Weirder still, they were used in pigment until astonishingly late in the last century (and a rather long time after they ran out of actual antiquities to grind). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
This line: " It drew many favourable reviews, including one in 1829 in The Gardener's Magazine on the inventions proposed in it. In 1830, the 46-year-old reviewer, John Claudius Loudon, sought out the 22-year-old Webb, and they married the next year."
Sounds pretty creepy by contemporary standards, but reading Loudon's page he was also a fascinating character and both he and Jane were accomplished horticulturalist"
She was also a poor orphan who took to writing to have fund to live, so a marriage proposal from someone with similar interests - they even wrote books together - and they apparently lived quite happily until he died from cancer 14 years later.
It's an unremarkable age gap by Victorian standards. Men above working class status typically waited until they could support a family before marrying, and women typically married young (16-21 was common among the nobility: at 22 an unmarried woman was all but washed-up). Death in childbirth was sky-high by modern standards, and older husbands died of diseases which today would be survivable, so the average duration of a marriage was much the same as it is today -- about 12 years -- even though divorce was difficult hence rare.
(Victorian mores may seem alien to modern eyes because they arose from medical and social constraints we're no longer subject to.)
This is echoed in a trope that many will recognize from Back to the Future: Part III. Scientists/intellectuals in earlier eras attracted to each other by interests rather than age.
Interesting - the visible timestamp says "2 hours ago", but hovering over it does show a time two and a half days ago. I guess the mods think it deserves a second chance, as not-so-well-known early scifi that has things like:
> Surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons. Air travel, by balloon, is commonplace. A kind of Internet is predicted in it. Besides trying to account for the revivification of the mummy in scientific terms—galvanic shock rather than incantations—"she embodied ideas of scientific progress and discovery, that now read like prophecies" to those later in the 19th century.
Readit News
Some of its predictive power is astonishing. The plot is pure melodrama. But it also contains lawyers hacking robot judges, so it is pretty fun.
In the 1800s, an English company acquired 180,000 mummified cats and pulverized them into fertilizer.
The second chance queue works. I had a little-noticed submission become #1 for while, because of it (2020).
Sounds pretty creepy by contemporary standards, but reading Loudon's page he was also a fascinating character and both he and Jane were accomplished horticulturalist"
(Victorian mores may seem alien to modern eyes because they arose from medical and social constraints we're no longer subject to.)
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy_(1999_film)
Deleted Comment
> Surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons. Air travel, by balloon, is commonplace. A kind of Internet is predicted in it. Besides trying to account for the revivification of the mummy in scientific terms—galvanic shock rather than incantations—"she embodied ideas of scientific progress and discovery, that now read like prophecies" to those later in the 19th century.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment