Tag: Victorian

Friday Finds: The best adaptation of A Christmas Carol?

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My favorite book is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I wrote about how much I love this book in a post last year. Those of you who have been reading the blog for that long (thanks!) might recall it! This year, I was chatting with my friend Cameo about Dickens and all of the many film adaptations of A Christmas Carol. She suggested I watch a few film versions and give a verdict on which one was the ‘best’. I thought it was a great idea. So for this, the last ‘Friday Finds’ of the year, that’s exactly what I’ve done.

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Madeira Mondays: The Tenement House, Glasgow (Historical Site Visit)

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I cannot believe that I lived in Glasgow for several years without ever visiting The Tenement House.

We decided to make the short (about 50 minutes) train ride over to Glasgow from Edinburgh to tour the house as part of my 30th birthday celebrations (slightly hungover from cocktails the night before!).

Described on The National Trust website as a ‘time capsule of life in early 20th century Glasgow’, this museum exceeding my expectations and made me (an 18th century lover) very, very jealous at how many wonderful, original items you could see there – including a jar of plum jam made in 1929! The house, located in the very cool Garnetthill area of Glasgow (also home to the Glasgow School of Art, numerous excellent coffeeshops, bars and pretty, residential streets). It was once owned by Miss Agnes Toward, who worked as a typist. She lived there from 1911 until 1965, and the house is full of the belongings of her and her mother. Agnes was a bit of a ‘hoarder’ and kept everything, which is to our benefit, since the house really feels like not only a snapshot of a time but also a quirky, personal archive. That makes the site very special. It’s one person’s home, filled with things they loved.

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Madeira Mondays: These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly (Book Review)

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”I merely wish to smoke. Sparky can forgive that. You, on the other hand, wish to know things. And no one can forgive a girl for that.” – These Shallow Graves

One of my favorite films growing up was Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Not typical fare for a teenage girl, sure, but I liked seeing old New York – the glitzy and the grimy. I don’t have any particular desire to live in New York City but it really is a fascinating place, isn’t it? A little Colonial Dutch outpost that slowly became a commercial mecca and now a world center of finance, culture, food, fashion, you name it. And seeing old New York (specifically 1890’s New York) was one of the coolest things about reading These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly. The book is a Young Adult mystery novel, published in 2015, which follows an upper class society girl who dreams of becoming a reporter and gets mixed up in the city’s underworld when she starts investigating her father’s mysterious death. 

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