224 Year-Old News From London's General Evening Post

Back in June 1791, William III was King (as in Madness of...), and William Pitt the Younger was PM. Leafing through a recent arrival in the Little Shop, a rather well-preserved copy of the London newspaper The General Evening Post, gives a fascinating glimpse into the past.

News stories include:

Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy, returning home after 10 o'clock were "stopped by three footpads near Morden turnpike, who robbed them of two gold watches, 90l. in bank notes, &c and used them in the most brutal manner." (I daresay the same thing might well happen in 2015 if you're swanning around in Morden late at night...)

Mr. Henry Phillips' Powder for Destroying Insects back in production, after his "peculiar Misfortunes, well known to the public" had suspended it. I wonder what those Misfortunes were?

The court report is a cracker, not least because you can hear the words of the snooty defence lawyer...

"Useless piece of antiquity" indeed! Good on her for winning. Fifty quid was a decent chunk of cash back then.

There's also good news from China, as the Chinese were evidently happy to pay good money for any old crap the West shipped over there... Heh, the West would never fall for that if the tables were turned, eh?

There are also a few adverts for books coming out that week...

Clara Reeve is well worth a google. Her previous novel, The Old English Baron, was apparently an influence on Frankenstein. She also wrote a well-regarded history of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance. Nothing much Gothic about The School for Widows though. Apparently it 'tells the stories of childhood friends Frances Darnford and Rachel Strictland, both of whom have lived hard lives as the virtuous wives of improvident and immoral husbands, and of another tragic widow Isabella di Soranzo.' There's more on her life here.

Individual copies of newspapers this old which aren't completely knackered are hard to come by. I'm rather pleased to have this one in the shop, until it finds a new owner...

Are these the best ever images of Frankenstein's Creature?

There have been hundreds of editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (to give it its full title). The first to feature an illustration of the Creature was, I believe, the third edition, which had this as a frontispiece:

Since then, The Creature has taken many forms, especially on screen. Here's the fabulously named Charles Stanton Ogle as the Monster in the first film adaptation, from 1910:

Boris Karloff's flat head and bolted neck is still the visual image that comes to mind for most people (sorry Robert DeNiro), though for my money, you have to go back to the page to find the best representations of the Creature. Bernie Wrightson's version deserves an honourable mention, but best of all is Barry Moser's. His beautifully horrible illustrations for the Pennyroyal Press edition are breathtaking, in my humble opinion. Prepare to take out a mortgage if you want a copy of the original fine press version, though there is a somewhat more affordable paperback edition (a copy of which came, and swiftly went, from the Little Shop). The paperback does not contain these colour illustrations of the Creature, however... They really are the stuff of nightmares.