Mondo Lizzie Borden

Victoriana Magazine, a free online journal of all things Victorian, has returned, and with a new lovely design.

This came to me in an email, which prompted me to visit the new site.

Victoriana Magazine Is Back!

Victoriana Magazine has returned as a new daily blog magazine for Victorian style living featuring fashion and accessories, house remodeling and home decor, entertaining and holidays, food and recipes, history and lifestyles, and much more.
Now you can experience a bit of the 19th century everyday when Victoriana posts a new article related to the Victorian era.

You can receive free updates by email or by your favorite feed reader — you can unsubscribe at any time.

For those who received emails from Victoriana in the past, you will need to sign-up again on our new site to continue using this convenient feature.

Visit Victoriana now to escape to the 19th century!

For anyone interested in Victorian clothing, gifts, cards, furniture, and jewelry: The Victorian Trading Company. The catalog is first rate and fun to peruse. It is available for you to download as well.

They also offer free E-Greetings that you can send to your pals.

The Fall River Garden Club, the Fall River Historical Society, and the Little Theatre of Fall River, Inc., are presenting History Underfoot III, a walking tour of Oak Grove Cemetery.

Guided tours of the grounds featuring characters who knew Lizzie Borden well.

Sunday, October 4, 2009 (raindate October 11), 11 am to 3:30 pm.

Advanced tickets are available at the Fall River Historical Society or at the Prospect Street Gates on day of event.

$15.

Stefani Koorey, Ph.D., Borden scholar, will be presenting a free lecture, titled

“Myth Busting Lizzie Borden: Facts on the Life of an Enigmatic Woman”

Presented by the Fall River Historical Society as part of their Lizzie A. Borden Lecture Series.

Lizzie Borden still fascinates. She intrigues us mostly because, even after 117 years, we know very little about her private life. After her acquittal for the murder of her father and stepmother, she remained in Fall River, Massachusetts, and spoke to no one publicly about the case ever again. And yet, there have been more than 30 so-called nonfiction accounts of her to appear in print. What exactly do we know about Lizzie A. Borden? And how has her particular story become more urban legend than authentic narrative?

Stefani Koorey, Ph.D. is a Borden expert and the publisher and editor of The Hatchet: A Journal of Lizzie Borden and Victorian America, in its 6th year of publication. She has been featured in the Discovery Channel’s recent documentary “Lizzie Borden Had an Axe,” and lectures far and wide on the subject. Her most recent discoveries of the portraits of Andrew Borden and his first wife Sarah, as well as the image of Emma Borden as a young woman and Lizzie Borden when she was a child, have helped to renew interest in this fascinating unsolved mystery.

WHEN: Monday, September 14, 2009, at 6:30 PM.

WHERE: Bristol Community College, Fall River, MA
Siegel Health Technologies Building
Room c111

For further information, visit the Fall River Historical Society

View Larger Map

Tonight’s performance of Lizzie Borden Live in Fall River, MA, at the Eagle Performing Arts Center, was a grand success.

The audience sat in complete silence as they devoured every syllable of this remarkable play. They cheered as the play ended, many there tonight repeat attendees from the last run of the show in Fall River in June.

Lizzie Borden Live is being performed only one more time this season in Fall River. Saturday night at 8 p.m, August 22, 2009.

Tickets can be purchased at the door and through LizzieBordenLive.com.

See you at the theatre!

Cowabunga!

The new book about Lizzie Borden and her Fall River being written by the curatorial staff at the Fall River Historical Society is going to change everything!

Everything we thought we knew about Miss Lizzie A. Borden, everything we have heard so far, read so far, seen so far, decided so far, is going to have to be revised. Parallel Lives is not only a highly entertaining exploration of Fall River’s turbulent history, but is a watershed treatise on one of America’s most enigmatic women.

For the very first time, we see the flesh and blood Lizzie Borden. She is now three-dimensional to us, with depth, and breadth, and length, and height. And the most remarkable thing about it all is that nobody who has written about her in the past has even come close to the real Lizzie. All those books, all those words, all those guesses and deductions and suppositions, all of them are going to be obsolete.

