Category Archives: 19th century

1833: Librarian suicides “under the influence of poets”

In September 1833, a London newspaper carried a grim report of a suicide in the French city of Marseilles. The unfortunate chap, a Monsieur Hollingsworth, had taken his life while “under the influence of poets”. A librarian by profession, Hollingsworth:

“…was of a melancholy temperament, possessed of an ardent imagination and, like those individuals to whose steps he followed, of a poetic turn of mind.”

Hollingsworth took his life around midnight on Tuesday September 3rd. According to reports from the scene:

“The pistol with which he destroyed himself was loaded to the muzzle. A part of his skull was blown against the window with such force as to break the glass. A piece of his cheek with the moustache on it was found sticking against the wall.”

Source: London Morning Chronicle, September 11th 1833. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1835: Madman tries to kill the French king – with 20 guns at once

assassination — The messy aftermath of the “infernal machine”

In July 1835, assassins targeted the French king, Louis-Philippe, as he reviewed troops in Paris. News of the attempt on the king’s life was conveyed by telegram to the French ambassador:

“An atrocious act was attempted this morning during the review [of troops]. The King of the French was not touched, although his horse was killed. None of the Princes were wounded. The Duke of Treviso was killed. Several guards, aides-de-camp and National Guardsmen were killed or wounded. The deed was committed by means of an infernal machine placed behind a window… Paris is quiet and indignant.”

The leader of this bizarre assassination attempt was Giuseppe Marco Fieschi. A former soldier and serial thief, Fieschi served several years’ hard labour in his native Corsica before escaping to Paris.

Once in the capital, Fieschi took up with political radicals and began to plot the king’s murder. But unlike John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, Fieschi and his accomplices left nothing to chance. They designed and constructed their “infernal machine”: a battery of 20 muskets attached to a wooden frame, all rigged to fire simultaneously.

The machine was aimed at the royal party from an elevated window overlooking the Boulevard du Temple. The firing of the “infernal machine” proved devastating: it killed 18 soldiers, including a marshal and former prime minister. Louis-Philippe and other royals were not seriously injured, however, one shot grazed the king’s temple and another struck his horse.

The backfiring from the “infernal machine” also took its toll on Fieschi, who was hit in the head with shrapnel and badly burned. He was quickly captured and given medical attention, then put on trial for attempted regicide. Fieschi and two of his accomplices were guillotined in February 1836.

Source: Telegram to the French ambassador in London, July 28th 1835. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1899: Navy officer slammed for kissing 163 women

Richmond P. Hobson (1870-1937) was an American naval officer. Born and raised in rural Alabama, Hobson enrolled at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis at age 14. In 1889, he graduated top of his class, though Hobson’s rigid discipline and dislike of both alcohol or tobacco made him unpopular with classmates.

When war broke out between the US and Spain in 1898, Hobson was sent to Cuba. In May 1898, he was ordered to seize control of a coal ship, the Merrimac, and scuttle it in the harbour mouth at Santiago, an attempt to trap Spanish ships inside the harbour. Hobson did manage to sink the Merrimac, though not accurately enough to block the harbour mouth. He and his men were captured and detained by the Spanish.

Though Hobson’s mission failed, the jingoistic American press presented it much differently. Hobson was hailed as the “hero of the Merrimac” whose courage and daring had thwarted the Spanish. Newspapers carried stories of his bravery and portraits of the dashing young officer, who became a celebrity and a sex symbol, even as he remained a prisoner-of-war.

Hobson was released later in 1898 and repatriated to the United States. He made a series of public appearances, most of which were flooded with eager young ladies. But these public audiences produced “shocking spectacles” that led to Hobson’s fall from grace with the press:

“The scene in the Chicago Auditorium, when Lieutenant Hobson was kissed by 163 morbid women, was loathsome. It is deplorable. It is sad that a man of his excellent courage and fine intelligence should so far forget the dignity of the American navy as to lend himself to a public exhibition of female hysteria… We shall never tire of boasting of his nerve and his unflinching devotion to duty; but no one is likely ever to hear us boasting about his modesty or his good taste.”

Reports were also scathing about the young women who rushed to kiss the “hero of the Merrimac“:

“We have no doubt they are heartily ashamed of themselves. They ought to be, at any rate.”

Hobson remained in the Navy, reaching the rank of captain, before resigning in 1903. The following year he was elected to the House of Representatives, serving there until 1916. In 1933 he received the Medal of Honour and a special pension for his exploits aboard the Merrimac.

Source: Pullman Herald, January 21st 1899. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1898: Doctor sees zoo animals during hashish trial

In March 1898, a Californian physician, writing anonymously for the Los Angeles Herald, described his evaluation of popular pain relief therapies. Having long suffered from back and muscular pain, the author tried galvanism (mild electrical shocks) and hypnotism, both of which afforded him some pain-free moments.

Lastly, he experimented by consuming large doses of hashish, which for safety was carried out in the presence of another doctor and two nurses. The substance was very effective at relieving pain, he noted, but had some significant side effects:

“For seven hours after the drug was administrated I was convulsed with laughter. I laughed incontinently, loudly, boisterously… The sensation was almost continuous, yielding at times to a feeling of dreadful seriousness that ended in tears, and then again breaking out… in a flood of laughter.”

