deceased, with the decorative design on a ground of black enamel. People would leave instructions in their wills for specific sums of money to be used by the executors to buy rings, and the recipients would be named. As a consequence of the Great Plague in London in the 1660s, mourning rings had to be made in enormous quantities.

The designs were generally based on the title page of Bills of Mortality published by the Company of Parish Clerks of London, or on funeral tickets. These are usually enclosed in an arched frame, the borders of which commonly show a skeleton with an hour-glass, a symbol of the brevity of life, a pick and shovel, used to dig the grave, and a winding sheet, in which the body was wrapped. Above, a skull and cross-bones appear with the legend ‘MEMENTO MORI’ (‘In remembrance of death’).

On the inside of this ring is the engraved inscription ‘In mem.I.W.Arch.Roch.obt 11 June 79’ (‘In memory of I.W. Archdeacon of Rochester, died on 11 June 1679’). John Lee Warner was Archdeacon of Rochester from 1660 to 1679.

via the British Museum

(via ancient-serpent)