In case you missed it, Crossroads has received a small makeover, including new logos and a revised name. You can learn more about it here.

Red House stood in an orchard of apple trees. The land surrounding the estate was once wild, a fairytale setting of rolling hills and meandering streams. Long ago, pilgrims would have passed near the village of Upton on their journey to Canterbury. Peasant farmers would have led their flocks to its meadows.

When the first bricks of the house were laid in 1859, much had already changed. A railway station stood just three miles away. The city of London, ten miles southeast, was ever-expanding, its suburbs steadily encroaching on the countryside like a low-hanging fog.

The city would win in the end. Today, Red House is no longer in Kent but Bexleyheath, a suburb of Greater London. It’s an outcome that its original owner would have abhorred.

William Morris purchased the land in 1859 after marrying his wife, Jane “Janey” Burden. It was a controversial union; Morris came from a wealthy family (his father was a financier) and Burden was the working-class daughter of a stableman. Burden’s striking looks made her an ideal art model, so she met Morris through their mutual network of artist friends.

Morris, of course, would eventually become one of the most celebrated artists of the Victorian era. His textiles, prints, and illustrations would cement his legacy as the leading figure of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. But when construction began on Red House, Morris was still early in his career and full of idealism.

Morris commissioned his friend, the architect Philip Webb, to build a home that reflected the artistic sensibilities that Morris had developed at Oxford. As a first-year student, he had befriended Edward Burne-Jones, who would later become a prominent artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Like many Victorians disillusioned by the rapaciousness of the Industrial Revolution, they had grown passionate about the craftsmanship of bygone eras, particularly the chivalric values, rural communities, and detailed aesthetics of the (highly romanticized) Middle Ages.

Over the years, Morris grew ensconced within a world of rebellious, eccentric artists who rejected the sterility of mass-produced items and elevated the imagery of Britain’s medieval past. The cohort included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, Arthur Hughes, and other artists and writers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Morris applied those ideals to the design of Red House: with its unique, asymmetrical structure, steeply pitched roof, and red-brick walls, the house both embraced the increasingly popular Neo-Gothic while using traditional methods of construction, something that Morris and his fellow artists and craftsmen valued a great deal. The final result was the very first building in the Arts and Crafts style. (Philip Webb is now considered the father of Arts and Crafts architecture.)

Morris had big dreams for what the house could represent. While decorating the home, Morris and his wife quickly discovered the challenges of achieving the Arts and Crafts-look in the age of industrialism. They commissioned friends like Rossetti to paint interior murals, and Morris designed most of the decor. Webb contributed his own furniture designs and created stained-glass windows. As a whole, the house was a revolutionary feat: the artists who made it were not just copying Gothic styles, but adapting historical building techniques for the Victorian world.

Having worked first as an architectural apprentice and then as a painter for several years, Morris decided that now was the time to take these principles beyond Red House. In 1861, he founded his own decorative arts firm: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., co-founded with the civil engineer P.P. Marshall and Oxford mathematician Charles Faulkner, who served as the firm’s financial manager. In partnerships with Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite friends, they resolved to produce everything from stained-glass windows to textiles and wallpapers with hand-crafted, traditional techniques.

Morris envisioned a future in which his country estate could serve as the site for an artists’ community, a romanticized take on a medieval village of craftsmen laboring together. With any luck, he and Janey (along with their young daughters, Jenny and May) would spend the rest of their lives surrounded by the warmth and tranquility of Red House.

It didn’t last. In 1865, the Morrises would relocate their family to London—a move that reveals much about the challenges of being an idealist in the age of industry.

I’m fascinated by Morris, not just because of his extraordinary talent as a designer, but because his own circumstances contain strong parallels to the difficult decisions that artists, designers, and craftspeople must make today in our “second” Industrial Revolution.

Red House only took a year to build, but shortly after moving in, Morris learned that his fantasy of medieval communitarianism quickly clashed with the realities of modern life. He was commuting two to three hours a day into London, taking time away from his wife and girls. (Not to mention that Janey, a favorite artist model for the Pre-Raphaelites, was growing a bit too close to Rossetti…) The idea of establishing the workshop in the countryside was soon abandoned. From a financial perspective—not to mention, the constraints on available labor and lack of exposure to potential clients—made it a difficult prospect at best.

Morris was also facing some personal financial difficulties due to his declining income from his investments and the high costs of maintaining the estate. One has to wonder if some of his earlier naïveté was the result of his inherited wealth; it’s easy to romanticize medieval villages when one is safe in the assumption that they would not have been a serf. The great country estates of England’s past subsisted on land rents and peasant labor. Already by the mid-19th century, upkeep of these properties required great financial investment. Morris had no choice but to sell his home in 1865. He would never set foot in Red House again.

With his family now established in London, Morris and his colleagues faced a critical juncture in their business. Morris’s aspirations of running a rural, medievalist workshop would not come to fruition. But could he find a middle-ground between that ideal and the urban factories he loathed?

In the late 1860s, two major commissions bolstered the firm’s reputation—the dining room in what is now the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the wallpaper for several rooms in St. James’s Palace. These commissions helped to expose Morris’s beautifully designed, hand-printed wallpapers to an affluent London audience.

As the company grew, so did internal disputes over its structure and leadership, culminating in its dissolution in 1875 and reorganization under Morris’s sole ownership. The newly-dubbed Morris & Co. could move forward with centralized leadership, another practical reality further removed from the medieval workshop Morris had once envisioned.

By 1881, Morris & Co. was producing wallpaper, carpets, woven textiles, printed fabrics, and tapestries; the company now had enough capital to relocate to a textile factory in South London called Merton Abbey Mills. Despite the industrial setting, Morris & Co. continued to use hand-block printing and natural dyes. The firm provided employment for skilled weavers, embroiderers, glassworkers, and other artisans. Morris succeeded in preserving craftsmanship and dignity of labor while still maintaining a profitable commercial enterprise.

Of course, there was a catch, one that would brush up against his increasingly socialist politics: Morris & Co. products were prohibitively expensive, and the only people who could afford to purchase them were the same Victorian elite whom Morris critiqued in his political writing. Morris believed that beauty should belong to everyone, but not everyone could swallow the price.

It’s this contradiction that lies at the heart of his work. The same could be said for the hand-printed, limited-edition books he created with Kelmscott Press, the imprint he co-founded towards the end of his life. Inevitably, these books were luxury items for affluent collectors.

Morris struggled a great deal over this. Ultimately, he believed that in a world of shoddy industrial products and horrific working conditions, maintaining high production standards and a positive environment for his employees was more important than producing affordable goods.

Over a century later, designers and consumers face similar issues. Clothing made ethically is often very expensive; fine pottery and knitwear and artworks made by hand are out of reach for most people. The makers of these pieces need to charge what their time and labor are worth, even when the price is more than what most can pay.

Even so, by clinging to his ideals in a hostile world, Morris had a long-lasting impact. Morris & Co. kept traditional crafts alive in the face of mounting industrial pressure, and its workers made an elegant case for slow production—a conversation we’re still having and still wrestling with to this day. Morris did not succeed in making his wares accessible to all, and he did not realize his vision of the artist’s village. But his legacy is in shifting the public’s perception of industry, and helping to highlight not just what we make, but how and why we make it.

Recently on Fireside Fables: The Voynich Manuscript

In the year 1912, a rare books dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a spectacular find: a manuscript, late medieval in appearance, written in an unknown language. Today, that text is known as the Voynich Manuscript, and no one has been able to decode it. What secrets might it contain?

Fireside Fables is a YouTube channel dedicated to exploring folklore, strange and forgotten history, supernatural creatures, and historical mysteries. From witch trials and ghost stories to cursed objects and strange legends, each video brings a new tale to mystify and inspire. Join us around the hearth for new episodes every week!

In case you missed it, Crossroads has received a small makeover, including new logos and a revised name. You can learn more about it here.

In 1911, Gustav Klimt debuted Death and Life at the International Art Exhibition in Rome. The painting won first prize, and to any outside observer, it appeared that Klimt had reached the peak of his career: the artist had navigated the rise and fall of the Vienna Secession, weathered the outrage surrounding his erotically-charged work, and could now take his place at the pinnacle of Art Nouveau.

Death and Life still resonates deeply with audiences. I would know—shortly before Christmas, I posted a Note featuring the painting on Substack, and it received thousands of interactions. Many of my newer readers discovered my newsletter thanks to Klimt’s painting.

But that version of Death and Life, which hangs in the Leopold Museum in Vienna, is not what viewers would have seen at the 1911 exhibition.

This painting exists now only as a faint memory, buried beneath layers of paint. It is thanks to a 1913 color reproduction in the magazine Kunst für Alle (“Art for All”) that we even know what the original looked like.

The first version of Death and Life emerged at the tail end of Klimt’s “Golden Period,” named for his use of gold leaf in some of his most famous works, including The Kiss (1907-1908), Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), and Judith I (1901). Klimt’s father was a Bohemian gold engraver, and Klimt would have followed in his father’s footsteps were it not for his obvious talent as a draftsman—a skill that would motivate his decision to enroll in the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) at fourteen. His use of gold leaf in his paintings was not only an homage to the early training he received from his father, but a nod to Byzantine and medieval artistic traditions.

Klimt’s portrayal of Death in the first version of Death and Life embodies this style; Death is a somber figure, head bowed, surrounded by a golden halo. Delicate gold flakes warm the background of the image, though already, Klimt was using far less gold when compared to many earlier works. On the right, a cascade of dreaming figures at various stages of life remain blissfully unaware of Death’s presence.

Despite the overwhelming acclaim Klimt received for this work, the artist was navigating a difficult period in his life. He was still reeling from the rupture of the Union of Austrian Artists, the group he had co-founded in 1897 as a radical stance against the stuffy, conservative Association of Austrian Artists.

Similar to the plight of the Impressionists in 1874, young Austrian artists found that the Association possessed little patience for Art Nouveau, and breaking through as up-and-coming talent was an uphill battle. But by 1905, the Union of Austrian Artists, otherwise known as the Vienna Secession, was falling apart. Divisions surfaced between those who felt that they should focus on painting, and those (like Klimt) who insisted on the equal elevation of decorative arts. That year, Klimt, along with graphic artist Koloman Moser and architects Josef Hoffman and Otto Wagner, left the Union.

Meanwhile, Klimt’s melancholy and existential dread mirrored the aura of impending doom pervasive in Vienna. With the imminent outbreak of the First World War, the fissures within the Austro-Hungarian Empire were growing beyond repair. A city once captivated by modernity, the mysteries of psychoanalysis, and expanding democratic sentiment would now have to see how well they could dance as the floor moved beneath their feet.

In 1914, the empire went to war, and the limp carcass of the Old World was smothered by mustard gas and strangled to death. As the foundations of the country he had once known crumbled around him, Klimt’s style evolved. Leading up to the war, Klimt began moving away from gold leaf, instead embracing elements of French Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, synthesized with his distinctly Viennese explorations of the human psyche. He started painting more landscapes, making ample use of his summer escapes to Attersee.

Then, in 1915, his mother died.

Klimt was extremely close to his mother, Anna. He lived with her until her death; it was a relationship he always treasured, particularly in light of the early deaths of his father and his brother, Ernst.

After Anna’s death, Klimt revisited Death and Life. Some of the changes he made were in keeping with the stylistic evolution we’ve explored: he painted over the gold and removed Death’s halo. Life grew in size and importance to the composition. More humans were added to a tapestry of riotous color. With a billowing, ovoid shape, Life became a fragile ecosystem rippling across the canvas.

All of the humans are asleep, each locked within their own subconscious—except for one. Only the woman on the left sees Death with wide eyes.

Though still covered in crosses, Death is no longer the somber saint, the simple eventuality of the original painting. Death stares back at the woman. (Curiously? Menacingly?) He wields not a scythe nor a sword, but a club.

Countless scholars have highlighted this reference to the Danse Macabre, a motif common in medieval art in which Death leads away princes as well as paupers. It was both a political message and a spiritual reminder that death comes for us all.

But what strikes me about Death and Life is the artist’s choice to depict Death holding a club, rather than the traditional scythe. It’s an instrument so primitive and barbaric in a painting that is otherwise modern in its style and psychoanalytical themes. Death’s wielded club seems to remind the viewer not just of the inevitability of dying, but of the underlying savageness from which modernity cannot escape. It’s a message that rings true especially today—the times change, the technology advances, and the world’s overwhelming brutality remains.