And in the second phase, he began hallucinating:

“This was also most amusing… One faithful nurse had been metamorphosed into a monkey, another into a bear; my good doctor was as fine a specimen of a lion as ever was beheld in Van Amburg’s show… One of my bed posts seemed to extend quite to the ceiling while the other disappeared wholly from view. The clock on the mantel, once I looked at it, appeared to be nine feet in height.”

Source: Los Angeles Herald, March 14th 1898. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1889: Cure jaundice with urine-filled carrot by fire

Walter James Hoffman (1846-99) was a Pennsylvanian physician, ethnologist and author. After graduating from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, the young Hoffman volunteered as a medic in the Franco-Prussian War. After this he enlisted as a US Army surgeon, serving briefly under General George Custer.

In the 1880s Hoffman left the Army and traveled extensively on the North American continent, living with and studying frontier communities and Native American tribes. In 1889, Dr Hoffman presented the American Philosophical Society with the conclusions of his research on Pennsylvanian folklore.

This volume detailed a wide array of homespun medical treatments, some valid, some based on superstitions and wacky theories. One ‘cure’ still widely practised in rural areas was for a dog bite:

“To cure a bite, use a hair of the dog that caused it. It is sometimes placed between two slices of buttered bread and eaten as a sandwich.”

Mumps could be cured by rubbing the swellings against a hog trough. Rheumatism could be kept at bay by carrying around a potato in one’s pocket. Excessive saliva and dribbling in children could be stopped by “passing a live fish through the child’s mouth”. Whooping cough could be treated with daily drinks of tea made from a hornet’s nest. No less bizarre was a treatment for jaundice:

“Hollow out a carrot, fill it with the patient’s urine and hang it, by means of a string, in the fireplace. As the urine is evaporated and the carrot becomes shrivelled, the disease will leave the patient.”

Source: Dr Walter J. Hoffman, Folk Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans, 1889. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1842: American girls eat paper to get pale

James Silk Buckingham (1786-1855) was an English politician, social reformer and travel writer. Born in Cornwall, Buckingham joined the Royal Navy as a teenager and saw combat in the 1790s. In the 1820s he became a world traveler, spending years in the Middle East and North Africa before taking up residence in India.

After serving one term as Member of Parliament for Sheffield (1832-37) Buckingham resumed his travels, this time in North America. His observations of the United States were published in a three-volume set in 1842. In the third volume, Buckingham claimed that many American girls would eat paper to acquire pale skin:

“Young ladies at school, and sometimes with their parents, will resolve to become extremely pale, from a notion that it looks interesting. For this purpose, they will substitute for their natural food, pickles of all kinds, powdered chalk, vinegar, burnt coffee, pepper and other spices, especially cinnamon and cloves. Others will add to these paper, of which many sheets are sometimes eaten in a day… this is persisted in till the natural appetite for wholesome food is superseded by a depraved and morbid desire for everything but that which is nutritious… Such practices as these, added to the other causes… sufficiently account for the decayed and decaying state of health among the female population of the United States.”

Source: James S. Buckingham, America: The Eastern and Western States, vol.3, 1842. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1888: Smelly feet, a sign of teenage masturbation

Miss Priscilla Barker was a late 19th-century social purist. In 1888 she published The Secret Book, a guide for girls and their parents containing information about dress, cosmetics, deportment and medical matters. It also contained information and advice about sexual behaviour, which Barker considered a matter “extreme delicacy… too vulgar for discussion” but included out of “a sense of duty”.

Among her advice was a curt warning to teenage girls about the intentions of their boyfriends:

“Beware of men who will come to you with the appearance of honour, integrity and love, but who in the secret of their hearts only hunt for women as the huntsman hunts for game. That gilded hero, that demigod of yours, that ideal man, is a sensual and heartless destroyer of female virtue for his own bestial self-gratification.”

Like others of her ilk, Barker was obsessed with masturbation – or more specifically the prevention of it. The main cause of self-abuse, she believed, was reading romantic novels, which excited “premature feelings” in young women. Once provoked these “inroads of self-abuse… leave the citadel of womanhood unprotected and at the mercy of the enemy”.

Barker told concerned parents that if their daughters started masturbating, “the terrible demon of lust” would “brand his bestial mark” on their appearance:

“The face loses its colour and the eyes grow dull, heavy and weak; the hands feel soft and clammy; and often the smell of the feet is unbearable… Another victim came to into my notice [with a] mouth full of saliva… The first moment I looked at her I felt that I had before me a fearful victim of self-abuse.”

Source: Priscilla Barker, The Secret Book containing Private Information and Instruction for Women and Young Girls, 1888. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1839: Lincolnshire tailor sells wife for “a tub of turnips”

An amusing though unsubstantiated story from rural Lincolnshire concerns a tailor from the village of Owston Ferry, north of Gainsborough. According to press reports from 1839 the tailor, Kellett, was in nearby Epworth on business when he went on a bender and:

“…sold his wife to a saddler of that place, for a tub (twelve pecks) of Swede turnips… One huge turnip was given as deposit to make good the bargain.”