I can’t even recall a book that has done this type of work before—a book that takes a true historical person, an icon to masses, feared by some, and loathed by many more, and spins the story of their life so that the main character emerges as someone unexpected, someone who we have never met before, someone who has literally been made new.

You can throw away all of your other Lizzie Borden books when this one is published. You won’t need them anymore. In fact, you will mostly laugh at them and look back in wonder at how their authors have fallen short.

Things are happening quickly at 132 Green Street in Fairhaven, MA, the former home of the Brownell’s where Emma Borden was visiting on that fateful day in 1892.

Today the vinyl siding is nearly complete. In addition, note the plastic corner boards and window frames. The eaves are also made of plastic.

While the house looks lovely from a distance, looks can be deceiving. What we have here is a fine old home coated in modern ANTI-GREEN materials —-in a sense, coated and dipped in plastic.

This renovation is not the restoration promised by the buyer when first purchased. One wonders what the inside will become.

Purists would rather the house remain damaged and untouched than have the house “ruined” in this way. Others may love the color and ooh and ahh at the fresh clean appearance. “Oh, my,” they will say, “vinyl siding is so much easier to maintain!”

Yes, it may be “easier” but it also literally ruins the historical value of a home. What once had class and character and original wooden shingles and corner boards, now is Barbie’s play house.

I wonder if it smells like plastic on the inside of the house . . . .

Many thanks to Chris Richards for the heads up about the changes as they occur!

Dr. Philip Silvia, the author of the seminal collected work of Fall River history as seen through its newspapers, is being honored with a lifetime faculty research award at his university, Bridgewater State College.

Siliva edited the three volume set, which was published in different years: Victorian Vistas: Fall River, 1865-1885 as Viewed Through Its Newspaper Accounts was published in 1987; Victorian Vistas: Fall River, 1886-1900 was published in 1988; and Victorian Vistas: Fall River 1901-1911 was published in 1992.

It is rather difficult to get all three volumes in one set, and individual copies sell for anything from $90 to $375. The most sought after volume is, of course, the middle one, which contains information regarding the Lizzie Borden case.

If you are interested in them, try to purchase them with dust jackets in tact. The value of the set is only enhanced by these.

See the article here.

The second meeting of the Fall River History Club will be held at the Fall River Public Library on Wednesday, July 16, at 6:30 PM. The speaker will be Karla Moran who will be discussing childhood labor in Fall River during the height of the industrial revolution.

The August 20th club meeting will feature Nick Niles speaking about the Providence Tool Company.

The club meets every third Wednesday of the month. The public is welcome to join or stop by and hear a talk.

After much proofing, the May/June issue (#22) of The Hatchet: Lizzie Borden’s Journal of Murder, Mystery & Victorian History is available for sale through LuLu.com.

Subscribers to The Hatchet can purchase the print copy at a discount by logging into the membership area of The Hatchet. All others interested, please visit the PearTree Press LuLu site here and get yours today!

This is a very early mention of the Lizzie Borden case (or the Borden Trial as it was known in the aftermath). It is from The Cyclopedic Review of Current History, Detroit, Mich., The Evening News Association [etc.] 1892-93; Buffalo, N.Y., Garretson, Cox & Co.

This is from Vol. 3, published in 1894, and digitized from the New York Public Library collection. It appears on page 292.

The Hatchet found a new Lizzie Borden image! Read all about it in this press release!

The newest issue of The Hatchet is now online for your viewing pleasure. The Hatchet is in its fifth year of publication and this issue marks #21. As the magazine is now an official adult, there will be a party!

Subscriptions for the ONLINE journal are still only $20 for four issues! You can subscribe here.