Klimt didn’t live to see the end of World War I. He died of pneumonia caused by the Spanish flu, a brutal pandemic that swept through Europe towards the end of the war and eventually killed about 50 million people worldwide. His own dance with death arrived on February 6th: exactly three years after his beloved mother, down to the final day.

Recently on Fireside Fables: The Mystery of Edinburgh’s Fairy Coffins

In the summer of 1836, a group of Scottish boys were hunting for rabbits on Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano that overlooks Edinburgh, when they encountered something they couldn’t explain: seventeen tiny coffins hidden in a small cave. Ever since, the coffins have mystified historians and the public.

Were these “fairy coffins” used in an obscure, magical ritual? Were they intended as mimicked burials for sailors lost at sea? Or, could they be related to something far more sinister?

Quite a few of you are new here, so for those who are unfamiliar, Fireside Fables is my new-ish show on YouTube all about folklore and weird history. If you enjoy learning about ghost stories, witches, historical mysteries, and eccentric characters throughout time, then Fireside is for you. I’d love for you to join me!

As some of you might have noticed, I took a longer-than-expected break from Substack over the past month. I’ve been in the weeds establishing my new channel on YouTube, formulating and dreaming all that Fireside Fables can be.

During that time away, I was able to gain some perspective on how to give this website a refresh. The original name for Crossroads was The Crossroads Gazette, and while I’ve always loved that title, I’ve come to realize that “Gazette” doesn’t properly fit the function of this newsletter. Ultimately, Crossroads is my space to share my essays and keep readers apprised of any news related to my projects.

Henceforth, the new title will be Crossroads by Nicole Miras, and the new link is crossroads.nicolemiras.com, which is connected to my website. Shortly after sending this off, I’ll be changing the Substack email address.

As always, thank you for reading and supporting Crossroads! Looking forward to sharing more soon.

Cheers,

Nicole Miras

This is the fifth and final essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

The Gazette will be on a holiday break through the end of December. Wishing you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year! -Nicole

As the First World War embroiled France, Georges Clemenceau made a trip to Normandy to visit his artist-friend at Giverny. The former prime minister (who would be elected to lead France once again in 1917) was concerned about Claude Monet, and he felt he had just the project to revive the painter’s spirits.

The rest of Europe was engulfed in disaster and death; the modern world had come marching into view with the sound of machine guns and the suffocation of mustard gas. The Belle Époque, the world of Impressionism, had disappeared. At Giverny, Monet was dealing with his own tragedies—his wife Alice had died in 1911, and his eldest son Jean had died in 1914. Already prone to depressive episodes, Monet sunk into a dee…

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This is the fourth essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

Claude Monet moved to the house in Giverny in 1883.

The people of Giverny, a small village in Normandy, were no doubt scandalized by the artist’s living arrangements. His wife Camille had passed away in 1879, and his mistress Alice Hoschedé now resided with Monet and all of their children from their separate marriages. To make matters worse, Alice’s husband, the former department store magnate Ernest Hoschedé, was still alive. (For some years, the Monets and the Hoschedés all lived together after Ernest went bankrupt in 1877. In a rather peculiar arrangement, Alice nursed Camille before she died at the age of thirty-two.)

Monet chose the property in Giverny as a place in which the families could settle after years of instability. He would be a renter in the beginning; it wouldn’t be until after the success of his Haystacks and Poplars series that he coul…

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This is the third essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

In 1834, a fire burned most of the United Kingdom’s Houses of Parliament to the ground. Westminster Hall, built in 1097, was salvageable—a miracle, thanks to the efforts of brave firefighters and a change in the winds.

Once the ashes settled, it grew obvious that rebuilding would be a tremendous undertaking. A committee in each House decided to host a contest, in which architects could submit plans for a revamped Palace of Westminster. At the time, the Classical style was the norm for British state buildings. But Charles Barry had a bold idea: he submitted a design in the Gothic Revival style. After all, England wasn’t unified until the late 900s; the Gothic seemed a more fitting choice for Parliament’s new home. Barry won the contest, and he soon recruited Augustus Pugin, an architect who belie…

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This is the second essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

In 1895, a young Wassily Kandinsky was perusing an exhibit in Moscow when he came across a painting of haystacks. It was a strange artwork. The artist used feathery brushstrokes that gave what would otherwise be mundane stacks of grain a hazy character, as if the painter had glanced quickly in their direction while the sun was shining in his eyes.

