Browse Items (716 total)

Here we see another colored lithograph, advertising the ‘National Skating Palace.’ The viewer is led to believe this was a highly respected experience for two reasons. Firstly, having a lady, so gracefully skating towards us and inviting us to…

This essay appeared in a periodical about 10 years after Oscar Wilde's "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime", where the practice of cheiromancy was prevalent throughout the story. This practice of telling how a person is, based off the lines of their hands…

This is a comic from the British comic magazine called "Illustrated Chips" which indicates a satirical perspective on receiving information on fate from a machine fortune-teller. This comic mocks fortune-telling as the results of a few fortunes told…

The author of this poem is satirizing palmistry in a way not unlike Wilde's criticism in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime. The title pokes fun at the idea that palmistry can be a cure for the unwed, or coelebs, searching for wives. The poet mocks Frith's…

This poem which appeared in the comic and satirical newspaper "Funny Folks" speaks on the subject of cheiromancy (spelled here as 'chiromancy'), and comically reveals the subjective and ultimately false nature of palm reading by telling the love…

This article essentially gives a beginner's guide to palm-reading or cheiromancy to the reader, instructing them in what all of the different aspects of the hand mean in order to read it "properly." What struck me in "Character in the Hand" is that…

The essay "London Beyond the Pale" lies within the book and photo journal, "Living London: Its Work and Its Play, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes," which functions as something of a travel guide, attempting to capture every…

In Édouard Bisson’s “A Question to the Cards” (1889), we find a different scene entirely. Two wealthy, fashionable young women, surrounded by rich furnishings, appear to be reading a deck of cards. Here, cartomancy has become a fashionable…

Fortune-telling became increasingly popular in the 19th century. These two paintings show how cartomancy, that is, fortune-telling by deck of playing cards, was both a business opportunity or form of peddling as well as an increasingly fashionable…

These images are taken from the guided journal of Oscar Wilde. It is a rather odd format because it is not unlike the human interest pieces that contemporary magazines make regarding celebrities today. In fact, some of the same questions are asked,…