Really popular literature in the nineteenth century

 Recently, I've been cataloguing the books used to 'dress' Lakeview, ie nineteenth century books bought as job lots at auctions and from garage sales that are used as props to help give the impression of what the house would be like when people actually lived there in the late nineteenth century.

The books fall into roughly two categories - boring didactic books of overtly Christian stories, often given as prizes for 'general advancement and conduct' at Sunday school, and books by popular authors of the time such as Charles Dickens and Louisa M. Alcott.

Well, while it's hardly a scientific study, one thing that is noticeable is the the more popular books have damaged spines, are more likely to have been given as presents for birthdays, and quite worn, suggesting that they have been read and reread, possibly by several generations

while the goody two shoes overtly Christian books seem to have been little read with bindings that are still tight and have undamaged covers.

There's obviously a curatorial risk here - if you select the books in good condition to make a nicer display, do you risk suggesting that people were more overtly religious than they actually were?

A wifi enabled cat feeder

 We are a cat keeping household, which can be a problem when we both need to be away overnight,

Up to now we've relied on these cheap plastic gravity fed cat feeders, which work but have their own problems, including a tendency to sometimes jam.

One of our cats, Lucy, is a bit of a guzzler, and is not above stealing some of our other cat's food. At home we feed them together and make sure that Oscar gets to eat his dinner while Lucy eats hers.

So we decided we needed something a little more sophisticated and settled on a wifi enabled cat feeder

it's basically just a little machine that doles out about 10g of cat nibbles at set times throughout the day and. having two bowls means that if they are hungry and hear the cat feeder, they can both eat at the same time.

You can get more sophisticated versions with a camera, a speaker and so on so that you can have something kind of like Facetime for Felines, but we just went for the base version.

The device is powered from a USB socket, and has a battery backup so that the furries will still get fed if the power goes out - always something to consider if you live rurally, as we do.

Setup is fairly straightforward, or would have been if I'd remembered to put in the back up battery first.

You download an app and connect via bluetooth to the cat feeder, configure a wifi connection and then configure the device.

It's all fairly intuitive. 

At first I thought wifi was overkill, but actually it turned out to be useful, as the internet connection meant you could check that the cats had been fed, and that something had not gone awry with the device. 

You can also cancel feeding sessions remotely, which meant that once we knew roughly when we were going to be home we could stop it dispensing cat kibble, as we would feed them wet food when we got home.

While we wouldn't want to leave the cats alone for too long with only Radio National for company (perhaps because we have RN on at home in the mornings they've grown to like it as background noise), it does mean that we can leave them alone overnight or possibly even a couple of days if necessary ...

An experiment with Lubuntu

 When I had my little to-do with Jammy Jellyfish and Noble Numbat, I had the lurking suspicion that it might be my eMMC based Ideapad that was the source of the problem, rather than the latest version of Ubuntu.

 To test this, I took the old laptop I'd bought J second hand at the start of the pandemic  as an emergency replacement after her old machine died, and converted it to the current release of Lubuntu running over a Noble Numbat core, and it's absolutely fine.

My current guess is that some of the instability I had with Noble Numbat on my Ideapad came from some of the low level stuff not being quite optimal.

On the other hand having taken the IdeaPad back to the previous version it seems stable enough, certainly stable enough for a little genealogical work this morning.

Turning the Dell into yet another Linux machine gives me a silly number of Linux machines but having played with the Dell and typed on it for a bit, it is quite a nice machine, and certainly light enough to shove in a backpack to take somewhere, so it might well live on as a replacement for my old heavy Kubuntu based Thinkpad...

Reverting to Jammy Jellyfish

 Ever since I upgraded my Lenovo Ideapad from the previous version of Ubuntu, Jammy Jellyfish, to the newest version, Noble Numbat, I've been having a few stability issues with previously well behaved applications such a FocusWriter crapping out on me, which was a bit embarrassing when you're in the middle of taking notes of a meeting.

Now what one wants out of a computer is stablity and reproducability, basically everything works all of the time and everything is predictable, ie always works the same.

And, for whatever reason, I wasn't getting that. 

So I decided to revert. Actually not quite true, I did wonder about migrating the box to Lubuntu, but as the current version with a non beta window manager is built on Noble Numbat, that didn't seem such a good idea.

On balance reverting to Jammy Jellyfish seemed the better idea as all the instability issues came after I upgraded to Noble Numbat.

I had a look at the data on the machine, and there wasn't actually that much that hadn't already been copied elsewhere, so I transferred the last few items to Google Drive and then went for the nuclear option of completely wiping the machine and doing a complete reinstall from a freshly written USB.

After the install, after having gone through the Intel security chip shenanigans, I simply reinstalled my apps and copied my data back, including my Notable notes, and away we went.

Took me about an hour - actually a little longer as I had lunch in the middle of the exercise. 

The only way I'm going to find out if the stability issues have gone away is to use the machine, and twenty minutes writing a blogpost doesn't really count, but hopefully a few days use will convince me that I've a stable system again...

Chamber pots, provenance, and globalisation

 

F Winkle potters mark on chamberpot base

As I’ve written elsewhere, chamber pots were very much a feature of Victorian life, and even more so in rural Australia, where often luxuries such as town water and town sewerage often did not arrive until the end of the nineteenth century, and on farm stations, the dunny out the back possibly lasted as late as the the 1950s.

So where were these chamber pots made?

Staffordshire. Or more accurately the pottery manufacturing area centred around Stoke on Trent.

• Wedgewood

• Swinnerton’s 

• J and G Meakin

• Johnson Brothers

• W H Grindley

• Thomas Poole and Gladstone Staffordshire

• F Winkle

•  W Adderley

And from Australia:

• Hoffman Brunswick Australia

• Robert Fowler (Australia)

While now owned by a multi-national, Fowler’s survives as a brand of sanitary ware, but Hoffman’s is long gone.

How do I know this?

Out of curiosity I spent an hour or so going through Victorian Collections to look at examples of chamber pots as an aid to recognising the sometimes cryptic potters' marks, and basically, most were made in Staffordshire, and none appear to have been imported from either of the other two major manufacturing countries of the late Victorian period, Germany and the USA.

Which suggests that if items as mundane as chamber pots were imported most domestic pottery must have been imported, despite the obvious expense of bringing cases of pottery half way around the world.

But then perhaps that's not so surprising.

Despite Felton and Grimwade establishing a glass bottle works in Melbourne in 1872 to make primarily medicine bottles, Australia was still importing glass medicine bottles in the early 1890s as evidenced by the wreck of the Fiji in 1891, so it is quite possible that while 'brand name' pottery was being imported, there was a local industry producing the more utilitarian unbranded, undecorated domestic pottery.

Equally, a substantial proportion of the unbranded items could also have been imported. It's important to understand that the wash set, the ewer, the basin, the chamberpot would possibly all have been on display on the nightstand, and that for middle class people having a good matching imported set was a sign of affluence, while poorer households would have made do with cheaper, unbranded items, and perhaps simply used an enamel metal pot that went under the bed - the 'gazunder'.

It's possible this unbranded pottery, whether being made locally or imported being less cherished, was more likely to be broken and discarded - judging by the number of pottery fragments in the soil in our back yard, quite a lot of broken pottery was simply dumped - and hence does not show up in the historical record.

Provenancing oil lamps

 Oil lamps were a feature of the Victorian age.

Before electricity they were used almost universally as a source of light, especially once cheap kersosene became available as a lamp fuel, which  displaced whale oil, which was comparatively expensive. (Gas lighting was initially confined to offices and factories as early gas lights were not actually that bright, and being fixed in position could not be easily moved round the house or repositioned to provide better light for reading, sewing, or other domestic tasks.)

At their simplest oil lamps consist of three components, a reservoir, a burner, and a glass funnel to protect the flame.

When you examine them, quite often the only manufacturer's name you see is on the brass burner unit, as in this example from Plume and Attwood in America

And I made the not unreasonable assumption that they had manufactured the lamp. And then I came across this example stamped 'Kosmos Brenner'

It turns out that 'Kosmos Brenner' is not a manufacturer but a type of burner made by Wild and Wessel in Berlin in the 1860s that allowed the use of a flat woven wick.

This design was copied by a number of other manufacturers, some of whom also named their burners 'Kosmos Brenner'.

So, long story short, I'd been assuming that the name on the burner was that of the lamp manufacturer, and in some cases, that's true, such as is the case of the brass oil lamps made by Sherwood's in Birmingham.

But there were always fewer burner manufacturers than oil lamp makers - even Sherwood's supplied burners to other manufacturers - so unless there is a maker's trademark elsewhere on the lamp we cannot safely use the trademark on the burner as an indicator of who manufactured the lamp and where, at best it's an indicator of where the burner came from.

By analogy, it's a bit like my looking at my no name chain store desk lamp and deciding it was made by Osram, as that's who made the lamp globe ...