Would You Like Some Milk with That Serial?

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, magazines were a large and thriving industry. But the word “magazine” referred to something quite different than the shiny, advertisement-filled publications found on racks today. Around the turn of the century, popular monthly magazines such as Everybody’s, McClure’s, and Munsey’s ran from around 100 to 150 pages, sometimes including thirty or more stories, articles, and poems, and cost ten or fifteen cents per issue. Though fiction has largely disappeared from today’s magazines, in those days it was a staple—besides publications that combined fiction and nonfiction, there were many all-fiction magazines, some devoted to specific genres—love stories, adventure stories, Westerns, mysteries, and more.

The Ettrick Shepherd and the Ballad of Kilmeny

In Lucy Maud Montgomery's Kilmeny of the Orchard, the title character owes her name, and perhaps a bit of her air of tragedy and mystery, to the ballad "Kilmeny" by Scottish poet James Hogg. The poem appeared in a collection published in 1813, The Queen's Wake, which catapulted him into stardom and earned him the nickname "The Ettrick Shepherd."

The ballad is well known to the characters of the story and is referenced several times, notably after the hero of the story, Eric Marshall, first encounters the beautiful and mysterious Kilmeny in her hidden orchard and learns more about her from the townsfolk:

Oh My Darling, Oh My Darling, Oh My Darling . . . Kodak Camera?

“I love the wild, where I can ride and ride, and never meet a human being—where I can dream and dally and feast my eyes on a landscape man has not touched. I have lived most of my life in New York, and I love nature so well that I'm inclined to be jealous of her.”

In B.M. Bower's Her Prairie Knight, New York socialite Beatrice "Trix" Lansell visits Montana for the first time and falls in love with the landscape. (And with a handsome cowpunch named Keith Cameron, but that comes later!) Trix is determined to experience all that mother nature and Montana have to offer, and to capture it all on film. She never leaves the ranch without her beloved "Kodak," and often holds up the riding party, much to the amusement of her British suitor, Sir Redmond.

Give Me a Head with Hair: The Sequel

Last month I wrote about the popularity of hairpieces among Victorian women, since they played a significant role in our recent release, Dora Deane. That was great fun to do because I never tire of browsing through vintage fashion trends. And while the ladies' hairstyles get more attention than the men's, that doesn't mean they were the only ones who got to have a little fun! In fact, hair was just as important to Victorian men, and in the novel Eugenia Deane takes great pleasure in putting down one of her would-be suitors as "a perfect bore—a baboon, with more hair than brains." Though men tended to wear the hair on their heads rather uniformly (above the collar and parted on the side, with or without a wave, and a bit of pomade or wax to hold it in place), they were really able to express themselves by the manner in which they wore their facial hair.

When facial hair started making a comeback after a trend toward clean-shaven faces in the middle of the nineteenth century, guys embraced beards and mustaches with gusto, and soon beards became seen as evidence of masculinity and manly courage. World leaders and public figures were quick to adopt the trend toward more facial hair, adding to the notion of strength and virility, and men everywhere were inspired to emulate them. And there was a growing market for products to help men get those sought-after thick and silky whiskers.

Give Me a Head with Hair, Long Beautiful Hair!

In Dora Deane by Mary Jane Holmes, our sweet heroine, Dora Deane, is tricked into cutting off her long, luxuriant hair so her wicked cousin Eugenia can sell it for big bucks to buy a new dancing ensemble. The story takes place in New York in 1858, and it got me to wondering if buying and selling hair was really such a big thing back then, since wearing wigs hadn't been in style for quite some time. But it turns out that accessorizing one's hair with more hair has never really gone out of style!

The Victorian Era encompassed more than sixty years of women's fashion trends (of which there were many!), and though hairstyles also changed over those years, one thing remained constant: the elaborate styles required an abundance of hair to pull them off successfully. Coils, curls, chignons, knots, clusters, fringes, ringlets--it was a veritable hairdressing playground, and one which every fashionable woman entered into fearlessly. But, one needed the proper equipment--thick, strong hair, and lots of it--to carry off those styles, and thanks to the merciless application of hot tongs and crimpers, a lot of women weren't blessed with a head full of healthy hair. So how did they manage to keep their hair in fashion?

Home, Home on the Range, Where the Deer and the Antelope and the British-Owned Cattle Play...

The American West of the 19th and early 20th centuries was a place filled with colorful characters and fascinating stories. The new opportunities of the West attracted people of all classes and nationalities, in search of fortune, adventure, or escape. Even as seemingly unlikely a figure as an English aristocrat, such as Sir Redmond Hayes in Her Prairie Knight, was by no means a rarity on the plains of Montana.

In the 1870s and 1880s, when the cattle boom was in full swing, many wealthy Englishmen saw the ranching business as an excellent opportunity for investment, and American ranchers welcomed the capital the English could provide. “[English] drawing rooms buzzed with the stories of this last of bonanzas,” wrote John Clay, a Scotsman who eventually became a highly successful ranch manager himself; “staid old gentlemen, who scarcely knew the difference between a steer and a heifer, discussed it over their port and nuts.”

