Readers and writers blog

I went out looking for a bailiff, and I ended up in Britain — 19th century Britain, that is, thanks to a weblog called The Victorian Peeper.

Don’t ask how a bailiff brought me to Queen Victoria’s world. After seven months of searching for diverse, well-written blogs, I’ve stopped resisting these side trips Google takes me on. And as for ‘peeper,’ it’s Victorian slang for ‘mirror,’ although the site’s author, Michigan-based historian Kristan Tetens, concedes that the modern meaning of ‘voyeur’ also is appropriate.

“I sometimes feel as if I’m spying on the Victorians,” she says.

It’s fun to do it with her.

Now to those of you who think of Queen Victoria as a stuffy old dowager — see the portrait, above left, as she appeared near the end of her reign (1837-1901) — we say, au contraire, nos amis. As a young woman, Victoria could be exciting and adventurous, as Tetens tells us in her Oct. 13 entry looking in on the making of “The Young Victoria,” a Martin Scorcese film due for 2008 release. She quotes screenwriter Julian Fellowes:

People think of a fat widow in black. They’ve forgotten the exciting young woman trying to find her own way. Some girls like to have fun and she was certainly one of them.

Some of that ebullience is shown in another portrait of Victoria, also above left, from a drawing by English cartoonist Ronald Searle, which Tetens shares in her June 29 post about a series of prints created by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to mark its 150th anniversary.

And Tetens herself has fun with her subject. Of her June 11 entry, we will say only that it is a Lolcats homage to Victoria’s accession that ends with the phrase “cheezburgrs 4 brekkfist.”

But most of Tetens’s attention is given to serious reflection of the Victorians, their works and their habits as they were:

• Victorian newspapers now on line, showing how the Whitechapel murders (Jack the Ripper) were covered in the Birmingham Daily Post, the Battle of Trafalgar in Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post and the west Africa scramble in the Belfast News Letter (Oct. 23).

• Contemporaneous obituaries from The Times of London, including those of William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Darwin (Oct. 10).

• Victorians of African descent, now honored at a Liverpool museum for their achievements, including working-class organizer William Cuffay and Crimean War volunteer nurse Mary Seacole (Aug. 20).

• A Victorian dinosaur park, models of 15 prehistoric species recreated somewhat inaccurately, that was opened five years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (Aug. 6).

• Corf-batters and bum-bailiffs (there’s that ‘bailiff’ that Google keyed in on), terms used in Pitmatic, a dialect spoken by miners in northeast England for more than 150 years. (A ‘bum-bailiff’ was a derogatory word for an eviction officer.) (July 30).

• Major Thomas Weir, a 17th century Scottish preacher who led a darker life as a warlock, possibly the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (July 10).

• Cragside, the Northumberland home of maverick Victorian inventor William Armstrong, the first house in the world to be fitted with hydroelectricity (April 1).

• The diversity of Victorian London, which nurtured the roots of Yiddish theater among Jewish immigrants in the East End and gave rise to the mysteries and myths of the Chinese who settled in the city’s Limehouse section (March 27).

• Victorian sexuality, the subject of an art exhibition at the Barbican in London that is so risqué that no one under 18 will be admitted (Feb. 24).

• The 19th century custom of post-mortem portraiture showing the departed in a peaceful sleep, a practice being revived by a Colorado nonprofit group to help grieving parents (Feb. 15).

Although primarily a historian, Tetens also is a good journalist, encapsulating her subject in the first few paragraphs so that you want to read on. For this and other reasons — clarity, interest and expertise — The Victorian Peeper is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt