James Malcolm Rymer

James Malcolm Rymer (b. 1814–d. 1884) created two of the most influential monsters of 19th-century fiction: Varney the Vampyre and Sweeney Todd. The son of an Edinburgh-born London engraver, Malcolm Rymer, who published poetry and a Gothic novel, Rymer was raised in a working-class literary-artistic family. His brothers Gaven and Chadwick were artists, and his brother Thomas put his engraving skills to criminal use as a serial financial forger. For the penny periodicals magnate Edward Lloyd, Rymer prolifically wrote bestselling serials including Ada, the Betrayed, or, The Murder at the Old Smithy (1843); The Black Monk, or, The Secret of the Grey Turret (1844); Varney, the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood (1845–1847); and the Sweeney Todd tale The String of Pearls, a Romance (1846–1847, expanded in 1850 as The String of Pearls, or The Barber of Fleet Street). In the 1850s, Lloyd’s business model changed. Favoring news over fiction, he jettisoned Rymer, who in 1858 took up employment composing serials for Reynolds’s Miscellany, a penny periodical founded by the radical journalist and novelist George W. M. Reynolds. Some of Rymer’s serials of this period, such as the outlaw romances Edith the Captive, or the Robbers of Epping Forest (1861–1862) and its sequel Edith Heron, or the Earl and the Countess (1866), were issued in stand-alone editions by Reynolds’s regular publisher, John Dicks. Rymer also composed essays, short tales, and poetry and served as a periodical editor, including of two of Lloyd’s penny periodicals. Extremely private, he published for the most part anonymously, as “the author of” several of his bestselling penny bloods, and under a variety of pseudonyms, including the anagrams “Malcolm J. Errym” and “Malcolm J. Merry” and “Lady Clara Cavendish.” In the 20th century, while Sweeney Todd’s fame grew, Rymer was largely forgotten, in part because an apocryphal bibliographic tradition erroneously maintained that The String of Pearls and many of his other works were written by another Lloyd employee, Thomas Peckett Prest. Since the 1960s, scholarly interest in penny fiction has brought to light Rymer’s contemporaneous popularity, his complex aesthetics, his often liberal or radical politics, his profound impact on Victorian mass culture, and his work’s vibrant transmedia afterlives.

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 1133-1167 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Sanchez-Lorenzo ◽  
J. Calbó ◽  
M. Wild

Abstract. Visual observations of clouds have been performed since the establishment of meteorological observatories during the early instrumental period, and have become more systematic and reliable after the mid-19th century due to the establishment of the first national weather services. During the last decades a large number of studies have documented the trends of the total cloud cover (TCC) and cloudy types; most of these studies are focused on the trends since the second half of the 20th century. Due to the lower reliability of former observations, and the fact that most of this data is not accessible in digital format, there is a lack of studies focusing on the trends of cloudiness since the mid-19th century. In the first part, this work attempts to review the previous studies analyzing TCC changes with information covering at least the first half of the 20th century. Then, the study analyses a database of cloudiness observations in Southern Europe (Spain) since the second third of the 19th century. Specifically, monthly TCC series were reconstructed since 1866 by means of a so-called parameter of cloudiness, calculated from the number of cloudless and overcast days. This estimated TCC series show a high interannual and decadal correlation with the observed TCC series originally measured in oktas. After assessing the temporal homogeneity of the estimated TCC series, the mean annual and seasonal series for the whole of Spain and several subregions were calculated. The mean annual TCC shows a general tendency to increase from the beginning of the series until the 1960s; at this point, the trend becomes negative. The linear trend for the annual mean series, estimated over the 1866–2010 period, is a highly remarkable (and statistically significant) increase of +0.44% per decade, which implies an overall increase of more than +6% during the analyzed period. These results are in line with the major part of the previous trends observed at many areas of the World, especially for the records before the 1950s, when a widespread increase of TCC can been considered as a common feature.


2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1199-1212 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Sanchez-Lorenzo ◽  
J. Calbó ◽  
M. Wild

Abstract. Visual observations of clouds have been performed since the establishment of meteorological observatories during the early instrumental period, and have become more systematic and reliable after the mid-19th century due to the establishment of the first national weather services. During the last decades a large number of studies have documented the trends of the total cloud cover (TCC) and cloudy types; most of these studies focus on the trends since the second half of the 20th century. Due to the lower reliability of former observations, and the fact that most of this data is not accessible in digital format, there is a lack of studies focusing on the trends of cloudiness since the mid-19th century. In the first part, this work attempts to review previous studies analyzing TCC changes with information covering at least the first half of the 20th century. Then, the study analyses a database of cloudiness observations in Southern Europe (Spain) since the second half of the 19th century. Specifically, monthly TCC series were reconstructed since 1866 by means of a so-called parameter of cloudiness, calculated from the number of cloudless and overcast days. These estimated TCC series show a high interannual and decadal correlation with the observed TCC series originally measured in oktas. After assessing the temporal homogeneity of the estimated TCC series, the mean annual and seasonal series for the whole of Spain and several subregions were calculated. The mean annual TCC shows a general tendency to increase from the beginning of the series until the 1960s; at this point, the trend becomes negative. The linear trend for the annual mean series, estimated over the 1866–2010 period, is a highly remarkable (and statistically significant) increase of +0.44% per decade, which implies an overall increase of more than +6% during the analyzed period. These results are in line with the majority of the trends observed in many areas of the world in previous studies, especially for the records before the 1950s when a widespread increase of TCC can been considered as a common feature.


