Read Online A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press by Jeremy Clay - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jeremy Clay
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finally published in English. Flicking from one to the other is like flipping a flan to find the underside teeming with maggots.
‘Among ill-paid workers, even if they have no large families, hunger prevails in spite of full and regular work; and the number of the ill-paid is very large’, wrote Engels. ‘In these cases all sorts of devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and rotten vegetables are eaten for want of other food, and everything greedily gathered up which may possibly contain an atom of nourishment.’
Even if they could scrape together the money for some of the more modestly-priced ingredients in Mrs Beeton’s recipes, it didn’t necessarily follow that the poor had anywhere to cook them. Nor did it mean they knew how to cook. In that, at least, they shared some common ground with the aristocracy. When the Marchioness of Londonderry announced that she knew how to grill a chop, it made the Illustrated London News .
There was another sector of society that fell beyond the scope of Mrs Beeton’s culinary advice: the unscrupulous. This was a time of wholesale adulteration of food and drink, when milk was diluted with water or thickened with starch, when beer was crafted with strychnine and when red lead lent an appealing hue to cheese.
There must have been quite a surreptitious demand for such sly recipes, but the virtuous Mrs Beeton certainly didn’t oblige. Nor, come to think of it, did she explain how to kill and cook a dog for an impromptu victory feast after an election. So the Liberals of West Bromwich, as we shall see, were forced to improvise.
Whisky Corsets – A Singular Fraud
A Canadian correspondent tells a story which reminds one of James Russell Lowell’s famous despatch on petroleum smugglers ‘with the pectoral proportions of a Juno.’
A novel method of avoiding the Sunday liquor law, he says, was discovered in Montreal about a fortnight ago.
The proprietor of a candy-store was arraigned in the Recorder’s Court, charged with ‘selling liquor on Sunday out of whisky corsets’. The latter part of the charge astounded the clerk of the court, until the chief of police explained that after some months of effort to detect how liquor was sold on Sunday in the French quarter of the city, one of his men while in a candy-store saw a man pass the proprietor five cents. The proprietor produced a small rubber tube from under his vest, one end of which the man put to his mouth and sucked.
The officer pounced on the proprietor and a search revealed that the man wore a pair of tin corsets, with doubled space between the inner and outer partitions, holding over a gallon of liquor. To this the tube was attached by a stop-cock.
The customers leaned over the counter, took the tube in their mouth, and sucked until the proprietor thought they had the worth of their money, when the supply was turned off and the tube put back underneath the vest. The police discovered that many a buxom candy-store woman wore similar tank-corsets and did a rushing business with rubber tubes on Sundays.
Warrants are out for several of the ingenious violators of the law.
The Worcestershire Chronicle , February 20, 1892
Extraordinary Poisoning Near Rugby
A most melancholy occurrence has just taken place in a farm house at Ashby St Ledgers, a village on the borders of Northamptonshire.
It appears that Mr William Payne Cowley, a farmer living in that village with his mother (who is a widow) and his brothers, had his sheep dipped, or washed, last week. The object of this dipping or washing is the extermination of vermin, and for this purpose a strong mixture of arsenic and soft soap diluted with water, is used.
On Tuesday morning last, Mr W.P. Cowley sent his brother, Mr Edwin Cowley, to the adjoining town of Daventry, where he purchased 6lb of white arsenic and a barrel of soft soap weighing 30lb.
On the following morning, Mr W.P. Cowley and his mother prepared the sheep dipping mixture, in which some
‘Among ill-paid workers, even if they have no large families, hunger prevails in spite of full and regular work; and the number of the ill-paid is very large’, wrote Engels. ‘In these cases all sorts of devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and rotten vegetables are eaten for want of other food, and everything greedily gathered up which may possibly contain an atom of nourishment.’
Even if they could scrape together the money for some of the more modestly-priced ingredients in Mrs Beeton’s recipes, it didn’t necessarily follow that the poor had anywhere to cook them. Nor did it mean they knew how to cook. In that, at least, they shared some common ground with the aristocracy. When the Marchioness of Londonderry announced that she knew how to grill a chop, it made the Illustrated London News .
There was another sector of society that fell beyond the scope of Mrs Beeton’s culinary advice: the unscrupulous. This was a time of wholesale adulteration of food and drink, when milk was diluted with water or thickened with starch, when beer was crafted with strychnine and when red lead lent an appealing hue to cheese.
There must have been quite a surreptitious demand for such sly recipes, but the virtuous Mrs Beeton certainly didn’t oblige. Nor, come to think of it, did she explain how to kill and cook a dog for an impromptu victory feast after an election. So the Liberals of West Bromwich, as we shall see, were forced to improvise.
Whisky Corsets – A Singular Fraud
A Canadian correspondent tells a story which reminds one of James Russell Lowell’s famous despatch on petroleum smugglers ‘with the pectoral proportions of a Juno.’
A novel method of avoiding the Sunday liquor law, he says, was discovered in Montreal about a fortnight ago.
The proprietor of a candy-store was arraigned in the Recorder’s Court, charged with ‘selling liquor on Sunday out of whisky corsets’. The latter part of the charge astounded the clerk of the court, until the chief of police explained that after some months of effort to detect how liquor was sold on Sunday in the French quarter of the city, one of his men while in a candy-store saw a man pass the proprietor five cents. The proprietor produced a small rubber tube from under his vest, one end of which the man put to his mouth and sucked.
The officer pounced on the proprietor and a search revealed that the man wore a pair of tin corsets, with doubled space between the inner and outer partitions, holding over a gallon of liquor. To this the tube was attached by a stop-cock.
The customers leaned over the counter, took the tube in their mouth, and sucked until the proprietor thought they had the worth of their money, when the supply was turned off and the tube put back underneath the vest. The police discovered that many a buxom candy-store woman wore similar tank-corsets and did a rushing business with rubber tubes on Sundays.
Warrants are out for several of the ingenious violators of the law.
The Worcestershire Chronicle , February 20, 1892
Extraordinary Poisoning Near Rugby
A most melancholy occurrence has just taken place in a farm house at Ashby St Ledgers, a village on the borders of Northamptonshire.
It appears that Mr William Payne Cowley, a farmer living in that village with his mother (who is a widow) and his brothers, had his sheep dipped, or washed, last week. The object of this dipping or washing is the extermination of vermin, and for this purpose a strong mixture of arsenic and soft soap diluted with water, is used.
On Tuesday morning last, Mr W.P. Cowley sent his brother, Mr Edwin Cowley, to the adjoining town of Daventry, where he purchased 6lb of white arsenic and a barrel of soft soap weighing 30lb.
On the following morning, Mr W.P. Cowley and his mother prepared the sheep dipping mixture, in which some
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