Charles Dickens – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

April tweets

Just the usual load of nonsense.

Jimmy Brennan panning for gold in the Sperrins, Tyrone in 1983.

Organ-grinding tweets for February

More untruths & idle opinions.

Did the house that Jack built come from Spain?

Or, How to cook the old lady who swallowed a fly without stooping to cannibalism. Cumulative songs (and monstrous nested stuffing recipes) in Quixote and Estebanillo González, with the grossest video you’ll see today.

Cruikshank, The progress of passion (1792).

Mechanical musical instrument invented for the 1851 London Great Exhibition by Henry Mayhew

He also coined “flaxen Saxon.” With other absurdities.

The Old Curiosity Shop -> La tienda de antigüedades / El almacén de antigüedades / El pequeño gabinete de antigüedades?

An old junk-shop or an old-junk shop; an old shop that sells curiosities, or a shop that sells old curiosities? One person’s trash is another’s treasure, and I wondered idly whether the Spanish translators hadn’t all got it wrong -perhaps misled by the building’s current, posh aspect- and whether it shouldn’t have been La vieja…

The invisible ethnicity of Inspector Richard Tanner of the Met

The British-Jewish detective who hung the German murderer of a London banker. With photos of his tombstone in Winchester’s West Hill cemetery.

Richard Tanner, late Inspector in the Metropolitan Detective Police Force. Born October 30th 1831, died October 19th 1873. [Also wife and mother-in-law.]

Treatment of incontinence

It may not have worked, but nineteenth century medicine often sounds rather fun. This from An Epitome of Braithwaite’s Retrospect of practical medicine and surgery (1860): M. Lallemand, of Montpellier, has great confidence in aromatic bitters, to which a small portion of brandy has been added, followed by active friction of the loins… As internal…

North-South synergy

I obviously don’t subscribe to this kind of over-familiar nonsense, but here anyway is Dickens in Household words (via Google Print) in 1856: There have not been wanting theorists who have recognised in the apparently constant opposition of the north and south a kind of natural law, by which both are destined to be regulated,…