Books Within Books: When A Man Marries

We love when our favorite novel characters love to read as much as we do! In Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novel, When A Man Marries, Kit McNair and her society friends are an educated lot, and the story features a few literary references that would have resonated with the early 20th century reader, but might be a little mystifying to today’s reader. Here, a few of those references from Rinehart's delightful romantic comedy are explained! The first comes when Kit meets the handsome Tom Harbison, who has a sense that they've met before:

"I beg your pardon," he said, and let my hand drop. "Just for a second I had an idea that we had met somewhere, a long time ago. I suppose--no, it couldn't have happened, or I should remember." He was smiling, half at himself.

"No," I smiled back at him. "It didn't happen, I'm afraid--unless we dreamed it."

"We?"

"I felt that way, too, for a moment."

"The Brushwood Boy!" he said with conviction. "Perhaps we will find a common dream life, where we knew each other. You remember the Brushwood boy loved the girl for years before they really met."

But this was a little too rapid, even for me. "Nothing so sentimental, I'm afraid," I retorted. "I have had exactly the same sensation sometimes when I have sneezed."

Cursing, Georgie Minafer-Style!

At the age of nine, George Amberson Minafer, the Major's one grandchild, was a princely terror, dreaded not only in Amberson Addition but in many other quarters through which he galloped on his white pony.

Georgie Amberson Minafer, the dynamic central character in the Pulitzer Prize winning The Magnificent Ambersons, makes an unforgettable entrance into the story, and it sets the tone for his character as the reader watches him grow and mature over the course of the novel. As a child, his mother dotes on him and dresses him in Little Lord Fauntleroy-style, complete with a mop-head of gorgeous curls, and Georgie takes some ribbing about his appearance from the other boys in the neighborhood. But they learn soon enough how deceiving appearances can be.

Titillating Tattlers & Muckraking Madness: Social Reform in America’s Press

I worked in the advertising department of a local newspaper for five years, and in that brief time, I saw the decline of readership and popularity of newspapers. Granted, smaller papers are faring better than the nationals as people still want to read local news stories, but the internet is driving many papers out of business. Why wait for news when you can have it with a few key strokes? But imagine a time when that wasn’t the case, when newspapers were the new big thing and the main way people connected with the rest of the world. Of course, with the news came scandal, as well. I sometimes wonder at what is considered news these days when I am watching television--fashion, celebrity life, gossip and rumor mongering are all front and center more often than not, but this is nothing new--the tabloids have been around since the late 1800s.

Brawlers, Bashers & Battlegrounds: Early 20th Century Gangsters

While many associate New York City gangs with either Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film The Gangs of New York or the high-profile celebrity criminals of the Prohibition, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was thick with gangsters, as evidenced in Legacy Romance's newest release, The Prince and Betty by P.G. Wodehouse. The battleground was the immigrant slums, but those fighting for control weren’t outsiders, but rather immigrants themselves (or children of immigrants). Mobsters from these communities, which were predominantly Irish, Italian and German and Eastern European Jews, fought against one another, and teetered between fighting and supporting New York City’s corrupt police force and political machine.

The center of politics in the Lower East Side was Tammany Hall, which was both a place and an organization. Originally a patriotic "club" when founded in the 1700s, by the 1900s it was synonymous with political machination, corruption, and intrigue. For the two biggest gangs in the Lower East Side, support came from the Tammany Hall politicos. Immigrants were provided money and assistance with naturalization in exchange for their votes, and in the early 20th century, that meant an enormous voting population was easily bought. From the 1850s through the 1930s, Tammany Hall would essentially control New York City politics.

Curses! Chief Squandro and the Legend of the Saco River

The river lapped the shores of peaceful meadows; it flowed along banks green with maple, beech, sycamore, and birch; it fell tempestuously over dams and fought its way between rocky cliffs crowned with stately firs. It rolled past forests of pine and hemlock and spruce, now gentle, now terrible; for there is said to be an Indian curse upon the Saco, whereby, with every great sun, the child of a paleface shall be drawn into its cruel depths. Lashed into fury by the stony reefs that impeded its progress, the river looked now sapphire, now gold, now white, now leaden gray; but always it was hurrying, hurrying on its appointed way to the sea.

Indians Fishing ~ Albert Bierstadt

Kate Douglas Wiggin grew up along the shores of the mighty Saco River in Maine, and it is the focal point of her novella, Rose O' the River. The above passage mentions an Indian curse said to have been placed on the river in 1675, and still feared more than two hundred years later at the time of the writing of Rose O' the River in 1905.

John Rolfe: Virginia's First Gentleman

To Have and To Hold features a fictional version of John Rolfe, the man best known for making tobacco a viable commercial crop in the Colonies and for marrying the Indian Princess, Pocahontas. We meet him on page one as he comes to visit his friend, the protagonist, Ralph Percy, and counsels him to take a wife. The book opens in 1621, merely a year before Rolfe’s death. It is impossible to say how accurately Mary Johnston portrays Rolfe’s personality, but I enjoyed her characterization of him, and it prompted me to do some investigating and learn more about the actual man. Rolfe’s life was marred by tragedy, and if he bore it as well as the pen and ink version did, he was an admirable individual.

