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Mary Allott Victorian Recipe Book: Domesticity as Defence
In 1860, the Mary Allott Victorian recipe book began when a twenty-four-year-old woman abandoned by her husband opened a blank notebook. Over the next fifty years, she would fill it with over 280 recipes—each one a defence against the accusation that she had lost her husband through domestic inadequacy. This recipe book sits within the…
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The Voyage of the Shalimar, 1859: The Man Who Sailed Away and the Wife He Left Behind
On 12 September 1859, Thomas Alexander Kidd stood on Liverpool’s bustling docks with his family, ready to leave everything behind. The former merchant, magistrate and police commissioner had sold his comfortable life for steerage tickets to New Zealand. Beside him waited his wife, Mary Agnes, and their six children—Eliza, Georgina, Mary, Helen, Frances and young…
