May 7, 1849 --- Lady Blessington's Salon

Gore House, Kensington, freehold and contents, goes on the auction block. The splendid mansion, on the southern edge of Hyde Park, had been the home of Lady Blessington (right) whose open relationship with her step-daughter's estranged husband, the French dandy Count D'Orsay, had appalled respectable society. Regardless, her home had become one of the leading literary and political salons; Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray and Disraeli, were frequent visitors.

It all ended suddenly when a man disguised as a pastrycook entered the house in early 1849 and served D'Orsay with papers demanding payments on his massive debts. Since Lady B. was also being hounded by creditors, they fled to France leaving only what they couldn't carry. "The occupants having retired to the continent" - is how Mr. Phillips, the Mayfair auctioneer, decorously put it in his advertisements. "The mansion requires neither substantial repair nor decorations, as very large sums [have] been lately expended thereon."

The auction runs two weeks; "splendid furniture, works of art, costly jewels and recherche property," as well as a 5000-volume library, all go toward wiping out the debts and leaving a £1500 surplus. The curious are drawn to see the ill-famed house, including society leaders Lady Jersey and Lady Hertford who would never have called upon the previous tenant. Thackeray is much affected, writing a friend: "I have just come from a dismal sight - Gore House full of snobs ... brutes keeping their hats on, I longed to knock some of them off and say, Sir, be civil in a lady's room! Ah, it was a strange sad picture of Vanity Fair."

Less than a month later, at her new home in Paris, Lady Blessington died. She was 59. Gore House was briefly rented during the Great Exhibition by Mr. Soyer, the famous chef hosting the "Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations"; serving gourmet meals in "the whilom boudoir of the Blessington." Gore House was pulled down in the 1860's to make way for the Royal Albert Hall.

May 6, 1882 --- The Invincibles Strike

In Dublin's Phoenix Park, Lord Frederick Cavendish (left), the newly posted Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Mr. Burke, the permanent Under-Secretary, are attacked and brutally murdered. Burke is the target, The United Irishman called him "the slimiest toad living." Young Cavendish, Prime Minister Gladstone's nephew, might have been spared had he not flailed at Burke's attackers with his umbrella. Both men are stabbed repeatedly and their throats cut. The assassins use surgical knives, ironically purchased at a cutlery shop in London's Bond Street.

The murders are universally condemned; even the nationalist daily United Ireland put a black band of mourning around its front page as a "token of abhorrence and shame." The tragedy shatters a hopeful mood prompted only four days before by the release of Parnell, the Irish leader, from Dublin's Kilmainham Jail. Having pledged to work for an end to violence in return for an end to the eviction of tenant-farmers, an ashen Parnell declares "I am stabbed in the back."

Across the Channel, the reaction is vengeful. The Queen calls it "an unexampled horror" and demands "no concessions to those whose actions, speeches and writings have produced the present state of affairs in Ireland." A hitherto unknown group, calling itself "The Invincibles" soon takes responsibility. A police manhunt is unavailing until, early in 1883, investigators arrest James Carey, a Dublin town councillor and slumlord. He had been seen in the Park that day and police were told he owned such long-bladed knives. Carey, who admits only to waving a white flag to alert the gang of Burke's approach, becomes the star witness. For the trial, the Crown was forced to threaten reluctant jurors with 100-pound fines. On Carey's testimony, five men hang, including Joe Brady, a local stonemason, accused of being the actual killer.

Carey, dubbed "The Prince of Informers," paid the price of his craft. While aboard a ship bound for South Africa and a new life under a new name, he was recognized and shot dead. The gunman, a Donegal peasant named Patrick O'Donnel, who had no connection to the murders, was brought back to England, tried and hanged.

For many years, a small cross marked the spot in the Park where Cavendish and Burke died; it has long since disappeared.

May 5, 1840 --- A Mayfair Murder

London is shaken by the brutal murder of 73-year old Lord William Russell. A widower at 72, the victim is the Duke of Bedford's brother and an uncle of the rising Whig politician, Lord John Russell, a future Prime Minister. Prime Minister Melbourne, with perhaps unnecessary detail, informs the Queen that his Lordship was found "quite cold and stiff" and the wounds "had nearly divided his head from his body."

At first believed to be a burglary with violence, The Times notes. "The excitement produced in high life is almost unprecedented, particularly among those of the nobility & gentry who live in comparative seclusion." Within a matter of days, however, police arrested Francois Courvoisier, the dead man's valet who had been given notice.

The case brought to trial was weak, based heavily on flimsy and circumstantial evidence, and public sympathy seemed to go towards the handsome 23-year Courvoisier and an acquittal seemed likely. Dramatically, an eleventh hour witness came forward; a Frenchwoman from a dingy Leicester Square hotel where Courvoisier had once waited tables. She testified that he left a parcel with her around the day of the murder. Inside it, police found several items stolen from Lord William's home, including much silver plate. The shaken defense counsel can only lamely suggest the evidence might have been planted in such a disreputable hostelry. The finding turned the day against the accused. The Lord Chief Justice wept while pronouncing the death sentence while Courvoisier showed no emotion.

Before hanging at Newgate, he confessed, admitting that his conscience had told him "Thou art doing wrong" but, "I hardened myself against this voice and threw myself on my victim." A crowd said to exceed 100,000 people watched the execution, Dickens and Thackeray among them. In a magazine piece entitled "Going to See a Man Hanged," Thackeray noted the condemned man's "wild, imploring look [and] pitiful smile." The account ended there, "I shut my eyes as the last dreadful act was going on." The images stayed with him, "I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done."

May 4, 1847 --- Miss Jenny Lind

The "Swedish Nightingale," Miss Jenny Lind makes her London debut at Her Majesty's Theatre. The excitement is unprecedented. The Queen and Prince Albert are among those drawn to see the continental sensation. In fact, the published list of opera-goers from the "high life" runs some five inches of fine print and includes Dukes, Earls, Viscounts, and Prime Ministers, past and future. Carriages clog Haymarket for hours.

Miss Lind is to sing the role of Alice in Meyerbeer's Roberto il Diavolo. A tremendous roar greets her very appearance on stage. Before she even sings a note, the audience rises as one, men waving their hats, women their handkerchiefs. If the critics are to be believed, the performance did not disappoint. The Times auditor writes, "If expectations were great, we must say that they were more than realized." In The Illustrated London News, the praise is even higher, "It is as though we now learned for the first time what singing really is." Even the usually japing journal Punch falls in line, "To call Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale is a compliment to the bird." Miss Lind makes no fewer than three curtain calls to satisfy the cheering, whistling, stamping throng.

She is truly the sensation of London. Soon, her portrait appears in every fashionable shop's window. Purveyors of "articles of taste and luxury" are quick to add her name, e.g. Jenny Lind soap, Jenny Lind combs, etc. Staffordshire pottery mills turn out, in all, 18 different statuettes. Her performances continue to sell-out, even at what were called "enormous prices." The Duke of Wellington is said to be among her many assiduous admirers. 

The 24-year old beauty remained free of the scandals which had so often tainted the musical stage. As The Annual Register put it, "It may be added, as much for the credit of the public as in just tribute to the lady, that the warmth with which she was received derived part of its glow from the admirable private character of Mademoiselle Lind."  Not surprisingly, therefore, Jenny rapidly became a favorite of Prince Albert's. In 1863, she sang a chorale composed by the late Prince at the wedding of the Prince of Wales.

May 3, 1845 --- The Song of the Shirt

Tom Hood, the "Poet of the Poor," dies of tuberculosis at 46. Bankrupt himself, victim of his own feckless speculations, Hood spent his final months seeking a government pension for his wife.

His greatest triumph had come in the Christmas, 1843, edition of Punch. "The Song of the Shirt" was an indictment of the "slop-selling" industry. Seamstresses, for long hours and scant piecework wages, stitched away at their "slop," slang for cheap clothing. That October, "a wretched-looking woman named Riddell, with a squalid, half-starved infant at her breast" had been hauled into court by her employer on charges she had pawned some of her cloth to buy food. The man claimed he paid good wages; about 7p a garment, out of which the woman must buy her own needle and thread.

