victorians

I’ve been trying to put the “Edmonton bureau” into more civilized order the last few weeks. This mostly involves decreasing the total entropy of my books and restoring them to shelves and boxes, which inevitably leads to the discovery of a couple dozen books I never finished and many others I’d like to read again. This in turn, tends to delay the tidying. Among the books I’ve unearthed and re-read is From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel about Jack the Ripper.

I think it was a case of horror victorianorum. I mean by this, that horror which even nowadays is felt by almost everyone who visits a display of Victorian stuffed birds under glass, for example, or of Victorian dolls and dolls’ clothes.

[Before the famine,] two million acres of Ireland were given over to growing potatoes. Three million people ate nothing else. Nothing. Adult males consumed between twelve and fourteen pounds daily.