Kandinsky was blown away. “Previously, I knew only realistic art,” he later reflected:

Suddenly, for the first time, I saw a “picture.” That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This lack of recognition was distressing to me. I also felt that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a muffled sense that the object was lacking in this picture, and was overcome with astonishment and perplexity… But what was absolutely clear to me was the uns…

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I’ve decided to pull this old series of patron essays from the archive, as most of you have not seen it. Below is the first in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

Claude Monet was just shy of fifty when he turned to the subject of haystacks.

Initially, it seemed a surprising choice for a man who, after thirty years of determination, had finally reached the brink of success. In 1886, longtime supporter and art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had set sail for New York with numerous Impressionist canvases in tow—a decision that jump-started the movement’s international popularity. The following year, Monet, along with Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and countless others, participated in the Exposition Internationale at Georges Petit’s gallery in Paris. The Parisian bourgeoisie who once found the Impressionists shocking and horrid were changing their tune, and the artists now exp…

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In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armée d’Orient, invaded Egypt. At the time, Egypt was ruled by the Mamluks and nominally controlled by the Ottoman Empire, but these groups were not Napoleon’s chief rivals. Whoever controlled Egypt controlled the Suez Canal, a crucial shipping route that connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The goal was to undercut British trade routes to the nation’s colonial holdings in India; doing so would give France an enormous territorial advantage.

The Egyptian campaign ultimately failed, but it resulted in a major discovery—one that would transform the field of Egyptology and launch a public mania for all-things-Egyptian.

Several miles from the port city of Rosetta (modern-day Rashid) lies Fort Julien, constructed around 1470 during the rule of the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbay. Then-General Napoleon placed Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard in charge of rebuilding the fortress; it wa…

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King Tutankhamun’s tomb is in danger of collapsing.

The Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun was laid to rest in 1323 BC. He slumbered undisturbed for thousands of years—miraculously, his tomb was never found by thieves, who had been picking through the Valley of the Kings since ancient times. This all changed in 1922, when an excavation team led by Howard Carter and funded by George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, opened the tomb for the first time in centuries.

A recent study by Sayed Hemeda, head of the Architectural Conservation Department at Cairo University in Giza, indicates that the tomb’s ceiling is at risk of collapsing:

Flash flooding with heavy rain caused by climate change significantly contributes to the activation of movements along the faults within the Valley of the Kings, particularly the prominent fault that runs through Tutankhamen’s tomb and is easily visible in the antechamber and burial chamber’s c…

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A circle of witches gather with the Devil beneath a waxing moon.

Upon first glance, Francisco Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (1798) may not appear too different from depictions of witches during the height of the trials. The women in this coven are elderly and haggard in appearance. One is holding a skeletal, malnourished child as an offering to the horned devil, and hanging from a spear are what appear to be spit-roasted infants. Gathered in one painting are a number of “witchy” stereotypes that convey suspicion and bigotry toward post-menopausal women: symbols of infertility, quite literally eating babies.

But the date of this painting should be your first clue that not all is what it seems.

Goya painted his Witches’ Sabbath at the very end of the 18th century. By now, witch trials in Europe were largely a thing of the past, and Goya wanted to keep it that way. This painting, as well as his later Sabbath painting, The Great He-G…

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In 1862, a jewelry engraver in Boston took a photograph of a ghost.

Like many Americans, William Mumler had developed an interest in photography, and improvements in cameras had made this technology accessible to a larger portion of the public. Mumler decided to take a self-portrait. All proceeded smoothly, until he developed the photo. To his shock, the pale image of his long-deceased cousin hovered beside him.

At least, that’s how Mumler recounted the story to the media. The truth involves some creativity, technological sleight of hand, and a public hungry for spectral visions of dead relatives.

Patrons of the Gazette may remember an essay in the archive about the Cottingley fairies, in which two English girls stunned the world with photos of flower fairies taken at the bottom of their garden. The photos, snapped in 1920, w…

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Philippe Clicquot had weathered many storms in his life. He had built a successful career as a textile merchant, navigating industrialization, the French Revolution, and securing his family’s future by arranging the marriage of his only son to the daughter of his greatest competitor. Together, the Clicquot and Ponsardin families dominated the textile industry in and around Reims, France.