Though The Times condemned the plight of the needlewomen as worse than Negro slavery, the furor passed. That is until Hood's poem, seemingly out of place in the holiday edition of a humor magazine. It was an immediate sensation:

With fingers weary and worn, with eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, plying her needle and thread.
Stitch, stitch, stitch; In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the "Song of the Shirt."

In a closing lament, Hood wrote, "Oh, God! that bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!" Sales of Punch tripled. Hood's career was reborn. When a prostitute was found dead in the Thames, a not uncommon occurrence, he offered "The Bridge of Sighs":

One more unfortunate, weary of breath
Rashly importunate, gone to her Death ...

But now, near death himself, Hood pleaded with Whitehall for a pension for his wife and children: "Certain classes at the poles of Society are already too far asunder; it should be the duty of our writers to draw them nearer by kindly attraction, not to aggravate the existing repulsion... But I am too weak for this task, the last I had set for myself."  The government allotted his widow £300.

The Song of the Shirt by GF Watts.

May 2, 1892 --- The Education of Women

Speaking to the 110th annual meeting of the Medical Society of London on the subject of "Sex in Education," Sir James Crichton-Browne (right) suggests that expanding educational opportunities for women is not in the best interests of their health or their pulchritude. An expert on the criminally insane and editor of The Brain, Dr. Crichton-Browne cites his own research to make the claim that the female brain is lighter than the male organ and the blood supply, which in the man is directed toward "volition, cognition and idea-motor processes," in the woman is directed to those areas of the brain which concern themselves with "sensory functions." Such physical realities cannot be ignored; at one London school for daughters of the upper and middle classes, 137 of the 187 pupils complain of headaches --- conclusive proof, the medico argues, of "excessive brain work as a factor in the production of ill-health."

He concludes with his "haunting" dream of encountering a group of young ladies, graduates of a celebrated college: "I should describe them as pantaloon-like girls, for many of them had a stooping gait and withered appearance, shrunk shanks, and spectacles on nose. Let us conserve the beauty of our English girls very jealously. I would rather they remained ignorant of logarithms than that they lose a jot of it."

The Times calls it "an argument well-calculated to enlist the stronger sex unanimously upon his side." Crichton-Browne lived on until 1938, long enough to see his theories discarded. He's remembered (if it all) for his best-selling four volume memoirs, What the Doctor Thought, The Doctor's Second Thoughts, The Doctor's Afterthoughts and The Doctor Remembers.

May 1, 1851 --- To the Crystal Palace

With a flourish of trumpets, "The Great Exhibition of The Works of Industry of All Nations" opens in Hyde Park. Designed to give "a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived," the Exhibition is the brainchild of Prince Albert. On display are examples of industry and craftsmanship from around the world, from awesome new locomotives to a steam-powered hammer that can crush stone or crack your morning egg, all - in the words of the official program - "pregnant with incalculable benefits for all classes of humanity."

The greatest single attraction, however, proves to be the sprawling edifice housing it all, the spectacular Crystal Palace. When Exhibition organizers first proposed a massive brick structure in Hyde Park, the outrage was immediate. Enter Joseph Paxton, chief gardener for the Duke of Devonshire, who designed, in effect, a huge greenhouse. Erected in four months, the "Palace" is 1800 feet long by 400 feet wide with a transept towering some 100 feet; large enough to encompass several huge trees which it was deemed impolitic to remove. The finished product is stunning: the dyspeptic Ruskin is one of few fault-finders, calling it a "cucumber frame between two chimneys," the late-Victorian arts-and-craftsman William Morris - then just 17 - found it "wonderfully ugly" and Disraeli labeled it "an enchanted pile."

Charlotte Bronte commented on the well-behaved crowds, "The day I was there, not one loud noise was to be heard ... The living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from a distance." On opening day, the Queen confides in her journal that her first sight of the "Palace" produced "a sensation I shall never forget." She adds graciously that the day belongs to "My beloved husband the creator of this great 'Peace Festival'...A day to live forever. God bless my dearest Albert, and my dear Country which has shown itself so great today."

The Exhibition closed in mid-October having made a profit of £86,000. Six million people attended, 14% of whom made use of something new to London - the pay toilet. The final report from the Commissioners suggested that such facilities be more commonplace in the great city to alleviate "the sufferings which must be endured by all, but more especially by females, on account of the want of them."