Nineteenth Century Europe
Supper at Sea in the Age of Sail
This summer I’ve had the pleasure of working with Fen Truitt. Fen is a student at Trinity College in Dublin. She’s interested in art, architecture, literature, music, hiking, and history–just for starters. In short, she fits in well here on the Margins, as you’ll see in the guest blog post below. (Please note that the…
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Word With a Past: Shoddy
In the early nineteenth century British textile manufacturers began to recycle woolen rags into a an inexpensive woolen cloth. The rags were shredded into fibers, mixed with new wood, and then spun and woven into the cloth, which was known as “shoddy”–a term that may have come from an old word meaning divide.* The process…
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Two Poets, Eight Centuries, One Poetic Masterpiece
Save Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of those books that some scholars love to be snotty about. Literary critics of a certain stamp dismiss it as bad poetry, apparently on the grounds that people love it who don’t otherwise read poetry.* Persian linguists rightly point out that Fitzgerald’s translation…
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