I've downloaded a few old ghost stories to my Kindle for holiday reading. We're staying in a seventeenth century cottage so it seemed fitting, although the stories tend to be bizarre or nutty rather than scary. It was probably much different when they were read by the fire and the shadowy light of an oil lamp.
The quote below was worth posting as it illustrates how social perspectives changed as mass communication spread across the UK.
"Was the house empty long?"
"Oh dear yes. People don’t care for remote places nowadays. Everyone is for railways and telephones and cinemas. The house-agent told us he only had to say ‘In the Cotswolds’ and intending tenants fled."
G.M Robins - The Haunting of White Gates (1900)
"Oh dear yes. People don’t care for remote places nowadays. Everyone is for railways and telephones and cinemas. The house-agent told us he only had to say ‘In the Cotswolds’ and intending tenants fled."
G.M Robins - The Haunting of White Gates (1900)
5 comments:
Today, of course, we are capable of organising things such that homes can be very isolated, yet still have access to railways, cinema, and telephones. And good quality broadband, and access to the motorway network, and have routes to London which get you to theatres and good restaurants with minimum travel and parking difficulties. And enough locals with gardening and cleaning and childminding skills, and of course the right schools and a desirable local set who arrange amusing evenings.
That's probably in or near the Cotswolds, as it happens. Just imagine aspiring to live the Cameron lifestyle. I'd rather do a stretch in jail.
"Labour are making it more difficult to employ people even as AI threatens jobs"
The people's flag is deepest red
But AI does the work instead
The females and the unskilled blacks
Are cheap, but you still pay the tax.
So raise the scarlet banner high!
Sack the lot, and get A.I.!
Though Tories carp, and Lib Dems sneer
You're unemployed because of Keir!
1895 the fist cinema, five years later and "Everyone is for … cinemas."
ps. I'm not really anon.
Sam - the Cameron lifestyle doesn't appeal to me either, it even sounds like a stretch in jail.
"The people's flag is deepest red
But AI does the work instead..."
Ha ha, very good, it's remarkable how people still go for socialist tosh, but they do and possibly always will.
djc - that struck me too, so much so that I had to check dates. The interest generated by even the earliest cinemas must have been enormous, more so than we may realise now.
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