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The youth of Charles Dickens was usually spent alone, and he was constantly unhappy. The financial failings of his father, who wound up in debtor’s prison forced Charles to work, at the age of twelve, in a shoe blacking factory. But Dickens’s personal sense of abandonment also later matured into a sense of abandonment of [...]
“the adepts of the Free Spirit did not form a single church but rather a number of likeminded groups, each with its own messiah and each with its own particular practices, rites and articles of belief.” It is characteristic of this kind of movement that its aims and premises are boundless . . . Whatever [...]
Although Dickens based William Dorrit as well as Mr. Micawber, on some of the superficial mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of his father, the fundamental humiliation of Dorrit, his shame and fears , helplessness and concealments, are in all likelihood Dicken’s own. It was he who felt imprisoned, just as all the leading characters in ”Little Dorrit” [...]
Abandoned children and orphans are everywhere in the work of Charles Dickens, a reflection of the the child abuse and exploitation he saw in the pre-Victorian and Victorian England his work. His own, and the general sense abandonment and bertrayal of need not be literal to wound deeply and permanently. Dickens appeared frenetic and obsessed [...]
The holy terrors of Munster. Their revolution in 1534-35 anticipated the “psychic epidemics” of our own time: “The spread of the Anabaptists in lower Germany and the Netherlands must largely be ascribed to the activity of Melchior Hofmann, a widely travelled furrier. The arrival of some of his disciples (Melchiorites) at Münster in Westphalia (1533-34) [...]
The long history of bronze has had many dark ages spaced through it, and the lost sculptures overwhelmingly outnumber the survivals. Among them the bronze Colossus of Rhodes, a wonder of the world, stood a hundred and twenty feet high for fifty-six years in the third century B.C., fell in an earthquake and lay in [...]
” The glory of all the Saints, ” they asserted, ” is to wreak vengeance… Revenge without mercy is the fate of all who are not marked with the Sign”. ”Cohn notes that John of Leyden (aka Jan Bockelson) wrote that, come the New Jerusalem, “all things were to be in common, there was to [...]
”On February 8, 1534, Anabaptists in Münster started to arm themselves as a result of threatening confrontations with both Lutherans and Catholics. On the 23rd of February, 1534, two things happened which were to drastically shape the future of Münster. Bishop Franz vonWaldeck began a siege of the city in hopes of regaining power. At [...]
”See what you think when you come down the Strada dei Fiorentini of Florence and spot the Perseus in the corner of the Loggia. If you’ve read Benvenuto Cellini’s book, you must admit you didn´t expect THAT—you didn´t know it was going to be so good, though Cellini swore it was. Of course how could [...]
Since Roman times, Bath’s hot mineral springs have pumped a quarter of a million gallons of spring water a day at a steady temperature of 49°c. In 1708, Thomas Harrison built the Bath Assembly House, for which the public paid fees to dance and gamble. During mid-18th to early 19th century, Bath’s population exploded from [...]