The drunken tailor may have forgotten the arrangement or not taken it seriously. The Epworth saddler, however, had different ideas. He organised for the balance of the turnips to be delivered to Kellett’s home in Owston Ferry. But delivery of the turnips was taken by the tailor’s wife, who had not been informed of the deal and certainly did not approve:

“..Having heard of the whole transaction, and not liking to be disposed of in such a manner, [she] fell on the poor unfortunate tailor and did beat him about the head with the turnips, then turned him out of the house.”

Source: The Lincoln Gazette, February 21st 1839. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1899: John F. Kennedy arrested, Tom Hanks claims reward

John F. Kennedy (c.1870-1922) was an American outlaw of the late 19th century. Like his famous presidential namesake, Kennedy was known to his friends as Jack. He started adulthood as a locomotive engineer but soon decided a much grander fortune could be made by robbing the railways rather than working on them.

With a gang of accomplices, Kennedy carried out a string of train robberies in the 1890s, robbing at least seven mail or goods trains. His experience as an engineer gave Kennedy considerable inside knowledge. He also carried out each robbery with his face covered.

Despite this, the identity of the ‘Quail Hunter’, as the serial bandit became known, was an open secret. Lawmen were well aware of Kennedy’s identity and did their utmost to put him behind bars, to no avail. He was sent to trial three times between 1896 and 1898 but escaped conviction each time, thanks to tricky lawyers, false alibis and bribed jury members.

In 1899, Kennedy and Jesse E. James (son of the infamous Jesse James) were charged with a botched hold up near Leeds, Missouri. Their trial generated a wave of press attention but public sympathy was with James, so both men were acquitted.

An interesting side story concerns a claim on the $500 reward for Kennedy’s arrest, made by:

“Tom Hanks, the barber, who was shaving the ‘Quail Hunter’ when Officer James O’Malley took him into custody… Hanks claimed that when Kennedy learned of the reward for his arrest, he surrendered himself [to Hanks] and that it was Hanks’ intention to take his prisoner to the county jail as soon as he had finished his tonsorial work.”

Kennedy himself supported Hanks’ claim, though probably only to deprive the arresting officer of the $500. After his acquittal in the James trial Kennedy was arrested for a yet another robbery. This time the evidence stuck and Kennedy found himself serving a 17-year stretch in prison.

The ‘Quail Hunter’ carried out his last robbery near Wittenberg, Missouri in 1922. After holding up a mail train, Kennedy and his accomplice attempted to make their getaway but were ambushed by several deputies. A gunfight ensued and both men were shot dead.

Source: The Kansas City Journal, January 14th 1899. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1814: Woman carrying the Messiah actually just overweight

Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) was born into a poor but devoutly Anglican farming family in Devon. Southcott left home around her 20th birthday. She spent the next 30 years working in and around Exeter as a farm worker, a housemaid, a lady’s maid and an upholstery seamstress.

Sometime around 1792, Southcott claimed to have experienced voices and visions. Some of these voices predicted events that later proved true. They also instructed Southcott to take up writing. In 1801, she spent her meagre life savings on self-publishing a book of her divine prophecies. It was picked up by a small but influential group of millenarian Christians and within three years Southcott had become a minor celebrity.

In February 1814, Southcott – then 64 years old, never married and purportedly still a virgin – shocked her followers by announcing that she was pregnant with the Second Messiah. She described her immaculate conception to a follower, George Turner:

“It is now four months since I felt the powerful visitation working upon my body… to my astonishment, I not only felt a power to shake my whole body, but I felt a sensation that is impossible for me to describe upon my womb… This alarmed me greatly, yet I kept it to myself.”

The news was greeted with comedic interest by the London press, which followed Southcott’s prophecies closely. She certainly developed some of the symptoms of pregnancy, growing “great in size”. But when no baby had appeared by the start of November, the 14th month of Southcott’s ‘pregnancy’, the sceptics were in uproar.

Southcott blamed the child’s non-appearance on her spinsterhood and recruited one of her followers as a token ‘Joseph’, marrying him on November 12th, but even this could not coax out the reluctant Messiah.

Southcott, by now very ill, disappeared from sight and died two days after Christmas. Followers kept her body for four days, believing that Southcott might rise again. Instead, they were greatly disappointed when her corpse started to putrefy and stink. An autopsy was conducted on Southcott’s body to find causes for the symptoms of pregnancy, including her greatly swollen belly. One attending doctor put this down to her abdomen, which was:

“..the largest I ever saw, being nearly four times the usual size, and appeared [to be] one lump of fat… this preternatural enlargement, the thickness of fat [and] the flatus of the intestines… satisfactorily accounts for the extraordinary size of the deceased.”

Source: Joanna Southcott, Conception Communication, conveyed to George Turner, February 25th 1814; Dr Peter Mathias, The Case of Johanna Southcott, 1815. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.