In this issue: a fantastic piece on Emma’s 1913 interview by Borden scholar and author Leonard Rebello; a story detailing the finding of the Lizzie Borden photograph (PLUS OTHER SURPRISES FOUND) by Stefani Koorey, Ph.D. (that’s me); another great installment of “Lizzie Borden Girl Detective” by Richard Behrens; a personal tribute to the late Neilson Caplain by his son Ron; a story about Lizzie’s Grand Tour by Shelley Dziedzic; an interview with criminologist, Professor Thomas Mauriello; a sweet plea about Edwin Porter’s grave by Sherry Chapman; a list of all residents of Second Street in 1892 (a massive accomplishment) by Harry Widdows; biographical pieces by Kat Koorey; and our regulars—Mary Elizabeth Naugle, Sherry Chapman, Douglas Walters, Eugene Hosey, and Denise Noe bringing in their very best work!

We have made some changes to the journal, the most obvious of which is the name. Now we are known at The Hatchet: Lizzie Borden’s Journal of Murder, Mystery & Victorian History. We are broadening our niche and promise to bring you the same level of scholarship and entertainment you have been used to.

The print copy of The Hatchet will be available later in the week through LuLu.com. Check back here for details.

If you would like to order back copies of The Hatchet in print, please visit our print-on-demand partner LuLu.com here.

I finally received my copy of the Fall River Historical Society Report for Fall 2007 and was pleased as punch to read that this year they are going to publish an important new book that centers on Lizzie Borden.

I may be behind on the news, but I still wanted to share the information they have provided regarding the publication.

According to B.K. Swartz, Jr. in his “The Origin of American Christmas Myth and Customs,” The salutation, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” may have first appeared in 17th century European correspondence. Says Swartz, “Merry is probably of English origin and was introduced to America in Dickens’ time.” In Clement Moore’s poem (l822) “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (or as we know it now, “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) the reader is addressed with the phrase “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.”

The Old English origin for Merry is myrige [pleasing, delightful]; of Germanic origin it is related related to mirth.

“Christmas cards were first printed in London, England. They were designed by John Calcott Horsley of the Royal Academy for Sir Henry Cole in 1843 and were sold at Felix Summerly’s Home Treasury Office. The greeting was “A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.” A portrayal of a child sipping wine in a toast on the central panel caused a stir with temperance groups. Cards were first mailed (to friends) by W. C. Dobson (Queen Victoria’s favorite painter) in 1845. First mailings in U. S. were in 1846. Louis Prang, a Boston lithographer, marketed multicolored Christmas Cards in Europe in 1865, and in the U. S. in 1875. He made Christmas Cards popular. Mailing was expanded with the “penny post card,” 1893. Half-tone engravings appear in 1900. The home photograph card begins in 1902 by Eastman Kodak.”

Harper’s Bazaar, December 9, 1876.

Odd facts about Father Christmas:

Father Christmas (later Santa Clause) was part of an old English midwinter festival and was normally depicted as dressed in green—a sign of the returning Spring.

Father Christmas was also known as ‘Sir Christmas,’ ‘Old Father Christmas,’ or ‘Old Winter.’

Father Christmas was not a bringer of gifts, nor did his slide down a chimney, but walked from home to home, feasting with families and then moving on to the next house.

Father Christmas was dressed in a red coat in the 1930s in an advertisement by Coca-Cola.

Source.

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. ~Charles Dickens

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph. ~Shirley Temple

Don’t expect too much of Christmas Day. You can’t crowd into it any arrears of unselfishness and kindliness that may have accrued during the past twelve months. ~Oren Arnold

Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred. ~George Bernard Shaw

Christmas is a time when everybody wants his past forgotten and his present remembered. What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day. ~Phyllis Diller

I am happy to announce that today the Fall River Herald News has done a rather lengthy piece on The Hatchet’s discovery of the previously unknown Andrew Borden portrait (see below for other blog entries on this remarkable image). The story on how it was found can be read in this issue of The Hatchet.

It really was a stroke of good luck and keen eyes. I guess I have always been on the lookout for all things Borden, and when I saw the image I was excited and skeptical. It wasn’t until I had other Borden scholars take a gander and they likewise considered this Andrew that I approached the Fall River Historical Society for authentication.

Thanks go to Deborah Allard for the great article and to Michael Brimbau for sending me the image of the article above and buying me lots of copies of today’s paper!

Read the article in the FR Herald News in its entirety here.