yeoldenews:

Some of this week’s highlights from my ongoing project to read through and transcribe the letters of Rachel (a wealthy Victorian girl at boarding school on the East Coast in the 1890s)…

• In November 1895 Rachel and her roommate “B” went to a costume ball dressed as “red carnations”. The costumes consisted of “short skirts made of red tarlatan, carnations all around our low necks and a big paper carnation on our heads”.
• Both Rachel and her cousin Will have much younger siblings (10+ years) who are collectively referred to as “the children”. The rest of the extended family are “the people”.
• Almost everyone in the extended family has nicknames that are used just as often as their real names. Will’s is “Icky” and Rachel’s is “Daught”, although I’ve also seen her referred to as “Rat” and “Sis”.
• Rachel has threatened to stop writing her cousin Bert if he doesn’t stop talking about football.
• Rachel’s class went on a field trip to a Quaker meeting and she spent
  most of the time trying not to laugh as people were “moved” by the spirit
  and when the solemn silence was broken by an old Quaker with a sneezing
  fit.

• I’m guessing at least 50% of Rachel’s money is spent on Huyler’s candy. (The other 50% is probably split evenly between theater tickets, train tickets and postage.)

• Rachel’s cousin Jack refers to his roommate as his “wife”. I don’t know
  what the roommate’s actual name is because Jack calls him Susie.

• Rachel and “B” went to see the Edison Vitascope at Keith’s and then went to a “Pop” concert in Jamaica Plain. (“You know where people sit around at tables and smoke and drink beer.”) They skipped church the next day because they still smelled too much like smoke.
• One of my favorite things Rachel does in the letters is mention what’s happening at the exact moment
  she’s writing them. She has described where she is and what the people
  around her are doing, included direct quotes that her roommates are
  saying to her and mentioned what record is playing on the phonograph across the hall.

• Monograms (the decorative letterhead/detail at the top of stationery) were the Pokemon of the 1890s. They were collected obsessively and the rarer the monogram, the more highly prized it was. Yale monograms are so sought after that Rachel is swarmed when Will’s letters arrive by girls begging for the monogram. About half of Rachel’s letters have the monogram cut out of the stationery.
• Your 1890s slang word of the day: “plug” (verb) – to focus/work hard on your (school) work. (Still in use in the modern phrase “keep plugging away”.) Example: “You seem to enjoy lecturing, why don’t you make that your profession? Will you kindly tell me why you think I am not plugging? I think your letters show you know nothing whatever about it.”