Essays

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Fashion, Politics, and Identity in Mughal South Asia

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Fashion, Politics, and Identity in Mughal South Asia

The Mughal emperors in India faced a sartorial quandary: continue wearing their traditional Central Asian attire, or adopt the lighter cotton clothing of this warmer clime? Simran Agarwal considers the cultural, political, and theological implications of embracing Indic fashion, arguing that — by donning the clothing of their subjects — the Mughal emperors fashioned themselves anew. more

Every two weeks we publish a new long-form essay offering insight and reflection upon the oft overlooked histories which surround public domain works. Our contributors range from award-winning authors such as Philip Pullman and Marina Warner to PhD students sharing unusual finds.

If you’d like to submit then please visit our submissions page.

We’d love to hear from you.

Hand holding quill
The Cat’s Meat Man: Feeding Felines in Victorian London

The Cat’s Meat Man: Feeding Felines in Victorian London

As cats evolved from feral ratters into beloved Victorian companions, a nascent pet-food economy arose on the carts of so-called “cat’s meat men”. Kathryn Hughes explores the life and times of these itinerant offal vendors, their intersection with a victim of Jack the Ripper, and a feast held in the meat men’s honor, chaired by none other than Louis Wain. more

“Relaxations for the Impotent”: Ben Hecht’s *Fantazius Mallare* and the Contradictions of American Smut

“Relaxations for the Impotent”: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare and the Contradictions of American Smut

J.-K. Huysmans pastiche? Formative influence on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl? Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing — and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose. more

Designing the Sublime: Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution

Designing the Sublime: Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution

As dissatisfaction with the old regime fermented into revolutionary upheaval in late-eighteenth century France, two architects cast off the decorative excesses of the Baroque and Rococo styles and sought out bold, new geometries. Hugh Aldersey-Williams tours the sublime and mostly unrealized designs of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, discovering utopian ideals crafted in cubes, spheres, and pyramids. more

The Color of Memory: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet

The Color of Memory: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet

By the time of Albert Kahn’s death in 1940, the French banker and philanthropist had amassed a collection of more than 72,000 autochrome photographs. Grace Linden explores the Archives de la Planète — his sprawling, global project to document and preserve the fast-changing world — and uncovers a latent nostalgia in the hyperreal hues of early color photography. more

Strange Gods: Charles Fort’s *Book of the Damned* (1919)

Strange Gods: Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned (1919)

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned. “For every five people who read this book“, wrote one reviewer, “four will go insane”. Joshua Blu Buhs recounts Fort’s early life, unfinished manuscripts (“X”, “Y”), and the philosophical monism that informed his research. more

“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study

“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study

Reading is a form of necromancy, a way to summon and commune once again with the dead, but in what ersatz temple should such a ritual take place? Andrew Hui tracks the rise of the private study by revisiting the bibliographic imaginations of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and finds a space where words mediate the world and the self. more

“To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster”: Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism

“To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster”: Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism

“As a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded” — this is the kind of life envisioned by Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). With an ear attuned to the transcendentalist’s inimitable voice, Randall Fuller revisits the intellectual context, interviews with female prison inmates, and personal longing that informed this landmark feminist work. more

The Man and *The Crowd* (1928): Photography, Film, and Fate

The Man and The Crowd (1928): Photography, Film, and Fate

“Make films about the people, they said”, Jean-Luc Godard once quipped, “but The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it?” Gideon Leek rewatches King Vidor’s classic, in which a young man with big dreams moves to New York City and becomes an identical cog who learns to love the machine of modernity. more

Talking Lightly About Serious Things: Henri Rochefort and the Origins of French Populism

Talking Lightly About Serious Things: Henri Rochefort and the Origins of French Populism

A man who “believed in nothing, not even himself”, Henri Rochefort is now a minor footnote in the annals of modern journalism. However, at the height of his notoriety, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, his writings, political activities, imprisonments, and escapes were the stuff of newspaper gossip around the world. How did a self-described “errant journalist and literary poacher” rise to power on the wings of sarcasm and ridicule to reshape France’s political landscape? Vlad Solomon explores the life and times of this populist forerunner. more

Gottfried Mind, The Raphael of Cats

Gottfried Mind, The Raphael of Cats

Labelled a “cretin” and “imbecile” in his lifetime, the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind had profound talents when it came to drafting the feline form. Kirsten Tambling reconstructs the biography of this elusive figure, whose savant-like qualities inspired later French Realists, early psychiatric theorists, and Romantic visions of the artist as outsider. more

Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard

Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard

When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy across the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with books. Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin explore this paradoxical sign of interiority and find a class of image that traverses the poles of absorption and theatricality. more

Our Mortal Waltz: The Dance of Death Across Centuries

Our Mortal Waltz: The Dance of Death Across Centuries

The sight of a skeletal corpse rarely inspires a rollicking jig. Yet for more than half a millennium, the dance of death in European visual art has imagined a tango between the quick and the dead. Allison C. Meier tracks the motif’s evolution across history, discovering how — through times of disease, war, and economic inequality — printmaking offered a means to both critique social ills and reflect upon new forms of human devastation. more