John Rolfe was born in 1585 in Norfolk, England. His first wife accompanied him on his original trip to Virginia. Their voyage was marred by a shipwreck, stranding them in Bermuda for some time. There, Rolfe’s first child, a daughter, was born, but she died in infancy. The shipwrecked travelers set sail again and reached Virginia in 1610, but Rolfe’s wife also died not long after they landed in the New World.

After arriving in Virginia, Rolfe began experimenting with tobacco crops and eventually was able to produce a tobacco that could turn a profit. According to Virtual Jamestown, “Rolfe's role in the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop insured his standing within the colony.”

Dog-Warpin' on the River: A Family Tradition

“The forests of Maine have been a resource since the area first was inhabited by humans – but the uses of the forest have changed and grown – from timber for masts and shipbuilding, to sawn lumber for myriad building projects, to raw material for papermaking, to a recreational resource that boosts the tourism economy.” ~Maine History Online

Rose O’ The River, by Kate Douglas Wiggin, takes place in Maine in the heart of the logging industry in the early 1900s. Although modern technology and enhanced safety regulations have helped in improving the job of a logger, it is still today considered a highly dangerous occupation. Requiring brute strength and incredible bravery, it's not for the faint of heart.

In the early logging days, men lived in camps on location while their families lived at home. Often, the cabins the men lived in were on skids so they could easily be moved from site to site when resources had diminished in the current location. The living conditions were deplorable, camps were often rampant with lice and other diseases, and the men wore the same clothing for months at a time. Later, through the unions, logging camps allowed the men to move their wives and families to these remote locations where small communities, complete with schools, were founded.

Sex, Lies & Gunpowder: Scandal, Seventeenth-Century Style

An adulteress. A co-conspirator in an assassination attempt. Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, meant to blow up the House of Lords, along with the King. These are just a few of the people and events mentioned in Mary Johnston’s swashbuckling adventure, To Have and to Hold. Let’s take a look.

Frances Carr, Countess of Somerset, was one of the most reviled and talked about women of her day. She was first married at the tender age of fourteen in a political alliance to thirteen-year-old Robert Devereux. The two teenagers were separated quickly because of their youth, but by the time they were brought together again to consummate their marriage, Frances was in love with Robert Carr, the 1st Earl of Somerset, and her husband was ill with smallpox. She did everything she could to avoid sleeping with her husband, all the while claiming he was unable to perform his marital duties. She even had herself examined to prove her maidenhood was still intact, though some speculated that she duped the examiners by claiming modesty, veiling her face and at the last moment substituting a truly innocent girl in her place. Frances eventually won an annulment and was honorably married to Robert Carr, but it is no wonder that Ralph Percy, the hero of To Have and to Hold, resented his wife being mentioned in the same sentence with the Countess. And the scandal did not end with her marriage. She also poisoned Sir Thomas Overbury because he dared to counsel Robert Carr not to marry her. She was sent to the Tower, along with her husband, for seven years.

Fresh Brides Available! Hurry, Supplies Won’t Last!

Thomas Hart Benton's Brideship
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

"...the plantation can never florish till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the people on the soil." ~Sir Edwin Sandy, Treasurer Virginia Company of London, 1620

Mail order brides. The images these words conjure up are not entirely pleasant, and certainly not romantic! Our modern equivalent of the mail order bride seems to bear little resemblance to the women depicted in Mary Johnston’s romantic adventure, To Have and to Hold, and to the actual women who traveled to the New World in 1620 to start new lives by marrying Colonists. In Johnston’s novel, Lady Jocelyn Leigh is running away from a man named Lord Carnal (sounds like a fitting moniker for a pimp, doesn’t it?) and she is rescued by the ultimate hero, Ralph Percy. When she meets Percy in the courting meadow, the scene is tinged with valor and romance. But was there much romance for the real Jamestown brides?

Take Two of These and Call Me in the Morning

I haven’t decided what’s worse. Paying ridiculous amounts of money for health insurance (at least the doctor will find what’s wrong with you and treat you appropriately--maybe) or having a doctor that only prescribes a hot water bottle for your ailments and checks on you a few times a week. Is it because you can’t afford medical insurance and can’t expect to get quality care? No. You live in the 1900s and they’ve only recently named strep throat as an ailment!

Take moment to ponder all the different long-term illnesses we know about today and then think about how many have just been named in the last hundred years. Many of these sicknesses were “diagnosed” as rheumatism.

According to WiseGeek:

Some conditions that were once given the general label of rheumatism or called rheumatic diseases include, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, lupus, fibromyalgia, and tendonitis. Frequently autoimmune disorders, since they remained unnamed but caused pain as well as affecting other organs, were classed as rheumatism. Illnesses like lupus were particularly susceptible to being called rheumatism. Later understanding of the actions of these illnesses show that the problem is not dysfunction of the joints, but rather immune systems that can attack joints, muscles and organs."