In 1840, the American press widely circulated illustrations of Queen Victoria’s wedding cake. It was a 300-pound, 14-inch-tall and 10-foot-wide plum cake, decorated with piped floral detailing and topped with a figure of Britannia blessing the couple while cupids sat around them. It was a sharp contrast to the simply iced, single-tier fruit cake that… Read more →
Tag: home
Women, Prayer, and Household Authority in Irish History
Traveling through Ireland in 1909, writer Robert Lynd described “a strange crying—almost a lamentation” that one might hear “on some evenings, if you are in a Catholic house in the most Irish parts of the country.” This strange sound, he elaborated, “was the hour of family prayer.”1 In almost all Irish households, nightly prayers were… Read more →