Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
Jane Austen letter
Guide to fashion and etiquette
Alphabet books
Soldier's letter: Battle of Waterloo
Jane Austen, Persuasion
P B Shelley, 'Ozymandias'
Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Coleridge's notes on Shakespeare
Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Grammar for children
Yorkshire dialect
Punctuation for children
Anti-slavery poem
Diary description of London
Execution of a 12 year old boy
Modern Flash Dictionary
Dickens, Oliver Twist
London dialect in Dickens
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Browning, Dramatic Lyrics
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Lear's Book of Nonsense
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
The Communist Manifesto
'How do I love thee?'
Poverty and the workhouse
Poor Letter H
'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
Get your ‘air cut!
Cookery for the poor
Mary Seacole's autobiography
Mary Seacole newspaper article
Nursery rhymes
Florence Nightingale letter
Coal mining
The Woman in White
Mrs Beeton
Mrs Beeton's Christmas
Melodrama: East Lynne
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Queen's English
Letter from Charles Darwin
Text message poetry
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Music Hall
Victorian fashion
Freakshow posters
Street sellers
Invention of the telephone
Illusionists and conjurers
Oxford English Dictionary
Afrikaans novel
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Anglo-Indian dictionary
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Circus poster
Jack the Ripper murders
Match Girls Strike
Babu English
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
H G Wells, The Time Machine
English 'down under'
Mary Seacole was a freelance nurse who worked in the Crimean War, caring for wounded British soldiers. She became a heroine of the war, her strength of character and kindness compared to that of Florence Nightingale.
Born in slave-era Jamaica to a white Scottish father and free black Jamaican mother, she had learned folk medicine as a child, and in 1854 she travelled to England to help in the war effort. Not put off by rejections from the authorities, Seacole paid from her own pocket for her own voyage to the Crimea. She set up a hotel which sold supplies, medical services - and alcohol. Florence Nightingale disapproved of the alcohol, but 'Mother Seacole' and her hotel were popular with the soldiers.
After the war she returned to England ill and penniless. The press highlighted her plight. In July 1857 a fund-raising festival for her attracted thousands of people, including many VIPs, and raised substantial funds. This newspaper article describes the event. Her memoirs, 'The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands', also proved extremely popular.
Shelfmark: Saturday, December 19, 1857, The Bristol Mercury, British Library Newspaper Archive.