I don’t think anybody could read this book without learning something new and finding things of interest. Flanders has an eye for piquant details, and she exiles several of them to footnotes on the page. One reveals that the parents of Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), sent up by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, worked in Wedgwood’s showroom in Bath. She was a friend of Wedgwood’s daughter, Susannah, Darwin’s mother. Another tells us that recent research proves that Dr John Hill was not just the 18th-century quack he is usually portrayed as: in a 1759 publication he suggested a link between tobacco and cancer. A further note records that when Abraham Thornton was accused of raping and murdering a woman he had met at a dance in 1817, he demanded ‘ordeal by battle’, to which he was entitled by law. Other notes deal with the Victorian mania for fairies and the craze for ‘electric jewellery’ set off by Iolanthe.

I learned something new from the last text page of the book. After describing nursery-themed advertisements for Borwick’s Baking Powder, Flanders writes:

The Sen-Sen Cachou Co. was rather less domestic, producing ‘The Sen-Sen War Puzzle’, a board game in which players raced to be first to beat the Boers.

At last I understand (what I confess I never understood before) the ending of John Betjeman’s poem ‘On Seeing an Old Poet in the Café Royal’:


Scent of Tutti-Frutti-Sen-Sen
  And cheroots upon the floor.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP