Sublime

cholera: in her notebook, ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’, George Eliot noted the appearance of cholera in England in 1831–2.

some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, and for the rest features entirely insignifican

Where the evidence survives it becomes clear that two-thirds of apprenticeships failed and were terminated before a lad could reach the end of his indentures and become a freeman of the city, able to join the guild as a full independent member. William Porkar from Horfield must have tried the patience of both masters and parents, for between 1549 a

Well, in truth he was very unlikely to be prosecuted. A few people were: Richard Bett, for example, a tailor from Essex, was convicted in 1565 for the size of his hose; and in the same year Richard Walweyn, who worked as a servant in London, was arrested for wearing ‘a very monstrous and outraygeous great payre of hose’, a charge that closely follo

‘Lyds,’ my mum said when I was leaving. She looked out of place in her new room, which was decorated with someone in their eighties or nineties in mind. Mum has for the last couple of centuries looked like she is in her early forties. She still has black hair, just with some streaks of grey here and there. Her eyes are still bright.

From the 1550s onwards a steady stream of literature warns of the numerous cons that could be practised upon the unwary. Apparently a small industry making loaded dice existed within the King’s Bench and Marshalsea prisons, but the master of the craft was a man named Bird who lived in Holborn and produced fourteen different types of loaded dice to