Author(s):  
Hyokyung Yoo ◽  
Byung Jun Kim

Since the late 19th century, microsurgery has achieved many miracles in history of surgery. With the development of microsurgical instruments and techniques, especially the first operating microscope invented by Carl Zeiss in 1953, the limitations steadily decreased and finally reached a limitless level of today’s supermicrosurgery. The chronological history of microsurgery can be divided into four periods: the beginning period of the late 19th to early 20th century when the essential microsurgical tools and concepts were established; the successful replantation of amputated extremities in the 1960s; the development of various kinds of flap in the 1980s; and the fully-matured period of today. This article reviews the milestones in the history of microsurgery, evaluates the recent advances, as well as microsurgery in Korea.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020/2 ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Juozapas Paškauskas

THE PROBLEM OF LEISURE TIME IN LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH-CENTURY LITHUANIA: THE WORKING CLASS CHALLENGE TO THE MIDDLE CLASS In the late 19th century, leisure time became an important and publicly discussed topic in modernising Lithuanian society. This article examines how the topic of leisure time was discussed from a wide range of political positions, and how the factor of leisure time became increasingly important when considering the future scenarios of society. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the topic of leisure time, its meaningful activities, and appropriate leisure time-related issues were intertwined with discussions about the development of civilisation, new cultural standards, and challenges to the most important principles of social cohesion. The reason for the debate at that time was inseparable from the main features of modernisation: rapid economic growth, industrialisation and urbanisation, changes in the social structure, apparent features of individualisation, secularism, and the burgeoning of consumer culture. In this article, the author focuses on singling out the most important features of modernising leisure time, when work and leisure become binary categories. From this perspective, the conflict between two important social groups, namely the working class and the bourgeoisie, is highlighted. The article demonstrates how these two groups sought to establish themselves ideologically, not only by showing their right to leisure time, but also by shaping what that leisure time should be. The first group consisted of the defenders of workers’ rights (and in rare cases, workers themselves) presenting leisure time as a precondition for a better life. This assessment was seen as an instrument incorporating workers’ daily life into the rest of modern society. However, with leisure time becoming a universal human value and norm, many leisure practices that workers in the late 19th and early 20th century opted for were problematic for members of another prominent group, the bourgeoisie. In this article, the bourgeoisie, or the middle class, is defined by means of Peter Stearn’s observation that it is useful to include cultural experience, not ‘just change in political or economic structure’. Thus, emphasising the cultural rather than the economic aspect of this social group, it can be stated that, for members of the middle class, ideas of ‘decent leisure’ and ‘appropriate use of time’ were based on the values and skills of self-discipline, order and efficient organisation. In this case, leisure time was recognised as a means of the partial reform of society and national consolidation. Consequently, the issue of leisure time in late 19th-century Lithuania became an intersection where two major social groups, opinions and practices met. On one hand, the question of leisure time is indistinguishable from a utopian, sometimes paternalistic, harmonious vision of the working class and their leisure; other ways, cultural and political attitudes about the dangers of the working class (and, of course, it is most dangerous after finishing work), arose from seeing how many late 19th-century workers chose meaningless, harmful and violent leisure activities. In both cases, the culture of leisure time in late 19th and early 20th-century Lithuania could be seen not as a routine or a temporary escape from social norms, but rather as a process for modern culture to appear in everyday life, contributing to the emergence of new social and cultural identities.


1970 ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Sarah Limorté

Levantine immigration to Chile started during the last quarter of the 19th century. This immigration, almost exclusively male at the outset, changed at the beginning of the 20th century when women started following their fathers, brothers, and husbands to the New World. Defining the role and status of the Arab woman within her community in Chile has never before been tackled in a detailed study. This article attempts to broach the subject by looking at Arabic newspapers published in Chile between 1912 and the end of the 1920s. A thematic analysis of articles dealing with the question of women or written by women, appearing in publications such as Al-Murshid, Asch-Schabibat, Al-Watan, and Oriente, will be discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.


1969 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony K. Higgins

The first recorded landing by Europeans on the coast of northern East Greenland (north of 69°N) was that of William Scoresby Jr., a British whaler, in 1822. This volume includes a chronological summary of the pioneer 19th century exploration voyages made by British, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, French and German expeditions – all of whom reported that the region had previously been occupied by the Inuit or Eskimo; also included are brief outlines of the increasing number of government and privately sponsored expeditions throughout the 20th century, whose objectives included cartography, geology, zoology, botany, trapping and the ascent of the highest mountain summits. In 1934 the Place Name Committee for Greenland was established, the tasks of which included a review of all place names hitherto recorded on published maps of Greenland, their formal adoption in danicised form, and the approval or rejection of new name proposals. In northern East Greenland, by far the largest numbers of new place names were those proposed by scientists associated with Lauge Koch's geological expeditions that lasted from 1926 until 1958. This volume records the location and origin of more than 3000 officially approved place names as well as about 2650 unapproved names. The author's interest in the exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland started in 1968, when the Geological Survey of Greenland initiated a major five-year geological mapping programme in the Scoresby Sund region. Systematic compilation of names began about 1970, initially with the names given by William Scoresby Jr., and subsequently broadened in scope to include the names proposed by all expeditions to northern East Greenland. The author has participated in 16 summer mapping expeditions with the Survey to northern East Greenland. Publication of this volume represents the culmination of a lifetime working in the Arctic.


1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-51
Author(s):  
Jan Richard Heier

Accounting has always been utilitarian in nature. It adapts to the changes in the business environment by meeting the need for new types of information. The change in waterborne transportation in the U.S. during the 19th century provides an example of such an environmental change that led to a need for accounting adaptation. With the advent of the steamboat, old accounting methods were modified and new ones created to meet the changes in the business environment. In the process, a standardized ships-accounting model was developed. The model can be seen in the accounting records of three ships that sailed at the beginning of the 20th century.


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