But nothing could have prepared him for the death of his son François at the age of thirty.

In the autumn of 1805, François caught some terrible illness (possibly typhoid?) and after twelve days of relentless fever, he died. He left behind his 27-year-old wife, Barbe-Nicole, and his six-year-old daughter, Clémentine.

The family was devastated by the loss. Though their marriage was arranged, François and Barbe-Nicole grew to love each other, and they shared a mutual passion: champagne.

Textiles were the family’s mai…

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An experienced hunter, Roe initially assumed that the large creature ahead on the trail was a grizzly bear. Then, it stood. At six feet tall, the strange, humanoid figure was covered in brown and silver fur, and upon closer inspection, Roe discerned that it was female. In his words:

Its arms were much thicker than a man’s arms, and longer, reaching almost to its knees. Its feet were broader proportionately than a man’s, about five inches wide at the front and tapering to much thinner heels. When it walked it placed the heel of its foot down first, and I could see the grey-brown skin or hide on the soles of its feet. The head was higher at the back than at the front. The nose was broad and flat. The lips and chin protruded farther than its nose. But the hair that covered it, leaving bare only the parts of its face around the mouth, nose and ears, made it resemble an animal as much as a human.

By this description, someone today would easily recognize this as Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Roe’s account is just one of many alleged sightings of the mysterious Bigfoot—a folkloric character as iconic to British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest as the Yeti is to the Himalayas, or the Loch Ness Monster is to the Scottish Highlands.

But Bigfoot is also the perfect case study to examine how folklore develops in communities, and how this process of storytelling and myth-making involves both published media and word-of-mouth. The origins of this legend are more complex than you might assume.

Bigfoot is the subject of Episode 1 of my new show, Fireside Fables. I’m thrilled to be launching this series on YouTube, in which we will explore folklore, fairytales, and things that go bump in the night. This show is co-produced with Brennan White, better known as house and techno producer Astara and fellow enthusiast of all-things-folklore.

If you too are fascinated by ghost stories, fairies, witches, cryptids, haunted places, and spooky tales, then I’d encourage you to watch the first episode below. It would mean the world to me if you subscribed.

And don’t worry, you will still find me here on Substack. Thank you for your ongoing support!

Dr. Kathleen Martinez’s ongoing hunt for Cleopatra’s tomb has resulted in a major discovery…

If you’ve been reading the Roundups for a while, you may remember the story of Kathleen Martinez, a Dominican archaeologist who is on a mission to find Cleopatra’s final resting place. Her theory was that Cleopatra was buried not in a tomb, but in a temple. In 2022, her excavations at Taposiris Magna resulted in an extraordinary discovery: a massive tunnel beneath the temple stretching over 4,300 feet (roughly 1,310 meters). Sitting 43 feet (13 meters) underground with a height of over six feet (1.8 meters), the tunnel was called a “geometric miracle” by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

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1. John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott - 1888

Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott features the protagonist of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem of the same name, published first in 1832 and revised in 1842. Set in an Arthurian England, the Lady of Shalott is trapped in a tower, with her only view of the outside world a reflected window in her mirror. If she dares turn towards the real window, she is cursed to die.

So much of the story is left unexplained. Who cursed her and why? When the curse is enacted and the mirror breaks, why must she die? Why does she first board the boat and float down to Camelot? The reader never receives clear answers. It’s exactly the kind of tragic damsel and dreamy, romanticized Middle Ages that the Pre-Raphaelites loved to paint.

John William Waterhouse was not a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Here is a refresher from an essay I…

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A naked woman, broom in hand, rides backwards on a goat. Her hair flows in the opposite direction of the creature’s fur, suggesting something deeply unnatural. Magic is afoot.

She is surrounded by putti: one carries an alchemist’s pot, one holds a highly-poisonous thornapple plant, and one appears to be passing gas as another tries to grab the magic wand from his hand. It is an image wild and wicked, clearly meant to illustrate the popular perception of witches at the height of the European witch trials… right?

