Join Duchess Katie & Lady Sadie as they dive into the world of historical BDSM

1. For those of us that we raised in a school system that doesn’t talk about colonialism… I know it is shocking but in 1910 Great Britain owned Egypt. By 1922 Egypt will be an independent nation.

1. 1910 is a wild time in the world anyways. There is a lot of colonialism in this book - I mean the cast are all expats or colonizers themselves. There is a lot of the energy that will lead to the xenophobia and nationalism that is the cause of the first world war. This doesn’t directly deal with any of that but it is the backdrop.

2. I went down a rabbit hole on salons in Cairo:

1. HIGHPOINTS: A Palestinian immigrant named May Elias Ziade hosted a wildly popular Salon and corresponded with the brilliant poet Kahlil Gibran.
2. I also learned that the first literary salon was in the Arab world to a ruler named Suayna Bint Husayn and it is highly likely that it then hit seventeenth century europe.
3. There were a lot of salons in Cairo - and one that was hosted by a woman named May Elias Ziade, She was originally from Palestine to a Born in Palestine to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. Ziadeh attended school in her native city and in Lebanon, before immigrating along with her family to Egypt in 1908. She started publishing her works in French (under the pen name Isis Copia) in 1911, and Kahlil Gibran entered into a correspondence with her in 1912. Being a prolific writer, she wrote for Arabic-language newspapers and periodicals, along with publishing poems and books.
4. The history of the literary salon in the Arab world, of which little is known, dates back far longer than one would expect. Sukayna bint Husayn (735 / 743), began running her salon centuries during the Umayyad dynasty, well before the idea was first introduced to seventeenth century Europe.She was a highly regarded woman of great intelligence, and an expert in fashion and literature. She was the first woman to open her house to male and female guests, and organised evenings of music, literary criticism, and poetry

3. ONE LAST THING: so i adore old planes and my dad was in a flying circus back in the day but I just had to mention that Bleriot was a real inventor/ aviator and was the first to fly over the English Channel and (almost) land. He did survive his many many crashes and went on to design more planes. He also worked closely with Voison which is the designer for the very real human that shows up - Raymonde de Laroche. Who will actually die in her own tragic crash just nine years after this book

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Intro Music: Musopen; Violin Concerto in F major, RV 293 'Autumn' - III. Allegro https://musopen.org/music/14910-the-four-seasons-op-8/

Join Duchess Katie & Lady Sadie as they discuss "The Finest Print" by Erin Langston!

Fun fact - most British pubs are named like the duck and dog because so much of the population was illiterate for so long that was the only way for people to know the names of places.

“These factors led to greater production of books, newspapers, magazines and ephemera than ever before. Between 1800 and 1835, twenty-five thousand titles were published in Britain; between 1835 and 1862, this figure more than doubled, at 64,000. In 1801, the number of copies of stamped newspapers was 16 million, but by 1849 newspapers numbered at 78 million. Still, books weren’t cheap enough for everyone to be buying them for their own collections. The ‘triple decker’ novel of the early nineteenth century, published in three volumes, might cost between fifteen and eighteen shillings - over half the weekly wage of a printer, and nearly all of a teacher’s. Even the cheaper yellowbacks weren’t appealing to everyone as a purchase item.”

Ironically the fastest way to help the population of England start to learn to read wasn’t education but lending libraries. “Circulating libraries like Mudie’s often satisfied more ‘popular’ tastes, and offered cheaper subscriptions for varying periods. Philanthropic efforts resulted in libraries for the benefit of the working classes, such as the Mechanics’ Institutes. However, working class readers also pooled their resources to purchase texts of their own choice, setting up reading rooms and libraries within their own communities”

On the note of Ethan Fletcher’s Debt: using an inflation calculator £100 in 1850 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £17,203.29 today and then if I exchanged pound sterling to US dollars today it is actually $21000.91.

Reference to a book on sexual health - it is a real book and Langston discusses it in her research section which I had so much fun with! It was a book called What is love? Or Every woman’s book. Published in 1826 and it discussed contraceptives! This was unusual but actually pretty readily available AND IT WAS literally published at the real 62 fleet street. Later in 1918 Marie Carmicheal Stopes wrote Married Love which also helped women “enjoy intercourse” and essentially discussed organsms as well as birth control.

Sources:

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Intro Music: Musopen; Violin Concerto in F major, RV 293 'Autumn' - III. Allegro https://musopen.org/music/14910-the-four-seasons-op-8/