Wedding – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Peter the Great’s April Fool’s jokes

Of dwarves, arson, stammerers, and binge drinking.

The Mathew Brady Studio's photo of the marriage of Charles Sherwood Stratton (Barnum's General Tom Thumb) to Lavinia Warren in 1863.

Organ-grinding tweets for March 2018

The latest barrel organ news from Hackney, London.

Section of London-Harwich in 1675, crossing the River Lea at Bow.

A sensational 1810 Parisian fire scene on top of an 1840s Russian barrel organ

But who are the three noseless Austrian ladies?

Robert Hillingford, The Disaster at the Ball Given by the Austrian Embassy in Paris, 1810 (1897).

Will Kemp Morris-danced from London to Norwich

But unfortunately he probably won’t figure in the results of the Singing Organ-Grinder’s historical explorations into English popular song.

Will Kemp underway from London to Norwich in 1600, with Thomas Slye on pipe and tabor, but without an organ grinder, because the technology wasn't there.

An organ-grinder at Archway

Pleasures and treasures of the Edwardian street, by a descendant of Scottish banditti.

Two versions of Flann O’Brien’s “The workman’s friend”

With some relevant chunks of Henry Fielding.

Contemporary etching of Fielding from his <em>Jonathan Wild the Great</em>.

All-star bill featuring Dan Mendoza aka the fighting Jew, manly Victorians, Joe Louis and the Dixieaires at the Battle of Jericho, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Rocky Graziano aka the Maharishi Yoghurt, Bob Dylan and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Muhammad Ali and over-reliance on computer technology, Rich Hall and the George Foreman Grill, Wesley Willis and Batman, and Ivor Cutler.

Richard Humphries' second blocks a crucial blow from Daniel Mendoza in the 1788 bout.

Some Itanglish in a Dryden comedy

One José María Trilladas has apparently been combing the accounts of the black card looters of Caja Madrid and has discovered that between them the great and the good, lefties and righties, spent everything on, to put it mildly, wine, women and song, and not a single cent on the printed word. But let that…