Except this engraving was created in the year 1500 by Albrecht Dürer, and the witch craze wouldn’t begin in earnest until the mid-sixteenth century. Witch trials did exist, but they were scattered events compared to the widespread panic that would engulf the public decades later. When evaluating Dürer’s witch engravings, we have to ask: from whom did he derive his inspirati…

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“There’s a moment when a young girl turns into a woman. It doesn’t last long, and I’d like it caught on canvas.”

These are the words that Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) shares with John Singer Sargent (Bobby Steggert) on HBO’s The Gilded Age, a show that explores the lives of wealthy New Yorkers and their servants during the late 1800s. Russell is married to the self-made railroad tycoon George Russell, whose character was inspired by the infamous robber barons of the period. Among the upper-crust, the Gilded Age was an era of tension between Old Money (those whose ancestors arrived during the colonial era, either of English or Dutch origins) and New Money like Bertha Russell, who is implied to be of Irish descent.

Nevertheless, the United States was barely 100 years old. Even those of Mayflower stock couldn’t claim the lineage of Europe’s aristocracy—despite, in many cases, having more money. Wealthy Americans sti…

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This essay is part of the series The Year Without a Summer. To read other essays in this series and gain access to the full archive, become a paid subscriber today:

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Throughout this series, we’ve traveled the world and witnessed tragedies, discoveries, and inventions left in the wake of the largest recorded volcanic eruption. We’ve examined how a natural disaster could be a catalyst for events that would shape human history, such as the establishment of the Golden Triangle (still today a major center of the narcotics trade), or the creation of a novel that launched the science fiction genre. Tambora forced scientists to reevaluate how climate was studied, and compelled millions to adopt more effective methods of food preservation.

What about the regions that didn’t face extreme weather? As I noted earlier in this series, different areas of the world experienced varying levels of impact after Tambora’s eruption. Russia managed to escape the worst of it, and Russian grains played a key role in preventing population collapse in Europe.

Across the Atlantic, the United States’ East Coast was bludgeoned by unforgiving freezes. Instead of “the Year Without a Summer,” the notorious year of 1816 lived on in New England folk memory as “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.”

But beyond the Appalachian Mountains, the frontier largely avoided Tambora’s wrath—with profound consequences for the westward expansion of the United States.

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This essay is part of the series The Year Without a Summer. To read future essays in this series and gain access to the full archive, become a paid subscriber today:

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Only one person in history has left a paper trail of both the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 and Europe’s Year Without a Summer.

Readers may recall Stamford Raffles, governor of the British colony of Java and author of History of Java (1817). Raffles’s account of Tambora is shockingly brief given the magnitude of the disaster: a mere footnote after an essay on Java’s “Mineralogical Constitution.” This makes more sense when one considers that Raffles was lobbying for expanded colonization of Southeast Asia, particularly to compete against the Dutch East India Company. Offering gory details of a volcanic eruption on an island just 200 miles away could prompt his audience to ask pesky questions. Are there other active volcanos in the region? Could the same event happen again?

Throughout his life, Raffles pursued his goal of colonizing more land in the region for the British Empire, including establishing the colony of Singapore in 1819. But in 1816, he was compelled to return to England to explain Java’s poor financial management. When he wasn’t fighting allegations of fraud, he was doing what many young, rich men of the era did to pass the summer—traveling the European continent.

In previous eras, the Grand Tour was a rite of passage for upperclass men when they came of age. Raffles’s early twenties coincided with the Napoleonic Wars, making the Grand Tour difficult, if not impossible. Now turning thirty-five, Raffles and his peers could once again explore the countries of Europe in the fair weather of summer.

Except, as we know, the summer of 1816 was a season unlike any Raffles had witnessed.

Raffles was accompanied by his brother Thomas, who wrote of their experiences in his journal. He noted that the villages of France were overwhelmingly deserted:

We could not but notice the almost total absence of life and activity… There was an air of gloom and desertion pervading them. The houses had a cheerless and neglected appearance. No one was seen in the streets—they looked as if deserted by their population.1

In the years 1816 and 1817, crop yields in Western Europe and the British Isles dropped by 75%. We investigated the ramifications of agricultural failure in Europe and in Asia in my previous essays; for today’s entry, I’d like to explore a few glimmers of hope.

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